Soul Of Healing

This week we have an informative talk with Trini Rodriguez discussing Native American and Mexican American healing sweat-lodges and healing circles. How these concepts bring us closer to the soul. We discuss how they facilitate the “self” in becoming “whole” and we see how the Aztec Sun calendar guides us to the essence of our character.

Transcript

This week on Poetic Resurrection,

We welcome Trini Rodriguez discussing the soul of healing.

Hi and welcome back to Poetic Resurrection.

Our guest today is Trini Rodriguez and she is a poet and a facilitator of women's healing sweat lodge and healing circles in the Native American and Native Mexican traditions.

Welcome Trini,

How are you?

I'm doing fine,

I'm so glad to be here.

Thank you for inviting me.

Yes,

No,

I really am interested in the healing and the fact that you're a poet and you can work all those in together,

I mean I think that's fascinating.

So what poem do you have for us today?

I have a poem that deals with women and the way I see women too.

I wrote it for International Women's Day some years back and it reads this way.

I've been a woman too long searching for ways to escape this cocoon,

To spread wings wide,

No longer hide my being,

My heart,

My life.

Aching to find my way home to this body through this voice.

No more asking permission to be me,

Know myself,

Be at one with destiny.

Today International Women's Day in honor of women born before and thanks to women here now I offer a prayer,

A divine mandala,

Color of freedoms and dreams.

Bless this awaited return to the roots of our sacred knowing that while our days are numbered our presence will be counted,

Encouraged,

Bared,

In love shared.

For when we stand,

Live out loud,

Rescue our trampled souls,

We heal the spirit within to humbly transform,

To proudly say I've been a woman.

That's beautiful,

Thank you.

I mean it's just there's so much acknowledgement now and in being a woman and having that National Women's Day and having you do that poem and it's so true we don't listen to our feminine side because the feminine side was always like oh now you have to be assertive and a go-getter and there's nothing wrong with the feminine side.

I was telling someone else that it bothers me that when they change the name of something it's always the feminine that leaves.

There's nothing wrong with the feminine.

That we try to belong in a man's world for so long that we forgot who we are and that we actually have a lot to offer.

You work with that.

You do work with the women in the sweat lodges and healing.

Can you tell us more about that because it's really interesting?

Yes,

I agree with you.

There's been so much that's been pushed aside about our feminine aspect of ourselves and when I it's an energy that's in everything and in everyone and so the way that I've seen it the feminine has to be rescued again to be re-honored again in a way that's proper and it's been distorted.

It's been diminished just as women have been diminished but I think we ought to also recognize that again the feminine energy is in males and females.

We carry both energies.

It's not just an energy that belongs to women.

In fact,

It's the creator energy.

It's what allows us to give birth.

It's what allows us to again not just give birth to human beings but also to creative and regenerative things because it's the mother energy and that again can be cultivated and nourished in everyone and unfortunately it's been made second to the masculine to production to organizing to the structuring of things as opposed to being the feminine which is the first energy which is the one where you imagine and you honor life and try to protect it and so it's just I think a very important thing.

So in my work as a sweat lodge leader and also doing healing circles that's one of the things that I find is very very common.

There's this real sadness and a sense of not being understood by others but also we don't understand ourselves and so a lot of the work that has to do with sweat lodge and so on is for us to recover our true selves and going inward going into I don't know if you've ever been to a sweat lodge but I haven't.

Okay well it's a very very old practice.

It's all over the continent not just here in North America with Native Americans here but in South America,

Central America and in other places and the idea is that you go back into the womb.

Now of course figuratively it's a metaphor.

Basically you're going into a structure that looks like a little hut and for Native Americans in this on this continent it's an inipi and it's basically made of willows shaped in a dome and then you put blankets on it and then inside there's a fire rather a fire pit.

It's on the outside where the the volcanic rocks get heated but then they get brought in to the lodge in the center and you pour water on it and it's basically a steam bath and it's a steam bath not just for you physically it's a steam bath for you to cleanse yourself emotionally as well psychologically as well and spiritually as well.

So it's a time and a place to recenter yourself and to also let go because we know that when we take a bath what are we doing?

We're getting rid of the toxins,

We're getting rid of old skin,

We're getting rid of you know what what we have that we don't need anymore and sometimes that shows up in emotional baggage memories that we're holding on to that perhaps we haven't learned from but if we have it's time to let them go to make room for the new and that's what the rebirthing is you go in to transform yourself so that when you leave you are more prepared you know yourself better you're clearer and you're able to to move forward in a better way so that's the intent of a sweat lodge.

And how long is that for?

Is it something you do for an hour or hours or how long do you stay in the sweat lodge?

The again it depends on how how much time is required.

Again I do sweat lodge for women.

There are practices where in some cases you have men and women together and then also just men by themselves but again because of the kind of damage that we've suffered as women sometimes what we need is a space where we know that it's safe and it's it's confidential everything that said there is confidential so this purging this letting go is something that sometimes can take you know a little time and sometimes it takes more time it just depends on what's needed and so it can be anywhere from an hour to two hours to three hours there had been four hour sweat lodges and the idea in some cases people like to talk but really the idea is not that you're talking inside you're praying inside and there is for different people is different things but for a sweat lodge all you're doing is speaking from the heart you're not reciting something that's been scripted for you you're basically praying from from your center keeping your soul from your soul that's the point and it's interesting that the lodge would be in the dark because when you go inside there is no light you're closing the flap of the door that you walk into which is again a blanket and so it's entirely dark just like in the womb it's dark it's moist it's warm and you're going to hear the heartbeat well the heartbeat is the drum that we play and the singing is basically an offer of prayers so what we ask people to do is we ask them to sing join whoever's leading the song and also to to pray to really speak from that place where where we know a lot of times we hide our insecurities we hide our fears we hide our biggest concerns and of course that could be very damaging because we carry it in our body what we don't release we're carrying and so that can be very heavy after a while these practices allow us to take the time to attend to ourselves I think that's great what do you do because I'm I'm naive with this I'm going to ask you questions probably the regular person would probably have for you do you not drink water during that time or do you have water with you because of the sweating I just want to know that if someone would be interested in this they wouldn't be afraid of dehydrating right the idea too is it's very good to lose a lot of water you're going to perspire and so what we ask people to do is to prepare on a number of levels physically you want to make sure that you're that you're hydrating you're you're well hydrated before you get in and also that you haven't been eating heavy things because your digestion takes a lot of energy too so if you're in there and you're you've had a big meal well that's not going to help you if you're trying to release and let go so we ask that people do that also because we what we the toxins that we have in our bodies are if we've ingested anything that's toxic to our bodies like let's say say we've been drinking alcohol or we've had drugs that we shouldn't take if we've had that that's going to be released too so we don't want to have things in our body that are going to be difficult to release so we ask to people to abstain from that for at least four days before yes you do want to be well hydrated and and no we don't drink water during the sweat lodge but the flap does open four times because we pray in the direct the four directions it will open four times and during those what you might call breaks we can pass around water but we don't do it during the during the the prayer and the and the song time okay that's really because it's fascinated me i actually studied the u.

S uh native american cultures for a year at ucla i studied the music oh yeah so it was fascinating i've always had an interest in that because it's so close to earth you know it's the appreciation of the earth and you give gratitude to the earth i'm like a tree hugger i just love plants and you know animals and all of that kind of stuff so studying the native american culture and the beauty of it with the gratitude for life is always fascinated me it starts there and it's a beautiful way to to enter anything to start your day to of course start prayer prayer should be started with gratitude we've been in many ways misdirected to to think of prayer as a time to be asking but really what we're do what we're supposed to do is start the prayer starts with gratitude and then what we we may ask after we express our gratitude is to ask for guidance for the things that we we can't seem to do alone or that we don't seem to have you know tapped into one thing i did want to add is that i was i was asked and and given permission to to lead these sweat lodges by my adopted dad i i was just so lucky with that when i was i think was 40 it was 19 1989 i i just by chance my husband who had already started doing sweat lodge on the navajo reservation he was he was there to speak to youth because youth are troubled everywhere to the degree that we've we've lost our way from our traditions our most sacred you know understandings people are are starting to get very lost and so that's true also on the reservation so he was asked to speak to youth there and in the process met someone who became my father and adopted us he's a medicine man and he adopted me and and my family and he is the one that you know trini you ought to you ought to do lodge and i'll tell you that's the last thing i wanted to do i you know for part of our i because the way we've been damaged in this society is that we don't know we don't know what we know we don't know what we're tapped into we feel like we're entirely lost and of course i felt that way too so it took me a while to even accept you know the idea that that i could run lodge in the process one of the things he told me was i don't expect you to be the name which is the their word for navajo the their people and he says but you know in the process what you'll end up doing is you'll find your way back to your own ways and that's partly what's happened i've been able to now travel to and meet quite a few curanderas which is from mexico and just last february just before the pandemic closed the borders down i was on a trip to mexico with curanderos it's beautiful the way that sweat lodge gets done there is slightly different it's not with any willows but rather it's a it's a dome structure that is made of adobe and so it's it's almost like being in an oven but of course you're safe and this is a very very old tradition as i mentioned so these are women who have who do this regularly as a way of it's a healing literally healing where they use the water and the herbs that they use for either teas or or for just for the water that they pour on the rocks it has all medicine is in our plants and so the medicine will come through in the air as if we're drinking it also so it's a way of you're getting medicine through your pores but also if you drink it it will come through your body that way and so there's an it's an interesting exchange you're perspiring out the things that you don't need but you're getting in the things that you do need so it's a rebalancing really is what it is yeah no it's beautiful and for those of you that don't know what a curandero is translated is a healer exactly now i also know that that that's a good segue into my next question which is what is what are healing circles and how do they work well i'm glad you asked that because it's um there's a there's a distinction between what some people are calling talking circles and pass it to us stick around and you you talk but really healing circles go a little deeper than that they are again they're you're supposed to if someone wants a healing circle it's usually because they're going through some type of trouble sometimes some type of challenge that they feel they need guidance and help with and so the idea is to bring medicine to that circle medicine to help someone get through those struggles so the the idea is that if they ask you for for help with that then the then you basically ask that person who would they like there too because sometimes a person wants to talk to just you and sometimes they want their circle of support their their friends their mother their whoever it is that they feel that they can be truthful in a circle uh with and sometimes it may not be your closest relatives it's interesting enough it may be the people that you allow yourself to be honest with and that know you well and that aren't going to sit there and judge you if you're going through a struggle that's difficult that perhaps other people would judge the idea is to you come together to again do pretty much the same thing you do in a sweat lodge you're uh you sing you you pray you this person will will ask uh well first of all explain their situation what they're struggling with and they will just just release that way what it is that they're concerned about and surprisingly enough a lot of times people which is very interesting a lot of times it takes just saying things out loud that will allow people to come to their answers that we hold inside anyway and so the interesting thing is that the medicine that we can offer of course there's cleansing sage and there's copal which is the resin from the tree that you burn and blessed with there's all kinds of different things that you can do but the main thing is that you're sitting in a circle of respect and honesty and transparency so that so that we can be real about where we're at and get closer again if we've lost our way to who we really are because when we're tapped into who we are that's when we can do our best in finding our way again and so sometimes that takes a circle it takes a circle and so it's a circle of support and healing if you look at the word healing and what it really means it means to become whole it just means to become whole and a lot of times if you if you look at trauma we realize that we many times we're we're separate even from ourselves we dissociate if something's really painful and we can't deal with it we start and we don't remember i know in my in my life there was a lot of things a lot of blacked out periods that i just don't even know i can't account for and so the idea is to be able to face yourself but also face the fact that that you have the capacity and with medicine and with guidance and again mostly honesty and with heart we can recover we can recover to be our full authentic real selves not to have to pretend not to have to do what somebody else thinks we should do but to be able to stand up and say no this is who i am not as a way of being rejecting of other people or their suggestions but really to know that that the truest ones are going to come from us and that's when we're going to be able to stand in a in a good way well the self-acceptance when you feel that you have to be someone else you know people can see right through that they could they might be not call you on it or anything like that but they might say you know there's something not right they're not telling me everything or you could sense this because even though we live in a very material world our gut and our spirit our own spirit especially if we're in touch with it can tell us when something's not right we don't have to wait but i think something like a healing circle can bring it to the surface yes exactly which i think is so important because even for me i use myself as an example all the time because i am such a work in progress and that's why i started this podcast about exploring perceptions because it's all what we think now that thinking might be how your culture you were taught in your culture or your family or where you live the environment but it's not yours and to really get in touch with that soul part of you that knows everything and bring that to the surface i think that's beautiful and i think a healing circle would be such an advantageous thing for most people i mean as you're talking i'm like maybe i want one of those yes they call them platikas they're basically where you're again you're tapping into your heart because a lot of times to protect ourselves to protect our feelings to protect our heart we will have shields we'll have barriers we'll set up walls because we don't trust that people are going to be careful with us or we maybe we've made mistakes in our judgment of who we let in and so we don't trust ourselves and so we have to learn to trust ourselves again more deeply and not take those mistakes or those those errors and judgment as the end all of what we're capable of but rather looking at those as okay well i won't do that again and learn that okay i can learn it's not making a mistake doesn't mean you're dumb it just means you didn't have the experience to know something other than that until now yeah to recover your confidence and your your belief in yourself yeah and it's also allowing yourself to be vulnerable and but be vulnerable around the right people yes because i find that if you're vulnerable around everybody there are people that are going to take advantage of that and yes and it's their story it's not your story you're bringing into it they're bringing their experiences and their story come across people and they have like this you need to act like this and say things like this and blah blah blah i'm like you know what that's not living that's not that's not living that's not following your soul and so many people when they retire is when they say oh i should have done this and i should have done that even if finances because most people are afraid of the financial part of it all and even if your finances are that way then work your regular job and do your passion when you come home but to suppress who you are and what your soul is telling you it's death of the soul i find it is it is very much so and that's why i think it's interesting that the soul is it's associated with darkness it's associated with shadow it's associated with depth it's it's good that it is because that means we can we can protect it if it's something deep then we can protect it at the same time it should be not so deep that we can't access it because that's like our that's like our root that's what we're supposed to be rooted in and if for whatever reason we were made fun of or let's say we're we're very sensitive or or we're we we don't seem to have our sense of ourselves it's it's because we were there's a we're being tentative to our connection to our soul who we are who you can't change who you are you can only be who you are but that takes a lot of even that takes courage if being who you are does not look normal even even just being a poet or even being an artist or being a writer or or wanting to create podcasts for healing they may think well that's weird but no it's actually if that's really coming from a place of you wanting to fulfill your a calling that's deep that's not not based on what other people think you should do it because you can't help but do it that's a soul thing yeah it's it's important to find out what that is for each of us yes you know i've been an actor i've been a writer poet dancer i mean i've been everything entertainment it's my passion to do that now my frustration with it is that you don't make any money so you still have to have a regular job to do it but my saving grace was that i i did do it i had to let go of the anxiety of the money part i gotta make money i gotta make money you know i just i once i let go of that and just says you know this is my passion i'm doing it i should enjoy it instead of stressing that it's not making money because let's face it you know what do they say in in people in sag which is the union i'm in less than five percent make a living off of acting less than five percent that those are terrible odds so accepting that i accepted that i'm probably not gonna make that my living which is i'm okay because i've kind of shifted i've gotten more into the soul part of me it was very hard to let go of that it was difficult because you you feel like well i'm doing my passion why am i not making money and the healing part of it came with meditation for me and i'm like i said i'm a work in progress this kind of stuff that seems to accelerate you getting into that to me is is a wonderful idea you were telling me that you got your native name recently can you explain how you get a native name and how that works blessings that we've had is that at the achuchas we have there's we're surrounded by calpules which are groups of meshika tan santas who practice the culture and share that culture with community as an as an element of recovery for all of us to be tapped into our own ways be able to again recover that aspect of ourselves we were lucky enough one of the groups which is um one of the groups at the achuchas the cultural center that my husband and myself established in the san fernando valley they offered to do a naming ceremony for myself and for my grandson who was very much interested in his recovering his native roots so my husband also got his name the idea is that you're supposed to get a name that reflects your energies the energies that you carry there's a way to know what the what those energies are if you know how to read the aztec calendar what it's called the aztec calendar but it's the sun calendar and it's the what it is is it you have to know the day and the time of your birth and they will look on the calendar and trace it back and see what the energies were at that time and it goes up to 15 minutes up to as close as 15 minutes from the time of your birth so what they did is they read our energies and then based on the the energies that we carry they gave us our names and when you look at what that does for a person again i didn't get that done until i was 65 and this is supposed to happen every 13 years you basically the same point the earth and all the alignment of the stars and the sun and everything that alignment is exactly the same every 13 years on your birthday so that's why it's every 13 years so you're back in that same at that same point and it's time to check yourself because obviously what the energies that you were born with if you've worked with them if you if you've developed them you're going to be not not at the same level you're going to be at the heart and that means that your name will also shift so because your energies are still there but you've worked them it's another and of course you're at another stage in your life too 13 is different than 26 is different than 39 is different than 52 and different than 65 and it keeps that's the idea you get your name based on your energies but also it helps you know not just your of course our energies can be positive and you know they can be strengths and weaknesses too part of my energies were well the the strongest energy that i have is one that has to do with nurturing it's interesting enough i didn't know that until i was 65 and it turns out it's associated it's an energy associated with uh curanderas and with uh weaving and with weaving in the sense of creating of taking what there is and making something beautiful out of it in a caring way and so that's one of the the energies i have and so it's my name is lasoteo and so it's a beautiful beautiful ceremony it's one that it would be beautiful if everybody had that ability to to know themselves that well and to be seen because part of what it does is it tells you you are unique you have your unique energies which is your gift and so the importance of knowing what that gift is so that you can work it and offer it because a gift isn't something that you just hold on to and just know a gift is an offering and all of us have offerings but very few of us know what that offering is to me it's tragic that a lot of us go through life without a sense of what it is that our gift is we're asking ourselves in fact a lot of times what's the most common thing that kids get asked when they're in school oh what are you gonna be well as if as if it's uh something that you're just gonna pull out of the sky because you saw this commercial or you saw this ad or or or somebody does it and so you're gonna just copy what you see but rather it should be unique to what you bring energies you bring that's the idea that your parents and the person who knows how to read the calendar can help you understand what are this child's energies and you protect them that way because you know what they are and you help guide them so that they get developed it's almost like a psychology test i mean it just it knows your inner workings from a very young age i think that's wonderful i would love how do people find out about stuff like this well there's there's again because of the the resurgence of people interested in tapping back into old knowledge one of the things is a lot of the dante groups which become calpules which is basically uh community family groups that help each other maintain and develop that understanding uh one of the things that we did yes one of the things that we did was uh to offer a class where we would teach the how to read the calendar and energies and all that and so there are people at the achuchas who know how to do that and of course if i'm sure uh you have to be careful some people on the internet will say that they know too but it really has to be people who've studied it very very deeply i can't say that i've studied it deeply but i know what it's about and i know who to go to for it is there any ending thoughts that you would like to share with the audience something we didn't cover or something that you really would like people to know yes i think that um it's important for us to understand that we carry medicine all of us carry medicine and again it's related to our gifts it's i think something that's come very clear now that the pandemic allowed us to kind of step back and reevaluate where we are not just as you you know are us as individuals but as a collective society and community and families what is it that we value and how are we going to protect that so that we we can be our full selves and we can get closer to what our soul's purpose is and so i would say that it's just so important for us to not put that off because the sooner we really understand ourselves the sooner we can develop ourselves in a way that honors who we are and in the process will honor all of us by again sharing that part of ourselves that's really true i want to thank you so much for being here to for reading that lovely poem and the healing to because i think our soul needs to be healed so badly and people think of from the outside in versus the inside out yes there are people out there that there's a pill for everything and yeah of working on who they are so i wanted to thank you so much for being on the show thank you and many blessings many blessings to you

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