A Little Bit of Shamanism: An Introduction to Shamanic Journeying - Sandra Kynes 2019

Beyond The Basics

WITH THIS BOOK, I HAVE AIMED TO PROVIDE A framework for bringing Shamanism into your life. It gives you the basic information you need to go on your first journeys and establish contact with your helping spirits. As your practice develops, your journeys can encompass very specific goals. You can journey to your helping spirits to ask for guidance and advice in any area of your life, such as personal decisions, questions about career choices, and even guidance on relationships. You can also ask your helping spirits to provide you with powerful personal symbols to use in your daily life to bring you protection, inspiration, motivation, or any type of energy you are looking to attract. Just remember to always take the time to honor and thank them, and to occasionally journey just to visit and spend time with them. Our relationships with our helping spirits must be reciprocal, and we should always remember our responsibility to give back, just as we would with any interpersonal relationship in the incarnate plane.

The information provided here is just the beginning of where Shamanism can take you. Journeying is a crucial shamanic ceremonial practice, but it is far from the only one. If practitioners pursue the role of serving their communities, they will begin to take on other responsibilities, such as healing ceremonies, rites of passage, and end-of-life care. If you choose to pursue a path as a healer, remember that you must never perform work on others without their permission, even if you believe they would benefit from it. If you want to send healing to a person who is unable to consent, you can journey to their helping spirits and let them be the intermediary. I also strongly recommend developing a steady, regular practice and having established, active relationships with your helping spirits before engaging in this type of work. That said, here is an overview of some of these ceremonies, so you can begin to understand the depths that shamanic work can achieve.

One type of healing ceremony is soul retrieval, a powerful method for healing the deficits caused by what shamanic traditions refer to as soul loss. Soul retrievals are the shamanic approach to resolving soul loss and its associated symptoms. In Shamanism, we believe that people lose pieces of their soul when they experience trauma. This can be emotional or psychological trauma, such as heartbreak or abuse, or physical trauma, such as a serious injury or violence. Soul loss can even occur in moments of extreme fright, such as in a near-miss car accident. Many of us can probably remember being a passenger in a vehicle where the driver slammed on the brakes, narrowly avoiding an accident. When this happens we usually experience a harsh jolt, which produces a feeling that can be described as if we are leaving our bodies. Through a shamanic lens, this is actually what is happening. In that moment of shock, your soul momentarily leaves your physical body. When your soul snaps back, a fragment can be lost in the process.

Any experience of pain or trauma is a situation that may result in soul loss. While this might sound alarming, it is actually a very important coping mechanism. Soul loss allows us to become somewhat desensitized in order to withstand the experience. In cases of extreme trauma, this can be the only way someone manages to survive. In the field of psychology, this process is called dissociation. Dissociation can be described as a sense of detachment from one’s life to varying degrees. People suffering from dissociation often describe feeling as if they are spectators rather than participants in their own lives. This is a result of soul loss. Once our soul pieces become lost they do not return on their own, and we continue to move through life slightly incomplete until this is resolved. Psychology addresses dissociation through psychotherapy. In Shamanism, we heal soul loss through the process of soul retrieval. These two approaches are not at odds, and in fact, there is great value in using them in tandem.

Through soul retrieval ceremonies, we can start to gather these soul pieces and bring them back to ourselves. Soul retrievals are usually performed by an experienced healer rather than something we do for ourselves. However, this is not an absolute rule. Once you have developed a regular journeying practice and have established a relationship with your helping spirits, you can perform soul retrievals for yourself. That said, the soul retrieval process is not one to be undertaken lightly. The retrieval itself is only the first step of the process. Once our soul pieces return, there is a necessary and important process of integration. There is generally an adjustment period after receiving a soul retrieval. We might be confronted with feelings we have been avoiding and possibly start experiencing a new depth of emotions. For this reason, I recommend having the support of an experienced healer for your first soul retrieval.

Earlier in this book, I discussed Shamanism as a system of direct revelation, where all participants perform their own journeys and communicate directly with their own helping spirits. As you progress along this path, you will be tapping into ancient wisdom, even if you do not realize it in the moment. The more you work with your helping spirits, the more you will understand the extent of the knowledge they can share with you.

I often have newcomers with no prior journey experience in drum circles I host. On one particular occasion, there was a woman who happened to come across the event online. She came on a whim, drawn in by curiosity. We started the ceremony by greeting the cardinal directions and singing our soul songs, and then I guided the group on a journey to Lower World. Afterward, we sat in circle and shared our stories as part of the integration process. When it was her turn, she shared that not only had she met her power animal, but that he told her she had lost a piece of her soul. He said he was taking care of it until she was ready to get it back. This is a great example of the power and effectiveness of journeying. This woman had no prior knowledge of Shamanism and yet she learned about soul loss directly from her helping spirits.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, shamans also serve their communities, sometimes through end-of-life care. This involves tending to those who are at the end of their earthly lives and helping them transition smoothly to the spirit realm. This type of shamanic work is referred to as psychopomp. This word is derived from Greek and means “guide of souls.” The original meaning of psychopomp referred to mythological entities who helped newly deceased souls cross over to the other side. In the context of Shamanism, psychopomp refers to the ceremonial work of helping the dying cross over successfully. It also encompasses helping the souls that did not cross over completely after their bodies died. Not every soul crosses over successfully, remaining stuck in Middle World for a variety of reasons. They may have passed away with unresolved issues, died in a violent accident, or perhaps they do not even realize they are no longer alive. Through journeying, the shaman will track unresolved souls and help them complete their passage so they can reunite with the source.

Learning how to perform soul retrievals and psychopomp ceremonies is beyond the scope of this book, but it is a concept you can begin exploring if you hope to become a healer. In a previous chapter, we discussed the importance of managing our egos in shamanic work. This becomes especially important when acting as a healer for others. Healers act as instruments or vessels for messages from helping spirits in a process known as becoming a hollow bone. Whenever we are gathering information from the helping spirits, especially on the behalf of others, we should aim to act as a conduit apart from our own minds and egos. Furthermore, we must learn how to share these messages without viewing them through the lens of our own histories and emotional baggage. If we allow our own biases to impact how we deliver the messages of Spirit, we are interfering with the medicine that is trying to come through.

Becoming a hollow bone is an active and ongoing learning process. We all carry traumas and biases that impact both our actions and our perceptions. This is not inherently negative, but it is important to develop an understanding of where our biases lie. Here we can see another parallel to the field of psychology. Psychotherapists in training are usually encouraged to seek therapy for themselves, so they can identify their own baggage before providing therapy services to others. If you want to perform healing work, you must heal yourself first and foremost. As we explored in our discussion of the Wounded Healer archetype, our wounds can act as initiatory experiences. They force us to grow and expand. However, we must also have an understanding of how these wounds have shaped us, so that they do not interfere in our work of healing others.

Japanese Reiki, which we also discussed earlier in this book as a form of shamanic healing, is an example of becoming a hollow bone to perform healing ceremonies. When we provide energy healing without proper guidance, we are usually giving of our own ki and harming ourselves in the process. Through Reiki training, we learn how to become conduits for universal ki so we can channel it in an intentional manner to heal others. Rather than using our own ki, we become conduits for universal Ki, acting as the hollow bone. This is an important aspect of spiritual training, even if you do not go on to become a healer. By learning to set aside your ego, you will be better able to accept the lessons provided by your helping spirits.

Now that you have a comprehensive foundation for starting on your shamanic path, I encourage you to get as much firsthand experience as possible. Your best teachers are your helping spirits. I often meet students who spend months, if not years, reading books and studying but finding themselves afraid to put any of it into practice. You will learn much more through direct revelation than from any book or workshop. If you only take one lesson away from this book, let it be that there is no incorrect way to connect with the spirit realm. Shamanism is a collection of direct experiences, and the only way to develop your own practice is by having these experiences.