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Dec 9-11, 2005
Mayan myths and practices have much to teach us today. If we listen carefully, we may find not only clues to the past, but also signs of a possible, and different, future.”
In the mountains and valleys, forests and meadows, rocks and springs of the Mayan world, myriad spiritual beings live quietly and invisibly until someone recognizes them. Sometimes they try to catch our eye, looking at us through the holes in a dancer’s mask or the glass eyes in the face of a saint. In dreams they show themselves directly, but only fleetingly. By doing a divination, we can ask them questions, and they may answer.
In this workshop, Barbara will focus on Mayan shamanic dreaming and healing. Dennis will share his own very beautiful photographs plus footage from the upcoming PBS series Breaking the Maya Code, which also features Barbara. We will learn Mayan knowledge of bodily energy and the way it is connected to environmental and cosmic energy.
The body will be monitored and mapped so guests can learn to recognize “blood lightning” (called koyopam in K’iche’ Mayan) within their bodies. Then we’ll learn how to enhance it and connect it with the cosmic energy residing within “sheet lightning” (called koyopa in Mayan). This ancient tradition, embodied within a 260-day human gestation calendar, insists that mind exists simultaneously inside and outside the body and that the awakened body is the primary organ of knowledge, intuition, and wisdom. We are beings of energy, moved by others’ energy, the earth, and the cosmos.
Dennis Tedlock has done all his field work for three decades with his wife Barbara, including visits with the Zuni and in Nigeria, Brazil, and Mongolia. Most of their work has been among the Mayan peoples of Guatemala and Belize, where they underwent formal training and initiation as ajq’ij or “daykeepers,” learning ancient methods of divination and dream interpretation. Dr. Tedlock has taught at Iowa State, Berkeley, Brooklyn College, Yale, BU, and for 18 years at SUNY Buffalo, where he helped form the nation’s first degree program in poetics. For 11 years he co-edited and co-published Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics, the “first magazine of the world’s tribal poetry.” He has written Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya, and Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice. He translated Popol Vuh and edited two others.
Barbara Tedlock is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Buffalo. She has researched, lectured, and given workshops about Mayan shamanism to both scholars and the general public in Canada, England, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Russia, Mongolia, China, Nigeria, Kenya, Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Brazil. She wrote The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and four other books.
“Mayans live in a part of the continent where most people are Mayans today, speaking Mayan languages and eating Mayan food. Some of what we know about the Mayan world comes straight from our own memories of being with Mayan people. Some comes from inscriptions on Mayan monuments, which have been deciphered; some comes from Mayan hiero-glyphic books written more than five centuries ago, including the sacred Popol Vuh, Our deepest source is Mayan divination and dream interpretation, in which we have been trained and initiated by K’iche’ Maya priest-shamans.”
— Dennis and Barbara Tedlock