TA Insights in Mayan Fire Rituals
BY PIOTR JUSIK, ROSALIND SHARPLES AND JO GRACE
Having received various teachings from Mayan people, I (Piotr) wanted to share the opportunity to learn from non-Western practitioners. I sensed that there was something important we as transactional analysts (TA) might gain from indigenous wisdom. I contacted several TA colleagues to see who might be interested, and Rosalind Sharples and Jo Grace, both from the United Kingdom, decided to join me in Guatemala to experience Mayan fire ceremonies. We hoped to explore the boundary between Western knowing and Mayan practices to enhance our understanding of the two seemingly different systems.
Piotr’s Invitation to Adventure
What are the boundaries of TA? Can our method help us to make meaning of every cultural context, and to what extent is the meaning imposed or co created? These were some of our musings as we started our immersive research on the role of ritual in the process of psychological growth.
Recent developments in eco TA (Barrow & Marshall, 2023) have highlighted our interconnected relationship to land and culture. Thus, this opportunity responded to our deep-seated respect for nature and openness to other ways of knowing. The most important piece of the endeavor for us was about changing perspectives. Could we understand TA through the lens of the Mayan Cosmovision and vice versa? What happens when we change perspectives? How can this illuminate our practice and a commitment to OKness on a global scale? How can we respond as practitioners to clients from an inclusive place and what does that mean in the context of cultural and epistemic diversity?
Strangely enough, following the pandemic, even spiritual guides started to work via Zoom, so I set up three online fire ceremonies with Anny, our spiritual guide (Ajq’ij), before departure to work with her in person in Guatemala. She is a diverse Quiché young woman, a political scientist, and a social activist, all in one, who generously and patiently educated us in the symbolism of the Mayan Cosmovision.
At the same time, we were aware of a certain level of hypocrisy in our venture: How could we talk about the human connection to Mother Earth while flying across the world? Additionally, as outsiders with economic privilege, we had the choice to come and learn alongside Mayan therapists and counselors while it would have been more difficult for them to travel to receive pricey TA training. We voiced these concerns, and Anny suggested consulting the spirits to ask for permission from Mother Earth and the respective energies (Nahuales) that govern human life. The answer was positive, although we still kept wondering about our positional authority as TA practitioners and researchers in that context.
Rosalind on the Chicken Bus
We participated in several online rituals to prepare us for our journey and then met Anny face to face at a sacred site in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. My experience of this meeting was intense and disorienting. Retrospectively, I have reflected on how the online medium felt more co creative as we mastered the limitations of language and the internet, because I did not have to fully surrender to Anny’s work. Face to face, I was challenged to exist within Anny’s world—with her contracting and logic so different from my own. We gathered around the fire drinking very sweetened ceremonial cacao (my first surrender as I do not eat sugar) and participated in activities such as undoing maize bundles as we focused on our intentions.
Online Anny had spoken in English and Spanish, adapting to our cultural needs. On her own territory, her identity seemed to become ageless, powerful, and full of mystery. She spoke in her own tongue, Quiché, which felt both absolutely appropriate and also somewhat excluding. At some point, Anny asked me to lie down and then she undid my jeans, placing what felt like burning pieces of obsidian on my exposed skin. She then lifted me up and shook me in each direction, spitting sacred liquor that she had gathered in her mouth onto me.
After we left, I had an extraordinary experience on the “chicken bus” we took to arrive at Lake Atitlan. There was no room to sit or stand, the conductor aggressively piled more and more people on as the driver hurtled around steep bends of a mountain range. I was already overheated from the fire and felt quite nauseous. To distract myself, I looked around at the other passengers. Most seemed to have gone into a daze, lying against each other with their eyes closed. Once we reached our destination, I started to shiver violently despite the warmth of the evening. It took the physical contact of my travelling companions and piles of blankets to return to a centred place.
It has taken me some time to make sense of this experience. However, when I read Karen Minikin’s (2018) article “Radical Relational Psychiatry,” something slotted into place. I believe that in the fire ceremony, I experienced myself as surrendering to the culture that held me. In that moment, I also experienced myself as intruded upon (as my jeans were undone, and I was shaken and spat at without a verbal contract for that). Consequently, I became vulnerable to the oppressive shadow of violence impacting the Maya peoples, as represented by the ambiance on the bus. Minikin talked of extractive introjection, by which the oppressors take what is good and inject their excluded bad parts into the oppressed people of the conquered nation. Within that bus I believe I experienced some of this collective pain.
Jo’s Rebirth
Living in Wales for 30 years, I have found some spiritual grounding in the Celtic traditions to support a lack of childhood spiritual and religious experience. This has felt more resonant than the ad hoc appropriation of Eastern and Indigenous practices I had undertaken in younger years. However, the Celtic traditions, which offer a similar vision and also reflect centuries of oppression and suffering, have not survived in the same way as the Mayan Cosmovision, which still has a strong vibrancy in Central America, with Ajq’ijs (spiritual guides) such as Anny holding respected roles in their communities.
“The Maya Cosmovision is a unified system, a science of life that includes cosmology, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics and systems of health and wellness. … The ancients say you should be happy and content in your body but you should also be content in your heart.” Don Audelino, Mayan Elder.
The invitation to Guatemala held tension between my excitement for the chance to experience a spiritual tradition still so vital and the discomfort around my own privilege. I was curious about how the conflicting oppressor/oppressed experiences within my own family and culture could coexist and be held in awareness.
The Ajq’ij is seen as a conduit between humans and the universal energies of the natural and spiritual world, inviting a symbiotic relationship in which they are a “Universal Parent” to the Child in humans, regulating and supporting, guiding and healing without real challenge. As a Western practitioner and client, I was not used to the level of surrender this relationship required. To be held so robustly, without compromise or contracting, created the experience of an extremely firm, clear, and confident parent, something I did not have as an internalised experience in my body. My personal experience of the face-to-face ceremony was not as physically intrusive, and I was left afterward in a very different heightened state. There was something in my personal experience of surrender that offered a release and freedom in my Child, potentially C0, definitely C1. Anny pronounced me as a “new Jo.” I felt childlike, light and blissful, receiving permissions given by this mystical Parent figure along with the spiritual entities, to “start again.”
On the crowded chicken bus I interacted and played with children, sang to the loud pop music, and found the chaos enlivening. However, when we explored the extremes of our experience, through the lens of Minikin’s work, I wondered whether the activation of this Free Child state took me into the extractive introjection process, that is, the privileged tourist extracting the richness of the ritual and ceremony and the open joy of the children through her experience of “leaving behind” a part of her traumatized Child/internal oppressor. This was an uncomfortable exploration, which continues to unfold as we account for both intersectionality, our own unique experiences, and the different experiences of oppression we all carry across many generations.
In closing
Our respective experiences were clearly different, which highlights the challenges of stepping into an intersubjective space. On the one hand, wse all have a longing for perfect parental figures, which when unexamined may tip into totalitarianism. On the other hand, if every meaning is constructed, then we need to face the fear that there is no one truth, no universal parent to guide us. However, our hearts can show us the path as we discover what “I’m OK, You’re OK” feels like somatically when embracing individuals from other cultures.
Piotr Jusik, can be reached at peter@iflowcoaching.com; Rosalind Sharples, can be reached at rosalind.sharples@icloud.com; and Jo Grace can be reached at emotionwise@hotmail.com .
