Growing up in Salt Lake City, Haley Laughter of Hozho Total Wellness uses both yoga and her ancestral traditions to access the body, mind, and spirit. Her parents met through the Mormon Placement Program in Utah. Although born into a culture of assimilation, she eventually returned to the birthplace of her parents near Gallup, New Mexico. There, she reconnected with her Navajo ancestry. This ancestral wisdom provided a rich language in connection with the land and tied together a more complete universe of relationship and healing. Can you tell me what Hózhó means? A straight path, a good path. [Haley explains this with an arching gesture, pulling pinched fingers down from the top of her head and face to the front of her body, and out.] Hózhó is a way of thinking and doing things. So it’s being in balance. It’s speaking, walking, and talking, in beauty. Walking a straight path. The “Corn Pollen Path” is what we call it. Being able to take care of yourself and take care of others. Equilibrium with everything. Balance. In Diné, or Navajo teachings, to live in a state of Hózhó requires conscious awareness of the collective and interrelated relationships between self and others. More broadly defined, it includes a more universal whole through the elements of nature, including animals and insects, the Creator or Great Mystery, the Diné holy people, Mother Earth, Father Sky. This path of beauty also includes the distinct characteristics and cycles within nature such as seasons, night, day, sun, moon, stars, and even time. @indiejessphotography Do you feel there are parallels with traditional yoga teachings and your indigenous culture and traditions? Definitely. The best way to explain that would be through the four elements. We as indigenous, Navajo people, connect things to all the elements. Meaning, our life experience and our teachings are within the body. There is a correlation with the elements within the body. Fire for instance, would be your emotions. Learning how to contain them. You could have a wildfire that destroys things or you can learn how to create a fire that actually promotes growth and would be healthy for the ‘land’, or rather for yourself. Anger would be one of them. Anger hurts too, but again there is the healthy fire that is used in order to create new life. Mother Earth represents our body. Our bodies, like Mother Earth, are sacred. A sacred place that we hold our spirit our souls in. So taking care of it is important, drinking lots of water, eating healthy foods, exercising, yoga. Also cleaning our bodies. Respecting our bodies. That is the element Mother Earth. The mind would be water. The brain is protected with water. It is also the way the electrical current goes through and processes our mind, our thoughts, our thinking, and also our vision. It’s in everything that we do — always learning something, planning for tomorrow, the next day. Keeping our minds clean to the best of our abilities. As for air, that would be our breath. I remember a medicine man once told me once that ‘our tongues are like fire, but what do our small minds know?’ He was saying that we use it in a way that can hurt people, but the way that you use your words, the way you communicate it can be used for either way. [To hinder or to help]. Really that’s the lungs – air, breadth. We use a lot of that in yoga, you know breathing techniques. It also helps with our stress and anxiety. Taking care of our lungs, not smoking, using our words to uplift people. Using our words with the intention of good. How do you approach health and wellness in your community in a way that addresses shared generational traumas, and prevalent diseases? When I first got here, to Gallup, it was very painful for me to see our relatives on the streets sleeping in the cold, and many unjustly dying. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide plague the oppressed, and leadership is slow to address the obvious. I found, even our own people are corrupt and have their own personal interests at heart. It wasn’t until my brother passed away from addiction that I decided I can be the change. So, I created Hózhó Wellness & MorningStar Behavioral Health. @indiejessphotography I am very straightforward about the importance of health. We as indigenous people struggle with alcoholism, and self-identity. We struggle with depression. We struggle with the balance between the “modern world” and the traditional world. We have cycles of abuse. When I talk to them, my community, I emphasize how sacred the body is. That every strand of hair is connected to a star. How important the breath is. I talk about the mind. How do you use it? As the wild-fire? Or the healthy fire? The changes that happen to us with yoga are an evolution. By giving my community the tools and direction, whether focusing on alleviating pain or getting deeper into a pose, it allows them to experience their body, experience their breath and hopefully somewhere in the subconscious be able to think, “Is this right for me, is this good for me? Is it not?” I plant the seed. That’s all I do. I put in rows of corn and am just watching them grow. I want to say, as far as Navajo culture, our ancestors were the original yogis. I think that’s something we need to remember. Everything they did was with the Earth. I really feel like reconnection and going back to the basics of our ancestors and experiencing life with nature is so important.
