Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012

Evening
The Golden World: Sun

In the last chapter, you learned most of the important basics needed to form a strong foundation for your shamanic work. One item we left out, however: personal purification. Ordinary living can fill a person with psychic gunk, but people who work on other people’s energies and wyrd (life paths) are even more at risk. Shields help, of course, but sometimes things get through. (If you don’t have proper shields, or don’t clean or maintain them, gunk will get through.) In addition, sometimes personal problems and struggles can create a buildup of psychic garbage that creates static and interferes with spirit work. Spirit workers of all kinds should do regular purifications to keep them clean and open, just like surgeons wouldn’t walk into an operating room without cleaning themselves before and after, just in case. We actually recommend cleansing at least weekly in addition to before and after each client as a bare minimum. Psychic hygiene is just as important to a shaman or shamanic practitioner as physical hygiene is important to a medical professional. And sometimes, a client may need purification. If you touch a person energetically and get a feeling of “ick!” then the first course of action may well be a cleansing, or a series of cleansings.

However, people are all different, and what works as a cleansing for one person on one occasion will not work for every person or for the same person every time. Therefore, rather than give one exercise for cleansing, we’ve scattered a number of them throughout this book. You’ll find one below that uses the Sun for purification and one in the next chapter that uses the Moon’s energy. You’ll find one in the Blue World chapter—called Lake—that is nominally about healing (and can be adapted to a bath if you don’t live near a lake), but can be used for purification as well. A cleansing exercise in the Green World chapter—named Recels I—uses the smoke of mugwort, one in the Red World chapter involves recaning with flame, and one in the White World chapter uses ice. We recommend that you as a practitioner try all of them, so that you can better gauge which one is more suited to any given person or situation.

Exercise: Solar Purification

This exercise draws upon the Sun Meditation, except that you begin fifteen or twenty minutes before sundown. Go outside or to a window where you can track the procession of the Sun across the sky at sundown and make offerings. Then center yourself and begin to breathe, asking that Sunna cleanse you of whatever psychic gunk may have accrued on you and in you. Reach up to her with both hands. Extend your senses until you sense that a connection has been made. First, just like with the Sun Meditation, feel as though you are drinking in her light. Visualize her pouring her light into you until you are filled with it from toe to crown. Your muscles absorb it, drinking it in like a sponge gobbles up water. It flows into the spaces between your bones. It wraps itself around the cartilage. It seeps into your bones and into your marrow. This gold current flows with the blood in your veins. It overflows your crown and flows down around you, coating your skin, coating your aura, until you are thoroughly filled and cloaked with sunlight.

Once you feel yourself well and truly filled with her energy and light, and as she progresses into the west, ask her to take all that psychic buildup with her. Feel as though the golden energy that has been given to you for this purpose is slowly (in time with her passage across the sky) seeping out the soles of your feet and into the Earth, which can absorb and transmute this energy into something usable. As the light sinks from you into the soil, it gathers up the gunk, and with its momentum carries it into the Earth too, ridding you of the psychic contagion. When you are finished, thank Sunna, ground yourself, and take a cleansing bath for good measure. Then be sure to eat something.