Hunga Dunga: Aho Mitakuye Oyasin

“If you really want to understand peace and love, read this book!  Admittedly hilarious, sexy, and outrageous, Hunga Dunga is a “how-to” book for getting us back to the garden.  And we have to get ourselves back to the garden! – Human Rights Commission, City and County of San Francisco, Larry Brinkin, Senior Manager.

An excerpt from Hunga Dunga, Confessions of an Unapologetic Hippie:

The Barter Fair, Tonasket, Washington, October, 1975

Donald and Lois persuaded me to trade my nice down sleeping bag for an hour with a Native American shaman. I didn’t mind. We had lots of extra sleeping bags back at The Dome.

I entered a small wickiup. The dark-skinned man inside was dressed in beaded buckskin. He wore a feathered headdress and sported a small silver ring pierced through his nose.

He sat cross-legged in front of a large fire pit of glowing coals. The coals surrounded big rocks piled in the center. He looked up at me and offered a seat on the narrow hand-woven carpet opposite him. At his knees lay little piles of sacred herbs. Willow bark, sage, sweetgrass, tobacco, and shavings of cedar were the few I could identify.

He studied me for a long time. A slight look of arrogance settled into a trance-like stare. Without looking, he picked up some tobacco and shavings of cedar. He threw them on the coals. They smoked and filled the hut with an aromatic veil. Then he sprinkled some sage and a fungus-looking thing on top. The aroma was pungent, but transporting.

“You have a dilemma,” he said. “Why do you carry this burden? It is not necessary.”

“Help me, please,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t trust my own mind.”

“Dis-ease, illness of the mind or body, is only a dis-ease, or illness of the spirit,” he said. “When the spirit is out of balance, the mind is thrown into the sky of confusion, where clouds crest and break, churn and boil. No light is to be found.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

“The black void of nothing and the brilliant void of everything are the same void. They are neither, they are both, and they are one. One cannot exist without the other. But our custom is to teach our children from an early age to choose only the light, though they know the dark exists.”

He stood up, walked behind me and closed the flap to the wickiup. He put some charred wood into the fire pit. Soon they were flaming and joining the coals beneath in an orgy of heat. The rocks in the middle almost glowed.

“Take off your clothes,” he said casually.

As I started to remove my jacket, shirt, and undershirt, he fanned the flames and began a chant. The air around me was getting warmer. He removed his headdress and set it aside. His cheekbones looked more prominent. He was a good-looking man. Deep eyes. Hypnotic eyes.

He removed his buckskin shirt. His skin looked smooth and soft except for a few battle scars. Then he removed his moccasins and took off his pants, I did the same, revealing the longjohns I’d been hiking in and hadn’t taken off since I was in the mountains.

Now he wore only a loincloth, which disappeared with a wave of his hand. I pulled the waistband of my longjohns down past my knees and then reached down and pulled them off my feet. I put everything in a pile near the edge. I resumed my cross-legged position opposite him. He kneeled, his legs under him, his cock relaxed between them. Then he leaned over the rocks and closed his eyes so his cheeks could gauge their temperature. When he stretched, he filled his chest with air, pushing out his pecs, pulling back his shoulders, to inhale as much as he could. He remained so for a minute or more.

He forced his stomach to cave as he exhaled, bringing his shoulders in, and slowly releasing the very last molecules of his breath into the redolent air. He was a beautiful man. He opened his eyes to find mine admiring him. He smiled and resumed a slow but steady breath that sounded unmistakably like “soooooo” on the inhale, and “huuunng” on the exhale.

He brought out a mortar and put in some herbs. As he ground them with the pestle, he added a slippery, translucent gelatin from a wide-mouth jar. He spooned it in, letting it drip slowly from his fingertips into the bowl. I thought I smelled a hint of grape-seed oil, but it had the thickness of saliva. He ground all of the ingredients together while saying a prayer in what I assumed was Salish. When the mixture was a uniformly thick sludge, he placed it on an outer rock of the fire pit.

Then he grabbed a gourd painted with strange symbols and poured a small stream of water slowly over the inner rocks. The water exploded into clouds of steam. He chanted something with increasing gusto, trying to coax spirits from the mist. He stoked the coals and pushed them against the rocks.

He poured another stream of water and once again, clouds of steam filled the little shelter. I was starting to sweat a lot. I hoped I didn’t smell too bad. I could barely make out the shadow of him as he moved around the fire pit. He grabbed my hips from behind and pulled me sideways on the little carpet until his knees pressed against my ass. He sat on his haunches and began to smear the ooze all over my back, continually calling upon the spirits to guide him, to become a medium for me.

He lay me down and stretched out my arms and legs. He spread the stuff all over me, even my cock and balls, my armpits, the bottoms of my feet. He gave me a full body massage in the process, even rolling me over on my stomach so he could do my back. It felt wonderful. It was better than the massage I’d had in our hotel room in New Delhi, except this time, I wasn’t aroused, I was completely relaxed.

He rolled me over once more on my back. The last part of my body he worked on was my head. He closed my eyelids and smeared his creamy potion on my face, neck, and ears. Then he kneeled beside me and ran his hands slowly down my body, not touching it, but an inch or two above it. He ran his hands forth and back, chanting, calling the toxic spirits out. In the middle of his chant, he whispered in English, “You are merely energy thought into form. To energy you shall one day return.” Then he began his chant again.

Whatever it was, the oozy stuff covering my entire body felt warm and getting warmer with each pass of his hands. The gritty particles of herbs seemed to absorb the negative spirits. I lost track of where I was. I just fell into the warmth of his ointment; the hypnosis of his chant.

I don’t know how long he chanted over me, but I came to when he reached under my shoulders and sat me upright again, facing the fire. He returned to his spot, rolled the inner rocks over, and scattered them among the remaining hot coals. He poured a third stream of water over the whole fire. The steam was intense. The sludge of herbs was washed off my body by the sweat pouring from my skin, the sweat from my skin, washed off by the condensing steam.

When the steam had cleared enough for his face to come into view, he said, “Remember. The dark and the light are the same. The positive and the negative are the same. You may choose whichever one you want, but never forget the other exists. Let go the reins! Ride my horse Ayauaska. Hold your hands high and let him fly you into the light.”

He closed his eyes. I dressed quietly and undid the flap to what I now realized was a sweat lodge. He stopped me before I left.

“One last thing, my friend… to help you stay in the light.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Walk like we do through the woods… toe to heel.”

I smiled at him as I left. Toe to heel.

Note from the author: Throughout this encounter so many years ago, the chant of the shaman was “Aho Mitakuye Oyasin” (pronounced Ah-oh Mee-tah-koo-yay O-yah-seen.) It is in the Lakota Sioux language and shorthand for a prayer used all over the Native American world. It literally means “all my relations,” or “behold, we are all related.” It is a prayer of oneness and harmony with all forms of life: other people, animals, birds, insects, trees and plants, and even rocks, rivers, mountains, valleys, the earth, and the universe. Everything is alive!

“To Native Americans, the rape of the land is felt as if it is the rape of one’s own mother. Native Americans believe everything is not only alive, but composed of the same basic stuff, the cosmic energy of the universe (very close to what modern science is concluding)  which we can acknowledge but never, being mere ‘two-leggeds’ ever really understand.  Hence, the ‘Great Mystery.’ What we can do is walk the right road, as in Buddhism, and cooperate with nature, because, well because — aho mitakuye oyasin!”

My many thank to A. J. Weiss, a member of the Naraya Cultural Preservation Council for the past decade for his insight and education.

The full prayer, Aho Mitakuye Oyasin:

All my relations, I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer….

To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.

To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.

To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.

To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.

To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.

To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.

You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny.

One is not more important than the other. One nation is evolving from the other and yet each is dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.

Thank you for this Life.

“Aho Mitakuye Oyasin” my brothers and sisters, Phil.

To contact Phil or find out more: check out his website and blog For a copy of HUNGA DUNGA
Phil Polizatto – Worldwide Hippies Bureau Chief – West Coast USA, is a graduate of The School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was a feature writer for the overseas division of UPI, a copywriter for CBS, and an award-winning corporate film producer. Mr. Polizatto is a published poet and a regular contributor to Worldwide Hippies as well as a variety of other arts and literary journals. Hunga Dunga is his first published novel. He resides in the Pacific Northwest.