Pagan Prayer Beads

Hello fabulous humans, I'm Susan and I'm here today to talk to you about prayer beads and how you might use them in an Ethiopian context. So prayer beads are something you might have encountered in your life. They range from things like rosaries in a Christian context to things like Tibetan prayer beads or the mala in Eastern traditions. And what they boil down to is a marker system so that if you are saying prayers or meditations or chants or doing breath work, you can physically mark off each prayer or breath or whatever it is you're trying to practice on these beads without having to keep track mentally of, okay did I say that one six times? Am I on seven? Or are we eight? How much farther do I have to go? You can physically feel that with your eyes closed or open or however you are practicing and know that when you come to the a bead that's different to either stop, say a different prayer or whatever it is that you're doing or to engage differently with beads some other way, however you choose. So that's how you might traditionally use them in a religious context. So how does that translate to Ethiopianism? You can still use them for prayers. I will use scare quotes for prayers. I personally have developed some what I will what I'll call prayers for lack of a better word and for ease of communication with people who are familiar with those terms. It's really more about intention setting or you might think of it as an affirmation, things like that. So what I'll do is I will you know say maybe a short one for each of these smaller beads over and over again. I personally wouldn't want to get too too long with it or I'm going to get distracted regardless of the beads and then maybe when I get to a different textured bead or you know in one of a different size maybe I'll say a longer prayer or you know take a deep breath or maybe just stop because you don't have to use the whole set of beads each time you engage with it. So that's one way that you might engage with them as an Ethiopian. Some other things that I have found these useful for though is for one a fidget toy as you can see with it watching the video right now I'm playing with this a lot and having something with me it makes it kind of akin to a worry stone or just any kind of fidget toy. I have this ring here that I play with a lot too. So you can use it for that or a lot of the time and a lot of the use and joy I have gotten from these beads is using them as a comfort item. So I did not grow up in a religious context and so I find it very stressful to be in churches because you know as somebody coming from the outside especially when I was younger it felt very weird it felt very scary I didn't understand what was going on so I just have this kind of negative association and bodily reaction to being in a church and this kind of helps me calm down kind of helps me remind me of what my beliefs are and that is especially helpful when I'm in a context where I don't really agree with how things are being presented in a church particularly at weddings and funerals which is when I mostly find myself at churches for family members where one the emphasis is not on the individuals being celebrated or remembered and also a lot of the time at those kinds of events the politics of the church in question can come up and that's it can be really uncomfortable for me and I'm sure a lot of you as well. So having this with me gives me something else to focus on I can either say my prayers or just have it with me as a as a comfort item when I'm in a context like that that's uncomfortable for me and it doesn't have to be a church that you know brings you discomfort whatever it is that that you kind of want a little bit of extra of extra comfort and something to have with you like a worry stone these can be really helpful at least they have been for me. So those are some options and a last option I want to talk about for using prayer beads is as a memorization tool and this kind of is a little bit like what I talked about at the beginning with intention setting but I have set up my set of beads so that this main ring sort of represents the wheel of the year. Now I will say that this set of beads is set up in a druid context so it is useful for a particular ritual practice that I use in my druidry which is why the tail is important but for the main ring I also use this in an Ethiopian context for the wheel of the year and celebrating the four sacred pillars and the 13 principles. So I have here my air fire water earth stones with the various colors and those for me represent the solstices and equinoxes of the years of the year and also the four sacred pillars which I've assigned one to each quarter of the year and in between I have 13 stones. I have two sets of six turquoise and then a hematite in the middle point which is a stone that's particularly meaningful for me it's sort of what I use as my representation of myself. So there's 13 weeks in each quarter of the year adding up to 52 and this matches up well with the 13 principles so I can use this kind of as a marker of going through each principle if I want to and work on the memorization of the principles or just intention setting and a reminder and a meditative practice about each of the principles and the four sacred pillars. So those are some ways that you might use it this has been set up particularly in that fashion so that I can use it for that because I made this one myself. If you buy prayer beads you're likely to have a totally different you know set of patterns and numbers and groupings and things like that so it's one of the reasons I encourage you to make your own because you can set it up however you want in a way that's meaningful to you just as I have and you can incorporate whatever kind of symbology is important to you. So here I have an Awen which is a druid symbol you could put on the Ethiopian Sun Tree if that's something you want for your Ethiopian beads you could put on a Nautilus you could put on whatever is meaningful to you to have as a reminder or to incorporate into your practice. So if you wanted to do this yourself how would you go about doing that? Really all you need are beads and a cord and some beading needles. Now you have pretty much a ton of options with this you can get whatever cording you want just make sure that it is the right size for your beads. Many beads come with a standard one millimeter size hole so the cording I have here is a 0.8 millimeter cording and what I've purchased is I really like this it is here's the packaging so you can see the brand mine happens to be natural silk you can get whatever you want you can use plastic you can use hemp you can use cotton you can use whatever it is you want elastic if you want it to be something stretchy that you just put on your wrist it's up to you. I have chosen this because it was important to me not to have plastic in my prayer beads but also because this comes with a needle I use the term needle loosely this is really just a strand of wire already attached to the cording and it's just the right size and it's a good texture for making these knots that I've made in between beads. Now I have chosen to knot in between each bead so that it has a particular way of moving that I find really appealing to me you don't have to do that you could use a tiny little what are called seed beads which are the itty bitty ones kind of like these little ones here in between or you can just leave them let them touch it's it's up to you however you want to do it so all you really need is cording that is the right size for your beads and you need beads. Now I have some wooden beads here and I have some gemstones and I don't you know you can never be really sure 100% sure but I did my best to research online and find a company where I felt reasonably confident that the miners the craftspeople were being treated fairly and paid a fair wage and that the environmental impacts were going to be minimal so I am not going to stand here and judge anybody for whatever choices you want to make for your beads if you want to do plastic that's what's available to you if that's what's meaningful to you if you're not able to you know to have certain resources available to you I understand I'm not here to judge anybody but I do want to just put a plug out there for please do your research and try to make sure that you're not hurting anybody or the planet by your purchases for these because especially with gemstones there's a lot of and in today's age with crystals for example being as popular as they are there's a lot of stuff out there that is really harmful to a lot of people and to the planet now any purchases that we make obviously is going to impact somebody somewhere and impact the planet somewhere so please just be mindful of that impact when you go out and try to make and start making these choices so I did the best I could obviously I'm not perfect nobody's going to be but that's my my little spiel for trying to be as minimally impactful as you can so all you really need are those three sets of things I did want to show you if you don't have this cord with this little wire here you can get something called purling needles or beading needles they're very very skinny you can get these just at any craft store and just make sure that they're they're nice and thin and the other thing I want to mention is do check your beads like I said most beads are going to have a standard one millimeter hole but some of them do not this is my second set of prayer beads and the first set I had a lot of problems with because most of my beads have the standard hole but some of them I was trying to use did not they were pearls and they were very very very tiny holes so I had to use a very very small thread to to incorporate those so when I tried to make these knots even after I made the knot it was so small it would still slide through the bead so that's just something to be aware of as you're going about it and really just have fun with it it took me maybe a couple of afternoons of thinking about it to decide on the placement that I wanted what number sets of numbers were important to me what items I wanted on the ends Etsy is a good resource for this this is a from a you know small crafts person and it was it's a really fun process and it's a really nice way to make sure that the final product is something that's going to be meaningful to you and that you're going to use so and and doing it the process of doing it was a nice little mindful exercise so I hope that you enjoyed watching my video I hope you're inspired to make something meaningful to you that you can carry with you and use in times of comfort and in times of discomfort to to bring you joy and maybe add this to your practice is something meaningful for you and thank you very much for watching I'll see you again soon