What's truly Sacred

Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Goddess, almighty and sacred Womb - men

In Mami-Wata traditions, sacred dance activates kundalini energy. Through rhythmic movements, practitioners awaken this dormant force at the spine's base, allowing it to rise through the body's energy centers to facilitate spiritual transformation.

What is recognized today as twerking originated as sacred ritual in African spiritual traditions. These pelvic movements specifically activate the sacral and root energy centers, connected to creativity, life force, and divine feminine power.

Traditional initiation schools teach these movements as spiritual technology. Students learn to channel sexual energy upward through the body's pathways, transforming this vital force into healing power for both individual and community.

These practices represent liberation from colonial suppression of African spirituality and sexuality. By reclaiming these rituals, practitioners restore the sacred connection between sexuality and divine consciousness, healing the fragmentation between physical and spiritual experience.

Kundalini and Sexual Energy: Pathways to Spiritual Awakening

At the core of Mamiwata worship lies a sophisticated understanding of life force energy that closely parallels what Eastern traditions call kundalini—the latent spiritual power often symbolized as a coiled serpent resting at the base of the spine. The frequent depiction of Mamiwata with a serpent companion illustrates this connection, suggesting her role as an awakener and guide of this transformative energy. In both traditions, this dormant power can be activated to rise through the body's energy centers, catalyzing spiritual awakening and expanded consciousness. This understanding predates modern conceptions by thousands of years, demonstrating the profound spiritual wisdom embedded in African traditions that have long recognized the body as a vessel for divine energy.

Sexual energy represents the most potent manifestation of this life force—the creative power that generates new life physically, but which can also be channeled for spiritual creation and transformation. In Mamiwata traditions, this energy is not viewed as merely physical or reproductive, but as a sacred force that, when properly understood and directed, becomes a vehicle for divine communion and personal empowerment. Unlike Western perspectives that often separate sexuality from spirituality, Mamiwata tradition offers a holistic view that honors sexual energy as fundamentally sacred—a gift from the divine to be used not only for procreation but for healing, creativity, and spiritual evolution. Practitioners learn to perceive this energy as a tangible force that can be felt moving through the body like liquid light or electric current.

Activation

Ritual practices including drumming, dance, breath work, and meditation awaken dormant energy at the body's base

Circulation

Energy rises through the body's centers, purifying blockages and integrating aspects of consciousness

Expansion

Energy reaches higher centers, facilitating mystical experience and expanded awareness

Integration

Heightened energy is grounded back into daily life, bringing healing and transformation

Traditional practices for working with this energy include specific rhythmic movements that activate the body's energy centers, breath techniques that direct the flow of energy, and visualization practices that guide this power along prescribed pathways. Devotees learn to distinguish between merely releasing sexual energy (which provides momentary pleasure but dissipates this force) and circulating it internally to nourish spiritual development and healing. The undulating hip movements characteristic of many West African dances, for instance, aren't simply aesthetic expressions but precise techniques for awakening and directing energy through the body's core. Similarly, specific drum rhythms correspond to different energy centers, with practitioners describing tangible sensations as these vibrations "tune" the body's energetic system.

Contemporary practitioners often integrate these traditional African understandings with knowledge from other systems, including Tantric practices, Chinese internal alchemy, and modern somatic psychology. This cross-cultural integration reveals striking similarities in how diverse traditions understand the body's subtle energy anatomy, suggesting universal principles underlying these various approaches. For example, the seven major energy centers described in some Mamiwata traditions correspond closely with the chakra system of South Asian traditions, while the emphasis on energetic circulation parallels Taoist internal alchemy practices.

The awakening of kundalini energy through Mamiwata practices is often described as a profound and sometimes challenging process. As this energy moves through the body, it may encounter blocks or stagnant areas corresponding to unresolved emotional wounds, limiting beliefs, or cultural conditioning. The rising energy works to clear these obstacles, sometimes bringing buried material into consciousness to be processed and integrated. This purification aspect explains why kundalini awakening can sometimes involve temporary physical discomfort, emotional release, or psychological disorientation—all understood as signs of deep healing in progress.

Practitioners report a wide range of experiences as this energy awakens and circulates, from subtle sensations of warmth or tingling to powerful waves of bliss, spontaneous body movements, or visionary states. Some describe expanded states of consciousness where boundaries between self and universe dissolve, revealing a direct experience of universal oneness that transforms their understanding of reality. These experiences aren't seen as ends in themselves but as glimpses of expanded potential that must be grounded in daily life through ethical action, creative expression, and service to community.