ShamansBlog

For much of my life if someone accused me of working without thinking then I would take this as a very bad sign indeed. After all, isn’t a good worker one who thinks about what they are doing? The rational mind is so much a part of our culture that to say that “he’s not thinking when he works” is only ever an insult.

However, as a Shaman that is exactly what I do. I work without thinking. This is so much so that over the years I have trained myself to separate out my thinking mind from my spontaneous non-thinking self so the one cannot influence the other. This shows that you can work consciously without thinking with the rational mind.

And Shaman are not alone in this way of working. There is a whole range of people in our society – healers, therapists, artists and others – who rely on not thinking to achieve in their work. However, as a society at large we are slow to acknowledge these people let alone honour them. There is no place for them in our school system. No place really in our tertiary education and vocational training systems.

For example, an acupuncturist who intuitively knows how to use her needles to best effect may not be acknowledged, or even allowed to practice, without first passing written tests or exams. The recognition of the intellectual will allow the therapist to practice using the intuitive. Will the therapist’s intuitive abilities be openly acknowledged (or understood) by the clients? By other practitioners? Possibly not and, if so, then most likely not in a formal way.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying we should do away with qualifications or that there should not be standards for practitioners to meet. Instead I am asking for balance. For acknowledgement of the intuitive arts and an appreciation for their role in our society. To value these arts as we do intellectual and physical qualifications. Surely a qualified and intuitive therapist might be better than one who has simply aced the exams? And how do we know if someone has real intuitive capacity unless, as a community, we acknowledge that capacity?

So, here’s to working without thinking.

This question is very dear to my heart – what is the role or purpose of the shaman in the 21st century in modern western society? Surely we are beyond Shamanism and it is a thing of the past; of less developed peoples and societies. Surely shaman have been surpassed by modern doctors, psychiatrists, scientists, psychologists and the like?

In many ways these statements are true. The ‘traditional’ healers of our society are now the doctors and the others and not the shaman. The role of the shaman has lost its place in society in general to these modern day healers. However, so many of us are aware that these medical and mental health professionals are limited by being fixed in the world of the material and the physical. This appears at first to be logical as it is the material and physical that are acknowledged and revered in our society. But for many of us this is somehow unsatisfying. This is because for many of us our own experience of life tells us that there is more than the material and the physical, something deeper and more enduring.

It is a constant revelation to me how many people experience spirit, or something beyond the material world, at some time in their lives and, in many cases, regularly. These are people, perhaps you included, from all walks of life and from all parts of society. Often these experiences are out of context. They might happen to you in a family where such things are not acknowledged. Or you might be in a relationship where can’t tell your partner, or talk about it with them, because you know they would think you weird, or worse. The same with your work colleagues, perhaps even your friends.

This is where the role of the shaman has its place in our modern world. Seeking out a shaman or looking for other spiritual connection is not searching for the past. It is, in fact, a search for that special thing that is missing in so many of our lives – being in the moment. For this is the only place that spirit resides.

A shaman, like so many other practitioners and healers who work with spirit, provides us with a link to this important dimension in our lives. Working with a shaman we have an opportunity to be seen and experienced as a spiritual being, made up of more than our emotional and mental reactions to our day to day life. And without acknowledging this spiritual aspect of ourselves we are incomplete as human beings. This is why so many of us are drawn to search for their spiritual identity, even though such a thing is not acknowledged, and often denied outright or ridiculed, in our society. However, as we find out when we embark on this journey, we are not alone in our search.

Shamanic Healing, as I practice it, is a form of energy healing. This follows naturally from the shamanic perspective that everything is, ultimately, energy (see ‘The Shamanic Perspective’ ). Like other forms of energy healing, the healer, in this case the shaman, is a mediator between the world of spirit and the physical material world. As a shaman I am a vessel that is filled with energy patterns from spirit and these energy patterns then flow out of me to benefit the client, manifesting as movement, voice, chant, drumming, sound etc.

The energy patterns are determined by spirit as having healing qualities for the client. And so to understand how shamanic healing works we have to make some attempt to understand how spirit might perceive us. This is a very odd concept at first but as we explore it I think you will find that it is more familiar than you first thought.

Clients sometimes come with specific physical ailments, this might be a diagnosed illness or they might be aware that they lack energy, or are unhappy, or, for example, that they have a particular problem with work, or with relationships, or perhaps family. Naturally the client is focused on the immediate manifestation of this unwellness, whatever it might be. This is to be expected. However this unwellness is itself a manifestation of an underlying energy pattern carried in the client’s energy field and it is this energy pattern that is the focus of spirit. This energy level is the level at which spirit operates, and so it is therefore the level that is the focus of shamanic healing. This level goes beyond the stories of what is happening in our lives and concerns the condition of our self that is creating our life and those stories.

From this perspective it can be seen that the pattern of shamanic healing is the same as the pattern of ripples on a pond. If the centre of the ripples is the healing that occurs with the intervention and assistance of spirit, the ripples are the effect of the healing through the rest of our being. The change that occurs during the healing is at the centre of our being and is then manifested through our mental, emotional and physical bodies. Our thoughts and emotions will change, how we act in the world, and how others act towards us, will also change. Ultimately the healing can be so profound that our life changes in substantial and positive ways. This is the process that takes place through shamanic healing.

To achieve this healing spirit needs to be able to work down through the levels of our being. I find that new clients have different understandings of their spiritual selves and arrive with, naturally, different degrees of openness to the shamanic healing process. Accordingly it is the case that over a series of healing sessions the healing process begins to operate at deeper and deeper levels, bringing about more permanent and profound healing over time.

Healing spirits will work through me to the limit of the client’s will in the moment. This is not the same as the client’s apparent willingness to participate in the process. A client may feel that they are very open and willing, and may have genuine and honest intentions in this regard. However this can often be at the level of the mind and the emotions with the deeper soul reality being that the client is in fact, more cautious than they may outwardly seem. This is only proper as we are right to exercise caution when opening ourselves at a deep level, and so, as trust builds between the shaman and the client, and between spirit and the client, the healing process can expand and deepen.

This illustrates two aspects of the shamanic healing process. The first aspect  is that the healing that occurs is at the very centre of our being, at the fundamental energy level of our soul self. The second aspect is that this centre itself has layers and that healing will occur down through those layers as the client deepens their engagement with the healing process. This will usually occur over time.

It seems appropriate for my first post to talk about the basis of my work as a shaman – the shamanic perspective.

The starting point is the understanding that everything is energy. And I mean everything – every person, every idea, every rock, every weather pattern, every … (well, you get the idea). This is a broad and unscientific definition of energy I am using here. An equivalent word might be ‘vibration’ as this is how I see the world – as being made up of an infinite number of vibrating energy patterns of different frequencies.

This is not how we normally see the physical world. On a day to day level we perceive physical matter as being solid and definite and this seems to work just fine. However we should not make the mistake of believing that this useful and practical appearance of reality as mainly physical and tangible is in fact the true nature of reality. It is far from it. 

The next part of the shamanic perspective is that everything is metaphor. As we know, a metaphor is an idea or concept that is used to stand for another idea or concept. Most of us finish with metaphors when we are done with High School poetry. But metaphors are not done with us.

This perspective that everything is a metaphor is necessary because fundamentally the nature of ultimate reality is beyond the limitations and capabilities of the thinking mind. Every aspect of reality is a manifestation of the One, of the Great Spirit, of Spirit, of the Divine or, if you like, of God. As we cannot conceive of the One, our minds must settle for the manifestations of the One that make up our reality. This comprises everything we think, see, feel, smell, touch, taste or hear. These things are real in a day to day sense, but they have no permanent reality and only appear to us so that we may engage our thinking mind.

When we work from a shamanic perspective we bypass the thinking mind to access spirit and we then use our mind to manifest the guidance we have received. When I work as a shaman I may see a vision of a horse. I will watch the horse and it might start to run; it might be a particular colour; it might have a certain feeling or emotion associated with it and so on. I watch and feel these things and work with them, singing their song, moving to their dance or drumming their beat on my drum. All these visions are, however, simply metaphors for the underlying energy patterns that are being used and transmitted through me in the healing process for the client. So what might appear to me as a horse might appear to another shaman as a colour, or a waterfall, or a breeze.

Equally – and this is more difficult to understand - a ‘real’ horse that we might see on a farm is also a metaphor and has no greater reality than the horse of my vision. This is the true shamanic perspective and I will return to it in future posts.