Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012
Forest
The Beginning Place: Earth
Raven: I am lucky to have a patch of forest right behind my house where I can go whenever I want (well, assuming it isn’t twenty below zero or pouring buckets of rain) and sit to go into trance. I know that not everyone lives in an area where forest is available, but in ancient northern Europe, the forest was traditionally the place where one went to get away from human society and all the constraints that it put on a person. Old faery tales are full of references to the dark and frightening forest, which at one time covered most of Europe, full of wolves and bears and strange spirits. It was also the place of witches, the people with strange powers who lived on the outskirts of society rather than in the communal warmth of the village. It was considered strange and nearly unthinkable for someone to eschew the patterns of the village in favor of the howling darkness of the forest . . . and it still is.
The village has become huge and complicated and even more absorbing, and the bewilderment of the people ensconced in it is still just as real as it was when our spirit-called ancestors made their way out of the circle of light and into the shadows of the wild. Yet some of us are still called, and just like the ancestors, we sometimes find that moving into the forest means building a hut there and never coming back to the village. They may come to us to ask for our help, but if we stay in the wild place too long, we may never be able to really return. That’s a warning. Shamanic work can do that to you.
On the other hand, the forest—or any wild, undisturbed place—is the best place for stepping outside of oneself through the techniques of using altered states. That’s why the forest exercise is about that practice. Once you’ve grounded and centered and learned to protect yourself, once you’ve established right attitude toward the powers you will interact with, you are finally ready to journey outside of yourself.
Galina: Going into trance is a basic skill for competent spirit work, but I caution against investing it with anything more than the respect one might have for an essential body of techniques. There’s a regrettable tendency in some circles to elevate the ability to enter a trance to remarkable proportions, and it’s at best misguided and foolish, and at worst the dangerous disregard of a dilettante. This is one of many different techniques that will be useful to you, but it’s only important for where it can take you: it’s a way of getting from point A to point B so that you can do the necessary work that you’ve been assigned to do. It is not the end point.
I actually learned how to enter a trance during my training as a priest. To lead a good ritual or meditation, it’s important to know how to enter a light trance in order to follow what’s happening to the energy of the people with whom you’re working. Going into a trance is a way of moving inward in order to move outward. It’s a method by which the spirit worker can banish all external distractions in order to better approach the work that must be done. It’s also a prerequisite to traveling the Otherworlds. Learning to enter a trance is a way of learning to make of your mind and will a vehicle of transportation: out of purely mundane consciousness, out of Midgard, into the realms of the spirit.
The ancient Norse had a practice called utiseta, which literally means “sitting out”—sitting in a wild place where one will be undisturbed and going into trance, and then going either inward to the depths of the self or outward to another world. In its more extreme form, it was referred to as “going under the cloak,” an advanced practice in which trance workers literally wrapped themselves in a cloak and stayed there for hours or days without food or water until the answer to their question came. The most famous recorded example of this occurred in 1000 CE, when the Icelandic lawspeaker Thorgeirr “went under the cloak” to determine whether Iceland should convert to Christianity. He sought inspiration and advice from the Holy Powers through this ancient technique. He stayed in a trance for a full day and night, and in the end it was decided that Iceland would officially become Christian, but that people were free to practice whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own homes. In this way, the original practices and beliefs persisted to some degree, at least long enough for some of them to be recorded by Christian writers.
Other records speak of people going out to the grave mounds of specific ancestors and spending the night under the cloak there, in order to gain discernment, knowledge, blessings, or power through communication with the dead. The commonalities that the many accounts share lie in the solitude and removal of the person from daily patterns and activities. The use of a veil or a cloak to cover oneself is yet another means of creating a separation between oneself and the mundane world, of blocking out all external stimuli.
Exercise: Utiseta
Before training in trance, we must first learn to still the mind and emotions. In many respects, trance work is an outgrowth of meditation. Breath is the best tool of meditation. As we have already learned in grounding and centering, meditation and energy work can very successfully and productively be meshed with the rhythms of the breath. A good place to begin is to spend ten or fifteen minutes (set a kitchen timer or alarm if you must) sitting comfortably and focusing on your breath. Really feel the gentle expansion of the lungs, chest cavity, and intercostals that occur as a result of inhalation and exhalation. Feel the breath entering and flowing through your body and feel the release and cleansing power of exhalation.
Once you have mastered this and have practiced doing it daily for a couple of weeks, then use the breath to completely relax. Starting at the crown of your head and slowly working all the way down to your toes, sense or imagine the breath moving into each part of your body, teasing away the tension, seeping into the muscles and bones, undoing the knots, releasing the weight of any stress the body may hold. A very useful technique is imagining and trying your best to feel as though you are actually breathing in and out through specific points of the body. For instance, if your shoulder is tight and tense, imagine that you are inhaling and exhaling through your shoulder, and allow the breath to flow into the joint. See it gathering up the tension there, and upon exhalation releasing it. Tension is the enemy of effective work. It exhausts the body; it eats up energy; it blocks the clean and clear flow of energy. Just as we must learn to still the rampaging cacophony of our thoughts and emotions in order to have good “signal clarity” (to hear the Gods or spirits effectively and clearly), so too in order to properly enter a trance, we must rid ourselves of as much tension as possible. So as you do this exercise, try to go into the various layers of your body and get into the deep tissues of muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Use the breath as a vehicle through which your conscious attention can move. This is a very good exercise to do before going to bed, but Galina would caution that it should be done sitting up, otherwise the tendency is to fall asleep almost immediately. At the end of this exercise, center and ground as described previously in this chapter.
Part of learning to practice utiseta effectively is, first, having a connection to one’s ancestors (which we discuss in the Black World chapter) and, second, removing oneself from all external distractions. That’s why there is so often the mention of going away from one’s community or even one’s household, and of covering oneself with a cloak or a veil. Thus the practitioner enters a head space that allows coping only with oneself and one’s internal distractions. Today we live in a frenetic world of noise and almost constant stimuli, to a degree that our ancestors could never have imagined. For many of us, even learning to be with ourselves in silence is a huge undertaking. That brings us to the final exercise for trance work: the silent fast.
Just as people can fast from food and water, it’s also possible to fast from noise and distraction. In many ways, given our cultural conditioning, silent fasting is more difficult than abstaining from food. After all, when we avoid food for a set period of time, we have only the protestations of our physical bodies to contend with, but when we abstain from external stimuli and noise, we must deal with ourselves and all the internal distractions the mind throws up. We are our biggest blocks to effective work, and an important part of doing shamanism is learning to overcome the roadblocks we semi-instinctually throw up.
With that in mind, set aside a weekend when you will be undisturbed. Turn off the phone. Disconnect the computer. Turn off the TV. Unplug as many appliances as you can (they provide ambient noise that most of us don’t even recognize until it’s not there anymore). Turn off the cell phones, the BlackBerrys, the iPads and iPods. Allow yourself a notebook and a pen. Eat lightly and try to prepare your meals yourself. Bathe twice a day, focusing not just on cleaning yourself physically but on removing esoteric grime as well. Pray several times a day. Meditate. Do anything you want but don’t make a sound. Don’t speak to anyone. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t distract yourself from yourself. You may use the time to tend to your ancestor or deity altars, to write in your journal, to work on crafts—anything that doesn’t involve engagement with another person or noise. You may not do anything that enables you to escape the sound of yourself. You are creating the essence of the deep forest, where the only sensations are wind through the trees and the rustling of creatures who have nothing to do with your daily life.
Repeat this every few months. This sounds deceptively simple, but in over twenty years of teaching, we’ve rarely had a student successfully complete this on the first or even the second try. With these three exercises mastered (and mastery of them can take months of daily practice), you will have a good, solid foundation for trance and journey work.