Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012
Soil
The Beginning Place: Earth
Galina: Right around the time I began to explore polytheism, a few months before I had my conversion experience (what else can I call a deity showing up?), I also began to study magic. This later came to serve me well as a shaman, but at the time I was just trying to find my way in what was a very overwhelming world. I moved from a small, relatively rural town to New York City, and suddenly every moment of every day I found myself bombarded by other people’s thoughts and emotions. It was the emotional bombardment that was the worst; walking into a store or down the street, or into a restaurant, often felt like running a gauntlet of physical blows. I didn’t know it then, but moving to the city triggered a rapid development of my strongest psychic gift: empathy. This is the ability to intimately experience the emotions of others, and untrained, it is both dangerous and painful.
I really think the Gods were watching out for me, though. I was very fortunate to find the right books, the right groups, the right teachers at this crucial point in my studies, and I really think that made all the difference. My teachers were smart enough to teach me centering, grounding, and shielding immediately. Having suddenly realized through this training that I could control my gifts rather than be at the mercy of them, I blossomed under this tutelage. I really don’t think I would have survived those early years with either sanity or emotional balance intact without having learned these very basic exercises when I did. Now when I teach, I present them first and return to them again and again as absolutely necessary fundamentals. It really doesn’t matter whether a person wishes to study magic, or become a shamanic practitioner, or learn meditation, or engage in devotional work, or develop his or her psychic sensitivities; the basic exercises are the same, and until they are mastered, it’s utter foolishness to go any further. This is the technical foundation of everything else one will ever do. Over the past decade, I and many of my students have heard of teachers and groups who either didn’t teach these things or, worse, declared that they weren’t necessary. This is utter bullshit, and I can think of nothing more damaging to the next generation of practitioners than to be without the very tools that will help them succeed.
There is more life in a tablepoon of soil than in the average major metropolitan city. Civilizations are birthed, grow, flourish, and die in hours, days, or weeks, all within the rich blackness, of the Earth’s soil. Wars are waged there; and we scurry about far above its blackness, effectively oblivious. The lesson of soil is one of humility. It reminds us that not only are we dependent on something bigger than we ourselves could ever be, but that this is a good and necessary thing.
Symbolically, soil roots us. It is a rich bed of life into which we can pour out energy and from which we draw sustenance, very literally in the form of food. If we don’t take care of our bodies (which we’ll talk about later on in this chapter), then we can’t progress to taking care of our souls or to minding our energy. A classical metaphysical maxim proclaims, “As above, so below.” The logical corollary to that is “As within, so without.” As we feed our bodies from the blessings of the soil, so too must we feed our energetic bodies. This is where grounding and centering come in.
Exercise: Grounding and Centering
Centering and grounding are immensely important exercises. We were taught to center first and then ground, but there is an argument for the opposite. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, so long as both exercises are practiced daily, preferably several times a day for the first few months of training. If working with the land spirit is your foundation, these two exercises are your metaphysical backbone. They are oxygen. They are essential.
Centering serves three purposes:
1. You are clearly delineating and defining the boundaries of you: where you begin and end and also where the outside world begins and ends.
2. Having located your physiological center, which in women tends to be at the sex chakra (roughly three inches below the navel) and in men and large-busted women at the solar plexus, you are collecting any tension or stress (which is blocked energy), jagged emotions, or excess energy in what can be felt or visualized as a glowing sphere.
3. You are ensuring that your energetic body and your physical body occupy the same shape and space. (If there is too great a disparity between the two, a certain level of dysphoria and physical illness can result.)
NOTE: Many esoteric books focus extensively on visualization. Do not worry if you cannot visualize. There are many ways of sensing energy, and seeing it is only one of them. Some people will feel energy much easier than they will ever see it. This is equally valid. Just as we all have different learning modalities, so too energy can translate differently to different people. If you can neither sense nor see, then imagine. Imagination is a powerful tool. Thought follows imagination, and energy follows thought. Then one learns to harness all of that to the will. That is one of the keys to all effective work. So see, feel, sense, know. It doesn’t matter how you’re negotiating the exercise as long as you’re making the attempt to do so consistently.
The easiest method of centering is something called the fourfold breath. To do this breathing exercise, simply inhale four counts, hold four counts, exhale four counts, hold four counts. Do this over and over for about ten minutes. This will center you. Altering the breath can have a tremendous physiological and energetic effect on the body. For that reason, this is particularly good to practice when you’re learning, because even if you can’t see or sense anything, this pattern will center you anyway. Raven, who is a singer and musician, likes to make the out-breath a single deep note.
Galina recommends practicing this several times a day. The good thing about this exercise is that you can do it while going about your daily business and no one need be the wiser. She likes to give herself a mnemonic to remind herself to practice. For instance, you might say, “Every time I see a silver car, I am going to center, ground, and check my personal shields.” That would not be too frequent, by the way. The key is consistency and regularity of practice.
In time, as you breathe, you want to feel all the breath, all the energy in your body gathering about three inches below the navel. Eventually, as you breathe, you want to feel the energy gathering in a glowing golden ball at this location. A student of Galina’s once put it this way: “Basically, centering is contemplating your navel!” She was right, too. Be sure to breathe through your diaphragm, taking deep, even breaths. Don’t rush, and don’t worry if your mind wanders. Just gently bring it back to the breath.
Centering can be very calming when under stress. If you find yourself in an emotionally stressful situation, it may help to fall into this breathing pattern. There are, of course, many ways to center, but this tends to be the easiest and most adaptable. A person’s center is based on where the center of gravity is. Some larger or large-busted women and most men center at the solar plexus or in some cases even higher. (Energetically, we do not recommend centering above the solar plexus. It’s not particularly stable.) For the best effect, try to do the breathing exercise for at least ten minutes a day.
Grounding also serves multiple important purposes:
1. It connects you to something bigger than yourself, creating energetic stability and resiliency.
2. It provides you with a lifeline through which you can draw sustaining energy, if need be.
3. Most important, it provides you with a shunt through which you can drain off excess energy.
In many respects, centering and grounding are one single exercise divided into two parts. Like yin and yang, these two elements work together to form a cohesive whole. If you’re grounded but not centered, something will be missing, and vice versa. (We’re not even sure it’s possibly to be fully grounded and not centered!)
As a student recently said to one of us, think of grounding as watering the soil. This is very apt because once you’re centered, you’re essentially “peeing” your gathered energy into the ground! This may not be a particularly elegant image, but it is effective when it comes to understanding what grounding is all about. Once the energy in your body has been collected (i.e., centered), it has to go somewhere. This is where grounding comes in. Basically, grounding is just sending all the energy, tension, and emotions that have collected in the body down into the Earth. (Science tells us that everything is energy in motion, which means tension, stress, and emotions are energy too, and energy can be worked with. You have the power to manage the energy in your body to a greater or lesser degree depending on your focus and skill.) Don’t worry if you can’t see or feel anything; start with the mental focus, and eventually your awareness of the internal flow of energy will increase.
The easiest grounding exercise to begin with is also, like centering, a breathing exercise. Inhale and feel the energy gathered in your center. Now, as you exhale, feel that energy exiting the body through the root chakra (located in the perianal area) or, if you happen to be walking, through the feet, though we find the root chakra is the more stable point. On the second exhale, feel it entering the Earth and branching out into a thick, sturdy network of roots. Continue this imagery for as long as you need to, using each ensuing exhalation to take you farther and farther into the Earth, until you feel fully grounded.
You can actually first spend time creating a single taproot that reaches all the way down into the fire at the center of the Earth. Then, once that has been mentally established, you can work on creating a network of strong, solid roots reaching out before and behind you and to either side. Galina likes to make a two-chambered taproot, so that she can send energy down one chamber and draw energy up through the other; Raven prefers to use one root system and bring the energy up and down by turns. All of this is accomplished through that combination of seeing, feeling, imagining, and knowing, over and over again, until the energetic body adapts to the habit. That is what you are doing when you learn grounding and centering; you’re developing a necessary habit of practice in which you’re teaching the energy to flow differently (and more healthily) in your body from what it might initially be doing.
A note of caution: You must, above all else, keep your grounding channel strong, clean, and in good working order. This is very, very important because if that channel becomes damaged, blocked, or corrupted, you may become ill or develop severe pain.
In time you will want to learn different ways of grounding, and you will find that many of the exercises are primarily visualization exercises. Don’t worry if you’re not good at visualizing things; that too is a skill that comes in time. Galina always had difficulty with it. You may find that the image comes through feelings instead of sight, and that’s acceptable as well. The idea is that you’re connecting yourself to something bigger than you are, and that something (the earth beneath your feet) can support and sustain you. It gives you a focal point upon which you are an axis.
The standard idea with grounding is to be a tree. Once you’ve gathered the energy at your navel, send it down through the root of your spine. This is your point of connection to primal life energy. Send all the energy down, timing it to each exhalation, into the Earth. See it streaming from your root chakra in a solid golden cord of energy. This cord goes down through the floor, through the foundations of the house and into the Earth. With each exhalation, see it branching off like roots of a tree, tying you tightly to the Earth. This is the corollary to the silver cord that some people see when engaged in astral travel. As above, so below, in all things.
These two exercises are prerequisites to shielding effectively. The only requirement to gaining excellence is practice. As Galina’s Russian teacher told her when she was in high school: repetition is the mother of learning. That holds especially true here. There’s no way around it but practice.