Namaste, Chi and other weird words
If you have been around yoga practitioners, or people who meditate regularly, or lately, people who are trying to greet you politely without physical contact, you may have heard the word “Namaste” and have seen the person look at you with a smile, while pressing their hands together in front of their chest, like they are praying.
The word Namaste (pronounced by some as na-MASS-stay, and by others as NAH-mus-stay) is a polite greeting that originated in India. It has been interpreted in a few different ways, but generally is said to mean this:
“the Divine within me greets and acknowledges the Divine within you.” It is normally accompanied by that praying hands gesture.
The person who does this simply is being very polite, and acknowledging that the spirit of God resides in you, and that the spirit of God residing within him or her, recognizes that fact.
Especially in this time of worry about spreading infection, this gracious greeting is catching on, because no contact with the other person is needed. I have used it myself a few times … perhaps not as often as I should have, because I sometimes got really weird looks. That’s why I am writing this column!
Now, LITERALLY, the word Namaste means “I bow to you”, but like most languages, literal translations often do not convey the real meaning. For instance, have you ever considered the simple word, “Hello”? What does it mean, anyway?
Prior to the telephone, “Hello” was not the usual greeting between Englishspeaking people. It was used on the early telephones because the connection was usually not so good, and many early callers felt the need to shout in order to be heard. So, they used an expression they might use to call across a field, to someone on the other side: “Halloo!” Over time, people generally stopped shouting it, and it became “Hello.” Now, we often use it even when the person we are greeting is only five feet away.
There are other words that we holistic health types often use, that may cause raised eyebrows or puzzled looks.
For instance, when I am working with a client on some issue, inevitably the talk comes to energy. I don’t mean the kind that powers our cars or our homes. I mean biofield energy: the invisible force that surrounds living things at all times and permeates their bodies, allowing them to live, breathe, and think.
If you have ever practiced martial arts, or knew someone who did, or maybe watched Bruce Lee movies, you probably have heard someone speak about chi, also called ki.
When I was much younger, I was a martial artist, involved primarily in karate, jujutsu, and aikijutsu. While studying those fighting arts, I began to learn about that internal energy. I experienced it firsthand as I, a fairly robust 220 pounds, was thrown all over the place by instructors that were half my weight, one of whom was a young woman.
When I studied aikijutsu, my teacher was Grandmaster Richard Behrens, and one of his axioms was, “If I teach you how to hurt someone, I also should teach you how to help them.” So, when we practiced various techniques that were attacks on the energy paths of the human body, after that he would show us how to relieve the pain of that attack. It was only practical—we were students and were constantly getting battered and bruised.
That energy that flows through us and around us is always there. Besides the Japanese word ki, the Chinese call it chi or qi (both pronounced “chee”). In India, ayurvedic practitioners call it prana. In the Polynesian islands, it is called mana.
But the idea of such biofield energy came into disrepute in the popular mind. Science in the 18th century began to ridicule such ideas, laughing at the idea of a soul or spirit in a human being. That idea—the concept that a human being, or a horse or a tree for that matter, is merely a biological machine, became the rule of the day.
The whole idea of a mechanistic view of life is now slowly falling apart. Scientists are beginning to understand that we are not just machines that need the proper fuel and maintenance to live and survive. The ideas of Traditional Chinese Medicine, of Japanese medicine, of using sound as a healing therapy, of using massage or acupuncture to stimulate the invisible energy paths in the human body to promote good health, are making inroads into conventional medicine, and with good reason: they have at least as good a track record as many modern medical treatments, and better than some.
Funny how things begin to turn around.