The Seven Sacred Values

In the Beginning

In my journey with the Lakota ceremony called the Sundance, I have been coming to the prayer for 19 years. The prayer forms the foundation of my life and I don’t think I’d be here today without it. This is the place I have come to pray for understanding, to pray for my family, to pray for the relationships between me and different family members, to pray for my community, to pray for the earth and all beings on this earth. To pray for humanity to be able to relate to itself and the earth of which we are a part.

And so now I get to observe the human I have become.

This human is far distant from the one who first sat on these lands. In those days I was full of shame, guilt, recrimination, blame, addiction, pain, and trauma. The human that sits here now is one that strives to maintain what I call the ordinary place. A place that is neither inferior nor superior to anything else around me. It’s a place of rest. And in the ordinary place, I realise that I can be anything .. because whatever I am is ordinary for me.

 

The Journey

What I’ve realised on the journey of this last 19 years is that this prayer and the prayers people have made for me created a powerful container that has allowed me to grow. I have become a better mother, a better sister, a better daughter and a better community member. And in more recent days become a conscious businessperson and facilitator of other humans on their path.  You can connect to the unfolding of the prayer in the world of psychotherapy at The Pilamaya Centre here.

The consciousness awarded to me through dedication to this prayer and other scared practices enables me to look within the structure of my being and seek out those parts of myself that are existing in misunderstanding created by the conditioning I have absorbed while on earth.

The grace I have received gives me the capacity to make changes within the fabric of my psyche – I consider this to be a miracle.  I am eternally grateful.

You can read more about this year’s prayer here.

 

The Number Seven

The number seven is a special number and can be found in the majority of old and modern religions. I would go so far to say that it is a sacred number that forms the geometry of life.

Seven is also a very important number in my life. It relates to the Seven Sacred Values that the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman gave to the Lakota people at a time of great famine. I want to speak a little bit about these values and what they currently mean to me, given that their meaning is always evolving.

 

The Seven Sacred Values

 

Number One – Live in Good Health:

The people shall live in good health. And what does this mean to me?

It means that we have a responsibility to take care of our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. When we are in good health, it is much easier to access the spiritual realms and to feel as though we are part of something greater and recognise ourselves as part of the spirit of this earth.

When we are physically out of health, much of our focus is taken on the physical symptoms, and the same with the mental or emotional health. The result is often a focusing in on some of the symptoms that are out of health and we have less energy to focus on our spiritual reality – which is also part of our birthright.

So, by living in good health, energy is free to flow through our systems, and that energy allows us to connect to what I’m beginning to refer to as the truth of our being. In the truth of our being, we are able to be in contact or at least in some kind of relationship with the spiritual realms – or the creator of all.

 

Number Two – Remember the Generations:

I think this is something that can be misinterpreted, but is also very easy to interpret. Within this sacred value, there’s a recognition that we come here for a short time.

The short time that we spend here in each lifetime, is affected by the generations that have been behind us, our families, our genetics and the state of the earth and collective consciousness in when we are living.

Everything in this reality has been affected by those that came before.

And in every sense, some of the problems we go through are affected by the burdens that have been left for us from the previous generations. This value also recognises that we are a generation that will become ancestors and we are leaving behind things for the future generations to clean up.

The wisdom in this value asks us to look at our lives and be conscious of how we live them. It encourages us to try to complete some of the cycles that our ancestors have left open. And try not to leave too many burdens for those that are coming in front of us. The point is to try to clear the way for the future generations to live in harmony with this planet – and take their places as guardians of this earth.

And perhaps this is my particular slant and interpretation into the second value, but ultimately, I deeply believe that human beings have a role to play here. And the role is in stewardship – to be stewards of the planet. To use our intellect and the functions of our bodies to make sure that this planet survives from our current ignorance and misuse of it. And then to the next stage, for it to thrive.

 

Number Three – Walk in Quietness, Be Humble:

In this sacred value, we are taught that our footsteps on this earth echo across the planet, in this moment and for the rest of time. In a sense, we come here as visitors, and it’s important for us to recognise this and tread softly on this earth, not make too much noise or leave too much disruption behind us.

There’s a humility that we can connect to when we recognise ourselves within the immensity of this creation. Of course, our egos want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to be felt. Yes. And whilst we are more than the ego, we are also less than the ego wants to feel itself. When we realise our place in the cosmos, there’s naturally a humility that arises. And humility allows us to access the ordinary place that I spoke about earlier, where we’re neither smaller nor bigger than anything else, just in the place that creation made us to stand.

When we walk in quietness, we can better hear the sounds of nature. We can hear those messages that our wiser selves are continuously sending to us. We can hear the song of the earth, the song of all earths, and the different songs of the stars in the cosmos. This is only possible when we allow ourselves to quieten and live with humility.

 

Number Four – Be Happy:

In this sacred value, we find the keys to understanding the uniqueness and the preciousness of this human existence. The way that I understand it, there are souls and beings queuing up in the spirit world to have a human experience. We come here and we experience everything there is: to be felt, to be tasted, to be touched, to be listened to, to be witnessed, here on this planet.

And sometimes we might want out.

Because this is a difficult reality to be in.

So, this sacred value invites us to recognise the preciousness of the human existence, and to be happy that we have had this chance to experience it. Happiness from this perspective is not so much based on what we can achieve, what we can buy, or consume. It is merely based on the fact that we’re here in this place, having the experience.

 

Number Five – Help One Another, Have Compassion:

In this, there is the recognition that life on this planet is challenging. In a sense I believe that the human design is created to be confronted with challenges and find solutions to them.

There is a recognition here that life in this reality is challenging and it’s much easier to do if we are together in community. It recognises that at some point, we were all part of tribal networks. And within those communities, each individual would find their place within the tribe, there would be jobs to do and roles to play that were necessary to the tribe, but also fit with the ordinary place of each individual.

By that I mean, they were able to develop their unique skills and lens of the world in a way that was natural to their system design. And their design had a place in the tribe, which meant there was no need to coerce the person to think in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, because the values of the tribe were about maintaining the health of the tribe.

So, this value recognises that this is part of our history. And if we are able to forge networks and communities that are based in this value, then the prospects that life will continue on earth will increase.

 

Number Six – Live with the Power, Have Faith:

The people shall live with the power.

This is a really interesting subject to consider, especially as for the last few centuries, modern man has been exploring false power. We’ve been exploring a power that is based on superstition and fear, which ultimately is not the power that is discussed in this sacred value.

The power to create or indeed the power of creation, is inherent in each one of us.

There is an intelligence to this value that asks us to look into our lives. If we really look, we might be able to see that our thoughts are creating our reality.

So, this value tells us that the intellect that is intrinsic to every human has got power. And that we create according to the state of our consciousness, which essentially gives us a lot of support to develop our consciousness. In order to create a reality on this earth that is based in harmony, peace, stewardship we need to develop our consciousness in a certain direction. It is the direction of love. This is the direction we need to travel towards if we are to connect to the power of this sixth value.

It is telling us that the power of creation is inside of us.

In this moment and every other, we are creating a world that is a representation of our collective minds.

In these times, there are pockets of beauty. And there are pockets of destruction and fear.

There are places where people are trying to reconnect to our creator, and there are places where people don’t even have the chance to do that, because their lives are being ended by other human beings. And that’s all I really want to say about that. It is important to live with the power. If we want to see harmony in this world, then we must make it harmonious inside of ourselves, which connects us into what we want to see in our world. This is our power.

We cannot outsource the blame to any kind of God or creator for the state that we find ourselves in, because we’ve been given the power to create.

 

Number Seven – Respect All of Creation:

Given everything that I’ve shared so far, respect all of creation is a very sensible sacred virtue. Because at this point, we begin to realise that we are creation.

And therefore, by respecting ourselves completely, we must respect everything in creation, and treat everything in creation with respect. Only by treating everything in creation with respect, can we truly respect the truth of our being and our own souls.

This value is so obvious, and yet it’s one that we haven’t managed to understand, acknowledge, or appreciate up to now. It asks us to be conscious of ourselves in the smallest of actions and try to respect what we can see of creation on this earth.

You know, I used to kill spiders. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t like what they looked like. It wasn’t until I started to understand how-to live-in harmony with the earth that I stopped doing that. To respect all of creation goes down to the most minute details. Things that we may not consider such as, respecting our waterways, respecting that the way we treat our water and understanding that it is recycled back into the earth and back into other beings is important.

There are so many ways that I talk about this value that are not apparent in the simple sentence.

I want to leave that to you to explore this value with the rest of the seven – if they speak to you that is.

 

To Close

I want to say at the end of all of this, I have explained the sacred values in the way that they are spoken when I’m an Inipi or sweat lodge ceremony. And at the beginning of that ceremony, there is a welcoming of things that goes in sevens. Each one is dedicated to one of the values. And these are exactly the words that I’ve heard for years in this ceremony.

I know that if you look online for the Seven Sacred Values from the White Buffalo Calf Woman of the Lakota, they’re often discussed and described differently. I’ve shared with you the way they are spoken at the beginning of the Inipi ceremony and the way they make sense to me at the time of writing.

It’s also important for me to say that the ethical code for my life and my businesses are based around these values because to me they make complete sense. If we are to step up, and bring ourselves away from this disharmony, fear, and quite frankly, disruptive and confusing way that we’ve been living with each other and with this planet, we need to be able to follow something that is simple and makes a lot of sense.

These values, although simple, have many, many layers and pathways for us to explore the practicalities and subtleties of being here together with each other, in accordance to how we were designed to live on this planet.

And with that, I will close. Ahau Mitakuye Oyasin.