Pantheacon: Yoga, Vodou, and Orisha
Feb. 21st, 2007 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreI'm sitting here with my cat on my lap, wanting to get my 31 pages of handwritten notes before writing this up. However, he seems so happy, I can't bear to disturb him to fetch them.
Saturday, 9 a.m., Yoga
I've been doing yoga for a little over a year. When I started, I couldn't put my right ankle on my left knee (while sitting) and keep it there without some support -- kind of hard to do the impromptu laptop stand.
While Dorie led us through a lot of the usual yoga postures, one thing missing (especially for Pantheacon) is any sort of lead-in about why one does yoga. This exact sort of thing remained my frustration throughout the convention.
It didn't really hit me at the time, though, because I have been studying it with a serious teacher for a year. In general, the Iyengar approach takes the perspective that you have energy stored in your muscles and you need to stretch (and compress) in certain ways to get that energy moving around. Iyengar yoga takes the perspective that you should approach the postures in a random order (after you start with sun salutations and before you end with savasana) so that you don't build up expectations in transitions. Some other schools prefer a predictable order. Iyengar says not to eat or drink for two hours prior to yoga because the energy diverted to digestion interferes with the intended affect. Other schools also differ.
Above all, though, Iyengar is about precision of movement and deepening a pose by holding it (frequently to the point of pain for me, and sometimes to the point of release of pain). My usual instructor says that no posture is truly done until you can comfortably smile.
I like Iyengar because of the precision: I'm less likely to get injured, and at my weight and flexibility level, that's an important factor.
The 11 a.m. panel I went to was about Vodou, specifically as practiced in Haiti, and was a summoning of the Lwa Danbala-Wedo and his wife Ayida-Wedo, which are the more benificent (and therefore less frequently dramatized in Hollywood) spirits.
I try to go into these things without expectations, but despite my efforts, I have to admit I was surprised that the ceremony started with the Our Father, a Hail Mary, and the Nicene creed (honestly, not being Christian myself, I recognized it, but couldn't tell you which variant was used). This drove home the point that, in Haitian Vodou, the traditional African roots have been subsumed into a Christian cosmology, where the lwa operate similar to saints in Catholicism except that one specifically serves a specific lwa in addition to the Christian aspects of one's faith.
Everyone who wanted to dance and participate in the summoning needed to be entirely in white (including undergarments), for white is the color of the Rada loa. Women had to be modestly dressed, including covered shoulders. Menstruating women could not participate. Women who wished to be posssessed (and again, there's this bit lacking about why that would be a Good Thing) were to wear white scarves on their head. There were approximately sixty people in the room, of which about forty particpated. I was among the sideline sitters.
I guess it's because voodoo gets such bad press, I was expecting something a lot different than it was, but except for the unanswered questions, it seemed like a fairly ordinary thing -- at least until someone fell over possessed by the snake lwa. What that means, though, I was never clear on.
So, I saw a ritual, and now I feel differently about the whole thing, but I'm still puzzled by it. Had I gone to the companion "Meet the Lwa" event on Sunday, I likely would have gotten that question answered -- but I didn't.
At 1 p.m., I went to Orisha 101. Orisha is the religion of the Yorùbá and primarily found in Nigeria and Benin. The Orisha are not deities; Orisha is a monotheistic religion, with Oldumare as the deity and the Orishas as the emissaries. That said, one serves a specific Orisha primarily. One does not get to choose which one, either, just that it'll be one of the 401 of them.
Despite the difference in my own theology from this, I found myself very drawn to the people, especially Luisah Teish (who was not the main speaker, but who had some very good points to make during the question and answer). I sat next to a woman who'd been following the Orisha for a couple of years, who seemed like a real joy.
Thalassa's panel on Tarot will get her own entry.
Saturday, 9 a.m., Yoga
I've been doing yoga for a little over a year. When I started, I couldn't put my right ankle on my left knee (while sitting) and keep it there without some support -- kind of hard to do the impromptu laptop stand.
While Dorie led us through a lot of the usual yoga postures, one thing missing (especially for Pantheacon) is any sort of lead-in about why one does yoga. This exact sort of thing remained my frustration throughout the convention.
It didn't really hit me at the time, though, because I have been studying it with a serious teacher for a year. In general, the Iyengar approach takes the perspective that you have energy stored in your muscles and you need to stretch (and compress) in certain ways to get that energy moving around. Iyengar yoga takes the perspective that you should approach the postures in a random order (after you start with sun salutations and before you end with savasana) so that you don't build up expectations in transitions. Some other schools prefer a predictable order. Iyengar says not to eat or drink for two hours prior to yoga because the energy diverted to digestion interferes with the intended affect. Other schools also differ.
Above all, though, Iyengar is about precision of movement and deepening a pose by holding it (frequently to the point of pain for me, and sometimes to the point of release of pain). My usual instructor says that no posture is truly done until you can comfortably smile.
I like Iyengar because of the precision: I'm less likely to get injured, and at my weight and flexibility level, that's an important factor.
The 11 a.m. panel I went to was about Vodou, specifically as practiced in Haiti, and was a summoning of the Lwa Danbala-Wedo and his wife Ayida-Wedo, which are the more benificent (and therefore less frequently dramatized in Hollywood) spirits.
I try to go into these things without expectations, but despite my efforts, I have to admit I was surprised that the ceremony started with the Our Father, a Hail Mary, and the Nicene creed (honestly, not being Christian myself, I recognized it, but couldn't tell you which variant was used). This drove home the point that, in Haitian Vodou, the traditional African roots have been subsumed into a Christian cosmology, where the lwa operate similar to saints in Catholicism except that one specifically serves a specific lwa in addition to the Christian aspects of one's faith.
Everyone who wanted to dance and participate in the summoning needed to be entirely in white (including undergarments), for white is the color of the Rada loa. Women had to be modestly dressed, including covered shoulders. Menstruating women could not participate. Women who wished to be posssessed (and again, there's this bit lacking about why that would be a Good Thing) were to wear white scarves on their head. There were approximately sixty people in the room, of which about forty particpated. I was among the sideline sitters.
I guess it's because voodoo gets such bad press, I was expecting something a lot different than it was, but except for the unanswered questions, it seemed like a fairly ordinary thing -- at least until someone fell over possessed by the snake lwa. What that means, though, I was never clear on.
So, I saw a ritual, and now I feel differently about the whole thing, but I'm still puzzled by it. Had I gone to the companion "Meet the Lwa" event on Sunday, I likely would have gotten that question answered -- but I didn't.
At 1 p.m., I went to Orisha 101. Orisha is the religion of the Yorùbá and primarily found in Nigeria and Benin. The Orisha are not deities; Orisha is a monotheistic religion, with Oldumare as the deity and the Orishas as the emissaries. That said, one serves a specific Orisha primarily. One does not get to choose which one, either, just that it'll be one of the 401 of them.
Despite the difference in my own theology from this, I found myself very drawn to the people, especially Luisah Teish (who was not the main speaker, but who had some very good points to make during the question and answer). I sat next to a woman who'd been following the Orisha for a couple of years, who seemed like a real joy.
Thalassa's panel on Tarot will get her own entry.