The Healing Power of Prayer

The word prayer is derived from the two Sanskrit words pra and artha meaning pleading fervently. In other words, it is asking God (or whatever term you would like to use for a higher power) for something with intense yearning. According to a 2018 Pew Research Center analysis, 90% of U.S. adults say they believe in God or a higher power of some kind. In times of crisis, whether a personal crisis, a family crisis, a national crisis, or one like today's global pandemic crisis, many Americans turn to prayer. How often they pray and who they pray for varies greatly. The Pew survey data revealed that 55% of Americans pray every day, while 75% pray at least once per week and 23% seldom or never pray. Even among those who are religiously unaffiliated, 20% say they pray daily. Of people who pray, 82% say they pray for family and friends, and 74% say they pray for their own wants and needs.
 

According to these findings, prayer is an action that most people perform routinely. So, what are the main benefits of regular prayer? Research has shown that prayer induces relaxation, along with feelings of hope, gratitude, empathy and compassion -- all of which increase overall well-being. Studies indicate that prayer reduces anxiety and depression. A reduction in anxiety allows people to process and react to external events with a more cognitive rather than emotional manner. At a time in which there is worldwide concern over a virus without a treatment, a strategic and holistic approach to problem solving is a good thing. Lower stress levels, healthy habits and a strong spiritual life could be key to beating the coronavirus. An exhaustive review that compared spirituality to other health interventions found that people with a strong spiritual life had an 18% reduction in mortality.
 

When it comes to dealing with illness, most Americans pray to a higher power for help. Nearly nine of ten Americans have relied upon healing prayer at some point in their lives, praying for others even more than for themselves. In his superb book, "Reinventing Medicine," Larry Dossey, MD, cites multiple double-blind university studies that measured the effectiveness of prayer as a healing modality. For example, they would track a hundred people in the surgical recovery ward of a hospital, fifty of whom were being prayed for without their knowledge, the other fifty of whom were not. In every case, the group receiving prayer -- even though they didn't know it -- recovered faster, had fewer complications, scored significantly higher on emotional and mental wellbeing, and performed better by every other metric the researchers could think to record.
 

Alternative medicine researchers have classified prayer as a mind-body intervention, and thus, a modality of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). According to the Washington Post, "...prayer is the most common complement to mainstream medicine, far outpacing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies." Studies have suggested that prayer can reduce psychological stress, regardless of the god or gods a person prays to. According to a study by CentraState Healthcare System, "the psychological benefits of prayer may help reduce stress and anxiety, promote a more positive outlook, and strengthen the will to live."
 

The research findings indicate that, despite the increasing growth in scientific medicine, traditional prayer is still very much alive. Outside of belief in a higher power, there may be no more ubiquitous spiritual expression in the U.S. than use of healing prayer. It is a cultural way of coping with health problems. I have only one word of caution if you're thinking of trying this for yourself. I believe that for prayer to be effective, it must be sincere and from the heart. If you can do that with a script, by all means, do it! But most of us can't. Let your prayer be a conversation, not just talking to a higher power, but also listening for a response. 

Six Native Candidates Elected to Congress

The 2020 general election has been a historic one in terms of "firsts" for more diverse lawmakers -- it also saw a record-breaking number of candidates of Native American heritage win their congressional races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Six Indigenous candidates won their House races, which means the chamber will now have the most Native lawmakers ever serving at a time. Four of them are returning members.
 

Democrats Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member representing New Mexico, and Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk Nation member representing Kansas, both retained their seats after becoming the first Native American women elected to Congress, in 2018. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) of Chickasaw Nation also won reelection on Tuesday, as did Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) of Cherokee Nation.
 

New members will include Republican Yvette Herrell, who unseated Democratic Rep. Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District. It's the second time they've competed for the seat; Herrell ran against Torres Small in 2018 and narrowly lost.
 

The other new member is Democrat Kaiali'i "Kai" Kahele, who won his race for Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District. The seat was vacated by former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who launched an unsuccessful bid for president. Kahele is only the second Native Hawaiian to represent Hawaii in Congress since it became a state in 1959. The first was the late Sen. Daniel Akaka (D). Kahele has served in the Hawaii Senate since 2016.

Finding Your Spiritual Dharma

The concept of dharma, or the "eternal spiritual path," is a key Hindu and Buddhist concept, referring to a law or principle which governs the universe. For an individual to live out their dharma, they must act in accordance with this law. In Hinduism dharma is both the eternal order that rules the universe and the duty or law that governs one's life. In Buddhism, dharma is the doctrine, the universal truth common to all individuals at all times, proclaimed by the Buddha. Dharma, the Buddha, and the sangha (community of believers) make up the Triratna, "Three Jewels," to which Buddhists go for refuge. In Buddhism, dharma additionally means acting in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha's teachings and the path to enlightenment are symbolized by the Wheel of Dharma.
 

On an individual level, dharma can refer to a personal mission or purpose. Fulfilling one's dharma or purpose in life is considered the way to transcend suffering and the cycle of birth and death. It is said that all beings must accept their dharma for order and harmony to exist in the world. If one is following their dharma, they are pursuing their true calling and serving all other beings in the universe by carrying out their authentic role. According to the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita," it is better to do your own dharma poorly than to do another's well.
 

Finding your spiritual dharma, or purpose, is more about introspection and self-discovery than about following the same path as others. The most important thing you can do is to develop a spiritual practice. A spiritual practice is the regular performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. This is where you practice a variety of techniques on a daily basis that are designed to expand your awareness with the intention of achieving higher states of consciousness and spiritual enlightenment. Here are a three techniques to finding your spiritual path:
 

1. Mindful Meditation: Meditation is probably the most ancient and well known spiritual practice. To meditate means to focus the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity in order to train attention and awareness, and promote calm and clarity. Mindfulness is the idea of learning how to be fully present and engaged in the moment, aware of your thoughts and feelings without distraction or judgment. Combining meditation and mindfulness together into a single practice optimizes the effects of both.
 

To practice mindful meditation, sit or lie comfortably, and then close your eyes. Begin by silently asking yourself: "What is my dharma or purpose in life?" Then simply focus on your breath and observe whatever comes up without judgment or attachment. You do not need to do anything to your breath. Just breathe naturally and focus your attention on where you feel your breath in your body. It may be in your abdomen, chest, throat or nostrils. As you do this, your mind may start to wander. This is perfectly natural. Just notice that your mind has wandered, and then gently redirect your attention back to the breathing. Stay here for five to seven minutes. It helps to set aside a designated time for mindful meditation each day.
 

2. Mindful Drumming: Drumming is perhaps the oldest form of active meditation known to humanity. It is a simple and effortless way to still the mind's internal dialogue in order to access personal revelation from within. Combining these two ancient practices -- drumming and mindfulness -- can be life-altering. Just like a yogi or a monk, who exists in a spiritual state most of the time because of constant devotional practices, we can readily induce profound states of deep meditation and heightened awareness by using a drum as an aid to meditation. Mindful drumming is a way to connect straight to the heart. The energy that comes in from the source is directed through our hearts. The essence of mindful drumming is the experience of direct revelation, which comes through as a feeling, impression or intuition.
 

To practice mindful drumming, sit comfortably, and then close your eyes. Silently ask yourself: "What is my dharma -- my purpose in life?" Next begin drumming a steady, monotonous rhythm and simply focus on the beat. If your mind wanders, gently redirect your attention back to the beat. Drum for five to seven minutes, maintaining a nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and insights. The punctuated sound of a regularly beating drum stills the incessant chatter of the mind, enabling you to achieve a mindful state almost instantly -- the fast path to self-revelation. This ease of meditation with a drum contrasts significantly with the often long periods of isolation and practice required by many other meditative disciplines before significant effects are experienced.
 

3. Shamanic Journeying: When we are unaware of our soul's true purpose, or simply not aligned in our actions, we often experience a malaise of the spirit. We can engage the blueprint of our soul path through the vehicle of journeying. Shamanic journeying is a time-tested medium for individual self-realization. We can journey within to access wisdom and energies that can help awaken our soul calling and restore us to wholeness. Journey practice connects us with our deepest core values and our highest vision of who we are and why we are here. It heightens our sense of mission and purpose, empowering our personal evolution.
 

Shamanism is based on the principle that innate wisdom and guidance can be accessed through the inner senses in ecstatic trance. Basically, shamanic journeying is a way of communicating with your inner or true self and retrieving information. Your inner self is in constant communication with all aspects of your environment, seen and unseen. You need only journey within to find answers to your questions. You should have a question or objective in mind from the start such as identifying your innermost purpose in life. After the journey, you must then interpret the meaning of your trance experience.
 

To enter a trance state and support your journey, you will need a drum or a shamanic drumming recording. The drum, sometimes called the shamans horse, provides a simple and effective way to induce ecstatic trance states. When a drum is played at an even tempo of three to four beats per second for at least fifteen minutes, most novices report that they can journey successfully even on their first attempt. Transported by the driving beat of the drum; the shamanic traveler journeys to the inner planes of consciousness. Try a shamanic journey.

Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots

Across the United States, activists are responding to the pandemic crisis with anarchist strategies, like mutual aid. In Window Rock, Arizona -- the seat of the Navajo Nation -- the K'é Infoshop is one such group, and has been providing food and medical supplies to elders, families, and those infected with the virus. In a recent article in "The Nation," the Infoshop's members said their style of autonomous organizing has distinctly Navajo roots.
 

Just a few minutes from the Navajo Nation government offices, the K'é Infoshop opened its doors in April 2017 in a vacant coffee shop. Inside, early collective members painted each wall to correspond with the sacred Navajo colors -- black, white, turquoise, and yellow -- and began stocking the space with Native American books and magazines. Near the entrance, they hung a painting of a women's turquoise-ring-clad hands wrapped around jail bars -- a piece by a member who the group says was unjustly arrested in a police raid of the nearby flea market while she shared her lunch with a group of homeless people. Across the back wall, they put up red stenciled letters that spelled out, "K'é does not discriminate."
 

Anthropologists frequently describe k'é as the Navajo kinship system, but Infoshop members say it's much more than that. "It's our theory of everything," K'é co-founder Brandon Benallie declared. "It's our string theory. It's how we're connected to everything -- but specifically how that kinship is reciprocated and maintained. K'é is this huge overlapping philosophy that the whole universe is interconnected. But it's also these relationships that we have with one another and with the elements that exist in the world, whether that be the weather or the water or the animals."
 

Although there is a markedly European jargon to describing contemporary anarchism, the movement has long been influenced by Indigenous ideas. Being Navajo could be considered anarchist because they never had chiefs; they didn't have a hierarchy. It was always horizontal. Socialism and anarchism derived ideology from Franciscan missionaries who came to the Navajo Nation in the 1500s and 1600s and studied Indigenous societies. And later you have notable activists like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin reading the journals of these religious figures and how they describe Indigenous societies at that time.
 

As soon as the pandemic hit the Navajo Nation, K'é's members decided they had to help. K'é utilized the food pantry it had stocked for weekly solidarity meals with homeless community members. They gave away a years supply of food in just two weeks. At first the Infoshop was alone in its relief efforts in Navajo Nation, but by April and May, other mutual aid projects began to emerge. The youth-led Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief project raised funds to place large orders and organized teams to distribute upwards of 10,000 pounds of food each week across the 27,000 square miles of the reservation.
 

As the Navajo government struggled to control the spread of the outbreak, it established curfews and stay-at-home orders that no doubt saved lives, but made it more difficult for families to travel to any of the reservation's 13 grocery stores. Mutual aid groups obtained essential worker passes to distribute food after curfew, but organizers still faced resistance from the government. They were harassed on many occasions by Navajo police pulling them over and telling them that their authorization letters were not valid.
 

Commenting on the impacts of the pandemic and rapid growth of mutual aid groups across the country, Benallie noted, "Every time capitalism fails, we land on socialism, we land on anarchism, to take care of us. I hope it makes people question who is there for them. Was it the $1,200 stimulus check or six months of unemployment? Or was it the good people of the earth who were organizing resources and material needs to make sure that you don't go to sleep hungry or that your children don't go to sleep hungry?" he said. "Capitalism fosters this unhealthy, highly individualist view of oneself. People began to forget their responsibilities to each other, to the land, and began to only worry about how much they can benefit from the imbalance from broken kinship."
 

As organizers contemplate strategies to take care of their communities in the absence of government support, Benallie urges them to remember their relationships to one another and to the planet. "We can't do this alone. We need all of the good people of the earth to come together."

Appropriate Destruction

From a shamanic perspective, all creation is based on some form of destruction. In order to create something new, something old first must be destroyed. The old form is taken apart and from its energetic source, something new arises. Nature offers the best examples of this constant destruction in the form of seasonal changes. As each season gives way to the next, something is destroyed in the process. Fall kills off the green leaves and lays the landscape bare. Winter kills off the insects and weakest animals. Spring destroys the snowpack and brings floods. Summer bakes the land, drying up the streams and plants. Everywhere in nature are examples of great destruction that reform the land, creating a new canvas for change. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, erupting volcanoes, and withering droughts destroy the landscape as it was, clearing the way for new life, new forms, new possibilities.
 

Shamans acknowledge the awesome power of transformation that comes with destruction and seek to harness that power. One powerful universal shamanic motif of appropriate destruction is the dismemberment of the apprentice during the initiation as a shaman. The individual dies a symbolic death and is then restored and brought back to life. Completing this restorative rite is precisely the task of the shaman. As anthropologist Joan Halifax explains in her book Shamanic Voices, "The shaman is a healed healer who has retrieved the broken pieces of his or her body and psyche and, through a personal rite of transformation, has integrated many planes of life experience: the body and the spirit, the ordinary and non-ordinary, the individual and the community, nature and supernature, the mythic and the historical, the past, the present and the future."
 

The viewpoint emerging from the shamanic community suggests the times we live in have a theme of planetary and cosmological initiation. Shamanic initiation is most often precipitated by physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual events that force the ego into submission. Who we believe ourselves to be is not who we truly are. No matter how many years one has been developing their consciousness, no one is exempt from this shamanic death-and-rebirth. This is a shamanic initiation on the grandest cosmological scale.
 

The times we find ourselves in are like a great river in flood. We can try to hold on to the shore to save ourselves from being swept along with the current. But this is a futile effort, for nothing can resist the great tide of change that is sweeping through and forever altering life as we have known it for millennia. Instead, we are being challenged to let go and go with the flow. We are being given the opportunity to surrender to the current of change so that new dreams and visions can emerge.
 

The cure for dismemberment is appropriate destruction. An appropriate destruction measure for anyone would be to get rid of anything that does not contribute to personal growth and learning. This would include the elimination of unnecessary possessions, ideas, habits and limiting beliefs that no longer serve you. Situations, careers or relationships that no longer resonate with you will eventually fall away from your life. When you clear out the old, you make way for the new.

Pre-Columbian Council Circle Discovered in Kansas

Archaeologists using new drone-sensing technology have found evidence of an enormous, horseshoe-shaped trench hidden beneath a Kansas ranch. The rounded earthwork, which may be part of the largest pre-Hispanic settlement north of Mexico, appears to be what's known as a council circle. To date, researchers have identified five such structures across 22 sites in the area. Ancestors of the modern Wichita and Affiliated Tribes lived in what is now southeastern Kansas between about 900 and 1650 A.D. They lived in grass-roofed pit houses; hunted bison; and farmed crops like squash, beans and corn.
 

Over time, erosion filled the newly discovered earthwork with topsoil, concealing it from view. But modern sensors can detect subtle differences in temperature and foliage between the filled trench and the earth around it. The researchers located the ditch through a combination of drone surveying and LiDAR, infrared and thermal imaging.
 

Relic hunters who looted the region in the 1800s gave council circles their name, but the earthworks' actual purpose remains unclear. Researchers have previously posited that the structures served as the site of ritual ceremonies, housed community elites or offered protection from invaders. Archaeologists now suggest that sites including the just-detailed trench were part of Etzanoa, a population center dubbed the "Great Settlement" by Spanish conquistadors.
 

Spanish colonizers first encountered Etzanoa in the 1590s, when an unauthorized group traveled north in search of Quivira, a mythical city of gold. Though the expedition ended violently, one survivor managed to return and inform the Spanish of what he'd seen. In 1601, conquistador Juan de Onate marched to the settlement, captured a resident and tortured him until he revealed the city's name.
 

Archaeologists first excavated the site of the newly discovered council circle more than 60 years ago. But by 1967, they felt that they had discovered all of the mounds and earthworks located along Walnut River. Thanks to new technology, contemporary researchers have proven these predecessors wrong. Led by Dartmouth anthropologist Jesse Casana, the study's authors used nighttime thermal imaging to measure how daytime heat dissipated from the soil. The ancient ditch, which measures roughly 165 feet in diameter and 6.5 feet thick, is filled with looser soil than the tightly packed prairie around it; as a result, it holds more moisture and radiates less heat at night.
 

Casana and his colleagues identified the ditch as a cooler, darker horseshoe shape in a warm landscape. They then followed up during the day with photography and infrared imaging. The team also reviewed previous aerial and satellite images, spotting the circular formation in photos taken in June 2015 and July 2017. Researchers plan to continue exploring the site with remote-sensing techniques, which will hopefully enable them to develop precise targets for future excavations.
 

This article first appeared in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian Magazine