Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Why Do We Say Shaman?
Dancing with the Ancestors: Cultivating Shamanic Experience
Dream-Connecting Practices

These magical moments that happen as we re-indigenize Western minds are unexplainable to Western people because the nomenclature and necessary categories of understanding needed for these kinds of knowing are profoundly atrophied. Access to magic is a gift in our DNA from our ancestors, and they cheer us on as we find new ways to dance with time out of time. Yet, there is a struggle, and a bit of staggering through, as we find our way to a shared language for the emergence of the shamanic experience in Western culture in this time and place. Words that don’t quite fit, or are overused, are the best we can do sometimes.

I have struggled in the past with using the word “shamanic” to define the experiences that are now regular occurrences for me after years of meditating and making art and music in nature. I did not consciously seek out shamanic experience and was very resistant to the idea when I realized that my experiences fit best into what this word generally means — and what it now fails to mean because of being so overused outside of indigenized experience community. I did not train with a shaman or seek to become a shaman. I do not consider myself a shaman or think that this book will train others to become shamans. Rather, I think that what we think of as altered states and “shamanic experience” are everyday states in many indigenous cultures that we need to relearn.

Despite my discomfort with the term “shaman,” or “shamanic,” after much reading and exploring, I think this is the best word to fit with the kinds of perceptions I seek to describe. The word is at this point very watered down, overused and distorted in Western culture, as is our relationship to magical, mysterious and complex spiritual experiences. Our distorted and lost relationship with the word reflects our discordant and lost relationship with the aspects of human life that the word represents. Yet, shamanism is the first religion of the human species, and is accessible to all people through natural senses that everyone can develop over time.

Shamanism was the religion of my indigenous, northern European ancestors. All of our ancestral roots lead back to shamanic culture at some point in the past. Within our traditional religions are vestiges of shamanism, some containing more shamanic elements than others. Our natural wonder and awe of nature is the basis of shamanic experience.

Due to the immense and painful appropriation and annihilation of indigenous cultures by Western people, as well as the other reservations previously discussed, I have tried finding and using many other words to describe these kinds of experiences. After much reflection, for lack of a better term, to help reclaim and contextualize the word and because the perceptions and practices that I’m discussing here fit the traditional elements of shamanism, I use this word now, with some reservations but also with hope and confidence that we can reorient and reframe the term through authentic practice. The perceptions and practices that make this word fit are:

· mindful, embodied Earth-connected awareness

· understanding and sensing life as a web of energetic/light connections

· working with vibrational and energy reality for healing and change

· using trance states to connect with spirit helpers and guides

· traveling in other “worlds” to seek guidance and healing

· and seeking ways of symbolic knowing, or “dream” knowing.

I now believe that shamanic experience is in our DNA and speaks to something deep and primal within us. Shamanism awakens Earth and spiritual intelligence, which are desperately needed to face the profound challenges we face on the planet at this time.

A note on “other realms”: I believe firmly, as I’ve stated before in this book, that we cannot understand the profound complexity of life or the cosmos/universe, and much of what we encounter in spirit realms, but we can relate to what exists in these realms. In my own guiding understanding of my extrasensory experience, I see the presentation of imagery, locations and beings to be a choice in the moment between myself and the being, or beings, I am connecting with for a specific purpose, intention or communication. Without a doubt, there are common experiences, types of locations and symbols/archetypes that emerge again and again, across cultures and throughout human history, for those of us who travel in these realms. For me, I see the “stories” and locations of my encounters as a container that allows my human mind and understanding to experience these profound beings, messages and information through the lens of the perceptual instrument of my human form. In other words, I don’t know that these locations exist “out there”; in fact I don’t personally think that they do — rather I think that they are created in a shared space as I meet with spirit beings. This view reminds me that we are share-dreaming even our everyday Earth reality into existence, just as I share-dream a common space with spirit helpers and guides.