The Shamanic Journey: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Shamanism - Francis Paul 2017
Acknowledgements
To all my brilliant students who have had faith in me (well, most of the time anyway!), and who, in giving me their trust, time and money, have allowed me to develop Therapeutic Shamanism and write this book. Neither Therapeutic Shamanism nor this book would exist without you. Huge gratitude to you all.
Special thanks to Sarah Garton, Paul Connery, Tracy Owens and Cherry Spencer for generously giving their time to help with editing, for suggestions and help with the content, and for encouragement and support. My deep gratitude to you all.
Thanks to Ann Lowe for help with the book-cover text, and for publicity material, and to Lyn Lowe for help with the cover design. Their website is www.whispercreative.co.uk
To Michael Kusz, for the marvellous original ’Three Ravens’ artwork on the cover. He also makes great sculptures - www.graculus.co.uk
Introduction
How this book came about.
Thank you for reading this. As a book, it has been a very long time in the making. The idea to write the book pushed itself into my consciousness many years ago. For a long time, it was just a slow-growing and tentative idea. I felt the need to tend and quietly nurture it, and take the time to see what grew and developed. As it took form, I could see that what was emerging had deep and old roots. It turned out that I had been preparing for this for decades, starting with my earliest spiritual experiences, reaching right back to my early childhood and my first awakening experiences. Then came all the spiritual paths I explored; all the theories I learned (and the ones I then tried to unlearn!); the skills I was taught, and then developed and practised; the books I read; the workshops I attended. All the dead-ends and the blind alleys; the many mistakes; the stumbling around in the dark; the breakthroughs and realisations; my personal losses and triumphs. And all the help I have had on the way, from the human world, and from the more-than-human world. These things are the roots that this book emerges from. The roots go deeper still though, way deeper and older than the few decades of my own life on Earth. As we shall explore, shamanism is truly ancient. It is many tens of thousands of years old, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years old. In modern times though, along with our assault on the animal and plant kingdoms, and on Mother Earth herself, humans have hacked shamanism down. In many places, it was hacked right back to the ground, so that nothing visible was left. It was almost lost and destroyed. However, its roots are immensely strong and deep, and recently it has started to grow back. More than anything, this book is my attempt to do what I can to help with the regrowth and emergence of the beautiful thing that is shamanism.
A practical and experiential guide.
This book is a practical, step-by-step instruction manual. In it, I aim to give you as clear an understanding of the core principles and practice of Therapeutic Shamanism as I can. I will also take you through a set of exercises to help guide you into shamanic practice. As well as being a practical guide, the book is also an
introduction to shamanic philosophy and ideas, and about a way of being and living. The book, if you let it, will take you on a journey. You will discover that shamanism is a highly practical and accessible form of spirituality. In studying it, you can learn techniques and practices that can have a direct and positive application in helping you with your life at all levels - spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. These are also techniques and practices that you can use to help those around you, both humans and non-humans. In addition, practising shamanism does not require you to follow any beliefs or take anything on faith. Rather, it is a path of direct, personal experience. You do not need to ’believe’ anything in this book, or anything anyone else tells you about shamanism. Rather, the book is a simply a set of suggestions and exercises to try out, and ideas to think about. If you follow them and find they work for you, then you will find out the truth of shamanism for yourself because you will actually, personally, experience it. Doing that can truly change your life for the better. I will not go into how at the moment, as some of the ways shamanism changes you, and some of the things you will learn and experience, sound far-fetched until you have actually experienced them. I want you to experience them for yourself, rather than take them on trust. As the great Carl Rogers, who founded counselling, once wrote:
“Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets - neither Freud nor research - neither the revelations of God nor man - can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. ” ’On Becoming a Person ’ page 23-24.
Our ancient birth-right.
Before going any further, I want to clarify how I am going to be using the word ’shamanism'. How the word is used can be an issue in some shamanic circles, and so I need to briefly address this here. There is a lot of debate, scholarly and otherwise, about what exactly shamanism is and what it is not. What is usually agreed upon is that indigenous people generally are animists. Animism is the belief
that not just humans but all things have a soul - a life-force and consciousness. This means that all things are alive and conscious (albeit conscious in a way that may be quite different to human consciousness). All things — other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as rivers or mountains, and even things like storms, thunder, and fires. In reality though, animism is not a belief so much as an experience. Shamanism is essentially the practical application of animist beliefs. Now, some people argue that not all animistic practices are shamanic. The problem is that there is no consensus as to where the dividing line is between shamanism and animism, and I have no desire in this book to enter an academic debate about this (you may, or may not, be relieved to hear!). So, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, I am using the word shamanism to mean any practical application of animism, as I want the scope of this book to be broad and inclusive. So, from now on I am generally just going to use the word ’shamanism'. If you are someone who prefers a narrower definition of the word then, there may be times that instead of saying ’shamanism', you think that I should be saying ’shamanism and other animistic practices'. If so, then I invite you to just translate it as such in your head. For in the end, they are only labels, and it is not worth letting definitions of them get in the way of the deeper issues.
Humans have practised shamanism for the vast majority of our history. It is astonishingly old as a practice. It has thrived throughout all this expanse of time without the need for any sacred book or text to refer to (indeed, without any writings of any kind), and without the need for priesthoods or hierarchies to impose ’orthodoxy’ and root out ’heresy’. It managed this impressive feat of longevity and survival because what people experience in practising shamanism is remarkably consistent. In practising shamanism, and going on what are known as shamanic ’journeys’, people experience the same kinds of things, are taught the same kind of things, and are shown the same kind of things. It is a coherent and consistent body of knowledge and practice based on people’s experiences.
As I have said, shamanism is also highly practical. It can be used for healing the body, mind, soul, and spirit. It can be used for personal and spiritual development, and for a whole host of other things. It has also helped us to live in harmony and balance with the other beings who we share this planet with. As we shall explore, probably more than ninety-nine percent of the generations of our modern human ancestors (Homo sapiens) lived as hunter-gatherers. As hunter-gatherers, our ancestors, your ancestors, would have lived and breathed shamanism. In terms of
sustainability and longevity, hunter-gathering, guided by shamanism, was by far and away the most successful human culture that the world has ever seen.
Nearly lost, and now re-born.
It is only in the last few thousand years, relatively recently in the history of our species, that we turned away from shamanism. This started with the foundation of the first city-state cultures, around six-thousand years ago (a period that we misguidedly call the birth of ’civilisation’). However, as we shall explore later, the seeds of our fall probably started some thirteen-thousand years ago, with the discovery of agriculture.
We did not just turn away from shamanism though; we waged a war upon it. With the help of religions and political ideologies (religious and atheist, communist and capitalist alike), shamanic cultures were systematically destroyed. A few survived into the modern era, in pockets in the world. However, many (although not all) of those that did survive did so in broken cultures, and in forms that were heavily contaminated with modern religions. Shamanic cultures were often ripped away from the land that they had been a living part of, and the wild land that they had loved was destroyed. Very few genuinely pure shamanic cultures survived into the modern age. In terms of what had once been a world-wide practice, shamanism was decimated. For shamanism, and arguably for most of the species on this planet as a consequence, what we call ’civilisation’ has been a long and dark winter.
The recent resurgence and growth of interest in shamanism may at long last show that spring is coming though. However, shamanism is re-emerging into a very different world to the one it thrived in before. Our fall from shamanism has changed us profoundly. In later chapters, we will explore the way in which this has literally altered the way in which our brains are wired, and changed the way we think and perceive the world around us. On top of that, it is not just shamanism that we have waged a war upon. We have waged war on the natural world too. In losing the balance that shamanism gave us, we have brought life on earth to a crisis. The fate of not just ourselves as humans, but of literally hundreds of thousands of other species, hangs in the balance and depends on our actions.
In losing shamanism, we lost our way. We need it back. Indeed, our very survival, and those of our fellow species, may well depend on it. These are changed times.
Unless something like bird-flu wipes out ninety-nine percent of the human population, then we cannot go back to the successful hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors. Nor is everyone going to do vision quests or sweat lodges, or pack in their job and go abroad to apprentice themselves to an indigenous shaman. That is only ever going to appeal to a minority of the population; not enough people to make a real difference. So, if shamanism is going to be taken up again by people to a significant degree, then it needs to change. It needs to become relevant and applicable to the times that we live in now.
Shamanism for the present time.
This book outlines my ideas as to what form this new shamanism may need to be. It is therefore not a book about indigenous shamanism. I want to be clear about that. It is a book about what I call ’Therapeutic Shamanism’. Therapeutic Shamanism is born out of my experiences, study, practice, experimenting, and the teachings from my Spirit guides. It is intended to be a shamanic practice that is suited to the times we find ourselves in now, and of practical use in dealing with the challenges that we now face. Everything I say in this book I have confidence in. It has all come from my direct personal experience, and from many years of experience teaching students, and working with clients. All of it though I just offer as suggestions, for you to consider and try out. As such, I am well aware that it will not appeal to all of those who are interested in the shamanic path. It may not appeal to you personally. I hope it does, but if it does not, then that is fine. There is room for many paths and practices. I am most definitely not somebody who would say that my approach is the only right one. The important thing is not dogma, but what works, and different things will work for different people. There is a saying in shamanism ’Does it grow corn?', meaning basically ’In the end, the important thing is, does it work? If it works, then fine'.
This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of books. Each book will be based around courses I have run around specific themes in shamanism over the years, and so have been ’road-tested’ so to speak. The starting point is what is called ’core shamanism’. This is based on the work of the anthropologist and shamanic practitioner Michael Harner. Harner sought to distil out what is common and nearly universal in terms of shamanic practice worldwide (i.e. what is not specific to particular cultures). In doing so, he coined the term ’core shamanism’. Taking core shamanism as a foundation, the books will then start to build and develop a
coherent, modern Therapeutic Shamanism. This first book lays the foundations, in terms of both theory and practice. The second book, ’Re-wilding Your Soul', will be about exploring the shamanic lower-world (the healing realm of Mother Earth and nature), in detail and depth. The third book, ’Beyond the Self', will explore the shamanic upper-world (the healing realm of Father Sun and ’heaven’). Subsequent books will explore particular areas of shamanism including: safe middle-world journeying; the medicine wheel (a guide to flowing with cycles and seasons in shamanism); the totem pole (working with the human energy body, chakras, and meditation practices); soul loss and soul retrieval; healing ancestral and family wounds; death and dying from a shamanic perspective; plant spirit medicine, and more. There will also be a series of books exploring the links between shamanism, counselling, and psychotherapy.
A word about cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. It is generally regarded as particularly unacceptable when a dominant culture appropriates elements of a minority culture, but without the minority culture's permission. It can be a very hot topic of discussion in shamanic circles, in terms of Westerners ’stealing’ indigenous people’s practices and beliefs. It is certainly an issue that people need to be aware of in practising and teaching shamanism, and when it does happen it needs to be addressed. So, I wish to be clear that, in developing Therapeutic Shamanism, I have always tried to be mindful of the issue. As I have said, the fundamentals of Therapeutic Shamanism are based on core shamanism, which is not culturally specific, but the birth right of all human beings. Whereas certain practices and beliefs may belong to particular cultures, shamanism as a whole cannot be claimed by any one culture. In developing my approach, anything that I have added onto core shamanism has generally been taught to me directly by my own shamanic guides, and as far as I am aware is not specific to any particular culture. I have studied many different indigenous shamanic societies, but in terms of my own shamanic practice, I have never wanted to base it upon any particular indigenous culture. Rather, my intent has been to develop something that is at least a relatively culturally non-specific practice, as far as that is possible. It will inevitably have something of a Western, European flavour, since I am a Western European! But, given that, I try to keep my work as culture-lite as I am able, and uncluttered, flexible, adaptable, and applicable to modern-day ’civilisation’.
He or She?
We do not, of course, have a gender-neutral pronoun for the third person singular in the English language. However, to keep writing ’he or she’ all the time feels clumsy. I did consider alternating using ’he’ and ’she’ in different chapters, but personally I find books that do that jarring. So, I have decided throughout the book to use ’they’ as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, for want of a better solution.
Shaman, or Shamanic Practitioner?
One last, but important, thing. I wish to clarify the difference between the terms ’shaman’ and ’shamanic practitioner’. This is an area of some controversy. It really comes down to what we mean by the words. Michael Harner suggested, as a mark of respect, reserving the term ’shaman’ for people in indigenous cultures who lived and breathed shamanism, and instead using the term ’shamanic practitioner’ for modern ’Westerners’ practising core shamanism. I agree with Harner on this. So, I am not a shaman. In the way that I use and understand the term, few people become actual shamans. In some tribal cultures, it is a hereditary role that you have to be born into. Even in the cultures where this is not the case, the training to become a shaman is long and arduous, and generally begins in early life. Also, a true shaman spends their life living shamanically, and in a culture which wholly supports this. By contrast, for most Westerners, shamanism is something they come to much later in life and, given the constraints of living in the modern world, is something that is usually at best a part-time practice. To claim to be a shaman is a bit like claiming to be an enlightened being or guru. It is a state few people in the west will truly achieve. On top of this, the title shaman is generally considered not to be a title that one bestows upon oneself. Rather it is an honorary term, bestowed upon one by one’s tribe or community. So, in core shamanism, for a Westerner the usual term is ’shamanic practitioner’ not ’shaman’. It is a bit like in Buddhism; few people who practice Buddhism will become a Buddha, but everybody can be a Buddhist practitioner. So, I am a shamanic practitioner. With time and practice, you can be one too!
And so, the journey is about to begin...
This book, if you let it, will take you on a journey... you will experience first-hand the
healing power of shamanism, and your eyes will be opened to a world of mystery and wonder, and of immense potential and possibilities. You do not need any special talents or powers, just an open mind. And you will come to trust this new way of being because you will personally experience it. To say that this will change your life for the better is a remarkable understatement. It will also go towards helping heal the world.
I hope you enjoy the book. Above all, I hope you find it to be a practical guide, and that it inspires you to embark on your own shamanic journey, and find your own shamanic path.
I wish you happy journeying.
Paul Francis, 2017.
Chapter One
Getting Clear: understanding what shamanism is (and what it isn’t!).
Where shamanism is from.
In teaching shamanism beginners’ days, one of the things I sometimes start with is to ask people where they think shamanism is from. Generally, people tend to associate it with a particular region or culture. Many people associate it with Native American tribes, particularly from North America, or sometimes from Central or South America. Other people associate shamanism with the Mongolian or Siberian peoples, or sometimes with the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle. Some people think of it as being African; some people associate it with aboriginal Australian cultures. The truth is that shamanism has been practised literally all over the world. Early humans lived as hunter-gatherer tribes, and as far as we know there has not been a single hunter-gatherer tribe in the history of the human race that did not practice shamanism (in the broad sense of the word).
Over thirty years ago, I studied shamanism at university. I studied shamanic cultures from as far apart as Nepal, Africa, New Guinea, Polynesia, and Central America; cultures from many different parts of the world. There is a book called ’Shamanism: An Encyclopaedia of World Beliefs, Practices and Culture', by Walter and Friedman. It is full of scholarly articles about shamanic practices throughout the world. There are sections on North America, with chapters discussing shamanism from the Inuit tribes of the North, through to shamanic practices around the south in the New Orleans area, and from the Atlantic east coast through to the Pacific west coast. Further sections in the book are on shamanism in Central America, South America, Asia, Siberia, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, India, Burma, Malaysia, Australasia, Africa, Scandinavia, and even Europe. Yes, once here in Europe we had our own shamanic cultures too.
Given that all tribes practised shamanism, then all tribes have, or would have had,
their own word for ’shamanism’. In England, where I was born and raised, the original word has long been lost. The word we use in English, ’shamanism’, is from the Tungus tribe of the Siberia/Mongolia region. It entered the English language (the only Tungus word to do so, to the best of my knowledge!) sometime in the 1600s. It was first applied by Western anthropologists to the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols, and those of the neighbouring Tungusic and Samoyedicspeaking peoples. It then began to be used to describe practices found in other parts of the world including Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as anthropologists gradually began to realise how widespread and similar these practices and beliefs are. In the 1960s and 1970s, the anthropologist Michael Harner began to realise that you could take a shaman from anywhere in the world, say from the Amazon basin, and sit them down with a shaman from Siberia and (with the aid of an interpreter), they would describe incredibly similar shamanic practices and beliefs. What Harmer realised, as he studied shamanic cultures, is that underneath the cultural trappings of a particular tribe’s shamanic practice, there is a series of core beliefs and practices that are essentially common to all shamanic cultures.
For such a set of practices and beliefs to be so consistent throughout such wildly diverse and geographically widespread cultures is truly remarkable. It is almost as if these beliefs and practices must be somehow innate; hard-wired into us. And in fact, as I will discuss later, this does seem to be the case. That aside, for these practices to be so widespread and so consistent, people must find that (a) they work, and (b) they are worth practising and pursuing.
What is clear is that humans take these core practices and beliefs and adapt them to make them relevant to the environment, climate and times in which they live. Harner wrote about this core shamanism in his classic book ’The Way of the Shaman’, published in 1980. It is this book, and Harner’s subsequent teaching over the last thirty-plus years, that is largely responsible for the current rebirth and renaissance of shamanism that we are now seeing in the West.
How old it is.
So, shamanism has been practised throughout the world, and in a coherent and consistent form. The next question is how old is shamanism? This is a matter of much scholarly debate, and in some ways the answer comes down to how exactly one defines shamanism. However, there are cave paintings in Europe that date back
to around 33,000 B.C. which are generally thought to depict shamanic practices. This would make shamanism at least 35,000 years old! To put this into context, the oldest of the organised religions (that still exist in the modern era) are probably the Hindu and/or Jain religions which date from around about 1,700 B.C., so under 4,000 years old. This makes shamanism vastly older than any of the existing organised religions. To put this in another context, the Roman Empire was at its height around 2,000 years ago, the domestication of dogs happened around 12,000 years ago, whilst shamanism was being practised 35,000 thousand years ago. Could shamanism be older still? The problem with going any further back in time is that definitive evidence becomes scant. One intriguing thing I saw on a television program a few years ago was a discussion by an anthropologist about a piece of yellow ochre rock that had carvings on it. The object had been found in the Blombos caves in South Africa. The proposal was that this object was probably a shamanic ritual object. Carbon dating put this carving back to around 75,000 B.C.. If this is indeed a shamanic object, then that makes shamanism nearly 80,000 years old. In 2008, in the same cave, the remains of an ochre-processing area were found. Ochre is widely used in shamanic societies for body painting. This is rarely done purely for ornamentation and decoration, but as part of sacred shamanic practices. This paint-factory has been carbon-dated at around 100,000 years old.
Interesting as these archaeological findings are, if you ask indigenous peoples how old shamanism is they would generally say that we have been practising shamanism for as long as we have been human. Bill Plotkin, in his excellent book ’Soulcraft’, quotes an Inuit saying:
In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. This was a time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen, all you had to do was say it. Nobody can explain this: that’s the way it was.’ Page 122.
This saying contains many things that anyone already familiar with shamanism will immediately recognise. One is that humans can somehow ’become’ animals. Another is that we can talk to animals and that animals can talk to us. Another is
that there is really no difference between us and animals. And yet another is that our words and our thoughts have power, and that our words have consequences and can take on a life of their own.
Mythos and Logos.
Before going further, I feel it necessary to clarify the difference between mythos and logos. Mythos is something that is metaphorically true, but not literally so; it is something that is meant to be taken as a metaphor only. Logos is something that is literally true. The Inuit quote is intended as mythos. It is not saying that a human can physically transform into an animal. What it is alluding to is that a common experience in shamanic trance work is often a sense of ’becoming’ an animal. In shamanism, this is known as shape shifting. It is also common experience in shamanism to be able to communicate with animals. In fact, central to shamanism is the practice of working and communicating with what is known as a Power Animal.
It is not a religion.
One can find quotes similar to the Inuit one in other cultures, from all over the world. The point is that shamanism was once our natural state, our natural way of being, the world over. In fact, the idea of indigenous tribes practising shamanism is a distortion. In the West, being religious is an option. We can choose to be religious or not, and we can look around and pick the religion we want. For many Westerners, if we are religious at all, it may in reality be only a relatively small part of our daily life.
Shamanism is different. It is not a religion. In indigenous cultures, there were no people in the tribe who were not shamanic. Yes, the tribe may have had a designated shaman or shamans, but everybody in the tribe would have lived and breathed shamanism. The shaman was simply the person who was better at it than other people (in the same way that in the tribe there would also be somebody who was best at hunting, or best at looking after children, or best at storytelling, and so on). For indigenous people, shamanism was not something they did for only part of their daily life. Nor was it something only the shaman did. Rather, it was in a very real sense what people actually were; how they experienced and related to the world around them, moment by moment. It was literally a way of being.
Shamanism is, or was, our natural state. For our human ancestors, it is what it was to be truly human. It was intrinsic to how we lived. Now, if you accept the theory of human evolution, we modern humans (Homo sapiens) are somewhere between one hundred and sixty thousand and two hundred thousand years old as a species. Let us take the round figure of two hundred thousand years. This means we have been living and breathing shamanism as a species for two hundred thousand years. Now, say in a hunter-gatherer society you would have had children by the time you were aged twenty. That is five generations every hundred years. So, over two hundred thousand years, that is ten thousand generations of ancestors. Now, imagine if each generation of your ancestors is represented by just one person, and they are standing behind you in a line, a line of ten thousand people representing ten thousand generations. If each person is standing a yard/meter apart, the line is stretching back behind you for nearly six miles (nearly ten kilometres). Now, taking another round figure, let us say that we stopped practising shamanism here around two thousand years ago. That is only the last hundred generations of your ancestors. That means nine thousand and nine hundred generations of your ancestors were shamanic. Put another way, that is a staggering ninety-nine percent of your human ancestors lived and breathed shamanism.
So, shamanism is deeply familiar to us. It is in our ancestral DNA, and literally wired into us. I know from teaching shamanism that, once you get what it is, shamanism will feel deeply familiar to many of you who read this book. For many people, learning shamanism feels like they are remembering something that they already half-knew, but had not realised that they had forgotten. Reconnecting with shamanism often feels like a homecoming; a reconnecting with a piece of oneself that has felt missing. In rediscovering (or remembering) shamanism, it often feels as if the world around one becomes more vibrant and alive. In fact, of course, what is happening is that we are waking up to the aliveness of the world around us, which is why the process is sometimes described as ’waking from sleep’.
In the next chapters, I will discuss the core shamanic beliefs and practices, and how shamans see and experience the universe (and how this relates to much of what we now are understanding in physics). I will explore what shamanism is for, what it can do for us, and what it offers the world. And I will discuss why we nearly lost shamanism, why we so desperately need it back, and why it is relevant (in fact, essential) for the modern age.
Chapter Two
The Shamanic Worldview: basic principles and practice.
The nature of shamanic reality.
So, shamanism is incredibly old, and incredibly widespread. But what exactly is it? Shamanism is the direct, personal experience of Spirit. One of the things I love about it is its emphasis on this direct and personal experience. This means that it requires no leap of faith. You do not have to believe what scriptures say, or what a priest tells you. In fact, in shamanism there are no priesthoods, and no hierarchies at all. There are no shamanic temples or buildings (nature is our ’church’). There are no competing creeds or dogmas; no rival sects or factions. There are no texts or sacred books, and so there is no argument about the correct interpretation of scripture or doctrine. It is essentially an oral tradition. In fact, until the last one hundred years or so when we in the West have started writing books about shamanism, there has been virtually nothing written about it. There has never been a shamanic Bible, Torah or Koran. There have been no wars fought over rival interpretations of shamanism, nor has it ever been used as a justification for war.
What is ’spirit’?
So, shamanism is about your own personal experience of connecting directly with spirit. This then raises the question “what is spirit?” The shamanic answer to that is that spirit is everything. In shamanism, we talk about Great Spirit. Everything is made from Great Spirit and comes from Great Spirit, and in the end, will return to Great Spirit. From modern physics, we now know that everything is made of energy. Matter that appears solid is in fact made of energy. Shamans also know that everything is made of energy, and have known this for tens (or hundreds) of thousands of years. Where shamanism goes further than physics is in saying (and in fact, actually experiencing) that not only is everything made of energy, but that this energy is both alive and conscious. So, this means that everything around us is alive and conscious.
To many Westerners, this might seem like a strange idea. For one thing, we tend to differentiate between living things and non-living things; between the animate and the inanimate. So how can non-living things be conscious? And are all living things conscious? A slug? A blade of grass? Bacteria? Consciousness is something most Westerners tend to reserve for ourselves as humans, and possibly some ’higher’ mammals. Most of us can recognise consciousness in the eyes of a chimpanzee or a gorilla. We may also recognise consciousness in ’intelligent’ mammals such as our dog or cat. However what people are recognising here is a consciousness in other mammals that is similar to our own human consciousness. There are many different kinds of consciousness though. So, what about a snake? Or an earthworm? Maybe you are one of the minority of people who does recognise consciousness in all animals. But how about plants? Some people do feel some kind of presence around trees, particularly older trees that have lived a long time and have a ’history’. They often seem to have a consciousness, even a personality. Some people do recognise the consciousness in smaller plants and can ’tune in’ to them. And there is some very interesting research being done recently by scientists who are indeed recognising that plants are indeed conscious, albeit in a different way to us. So too, some people may even recognise the consciousness in rocks and crystals. What about rivers, lakes, mountains and deserts? What if we take this even further? What about your mobile phone? The chair you sit on? Your refrigerator? Your plastic water bottle? Your necklace? Paracetamol? The reality is that most Westerners struggle to recognise consciousness in other animals, let alone plants or rocks. And even ’new-age’ types who do see consciousness in plants and crystals often struggle to recognise consciousness in ’human-made’ objects.
In shamanism, everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious. It is just that most (Western) people struggle to recognise consciousness in things that are very different to them. However, things that are very different to us are still conscious, but just in a way that is different to us. When anthropologists studied shamanic cultures, they could (just about!) understand indigenous people talking about the consciousness of a tree, or even a waterfall. But when those same people started talking about the ’spirit of the outboard motor’, or the ’spirit of the machete’, anthropologists found this startling. However, many of us do, at some semi-conscious level, experience our human-made objects as having personalities and lives of their own. We may experience our computer as being temperamental, for example. We might give our car a name and experience it as having a personality, and we often experience buildings and rooms as having a
’atmosphere’ and presence.
Ordinary reality and shamanic reality.
If everything is alive and conscious then it raises the possibility that everything can be communicated with. To see how this might be done we need to explore more about what this conscious energy is, and how things come into being. Shamanism tells us that there is another, deeper reality behind this day-to-day, physical one. These days, modern physics agrees. David Bohm, a Nobel prize-winning physicist, wrote a book called “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”. In it, Bohm talks about the difference between everyday physical reality, which he calls the ’explicate’ and a deeper level of reality that he calls the ’implicate’. The physical, explicate, reality that we inhabit is made from information that exists in the deeper, implicate reality. Putting it another way, the physical matter in everyday reality is organised and held together from the patterns (or blueprints) in the deeper reality. Shamans have long described this difference between these two worlds. They talk about the difference between this surface world, sometimes known in modern-day shamanism as the ’tonal', and the deeper shamanic reality, known as the ’nagual’ (terms borrowed from the Toltec tradition, originating in what is present-day Mexico). I am going to use the terms ’ordinary reality’ and ’shamanic reality', to keep things simple.
In shamanic reality, everything is connected to, and a part of, everything else. In doing what is known as a shamanic journey the practitioner enters into this deeper, shamanic reality. In doing so, the journeyer personally experiences how everything is connected. It is often described in shamanism that everything is, in fact, a web of energy. Although in ordinary reality things appear to be separate, in fact they are merely protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy in shamanic reality. In this deeper realm, everything is but a part of an interconnected whole. This is true to such an extent that Bohm suggests that, if only we knew how to do it, we could take any single atom in the universe and follow its connections into the deeper, shamanic reality. Because all the atoms are connected, any single atom could then tell us not only what any other atom in the universe is doing, but what it has done, and what it is likely to do next. Just let that sink in for a moment; every single atom in the universe is connected to every other single atom.
Every. Single. Atom.
In. The. Universe.
This is what shamans experience. Physicists know this intellectually and theoretically, and are working on how to apply this knowledge by developing ’quantum computers’. These computers will in effect be able to communicate along this web of interconnection. If they are successful, such technology will have mind-boggling applications and uses, and change our lives in ways that we can scarcely begin to imagine.
Travelling in this interconnected web, in shamanic reality, is what shamans have been doing for thousands of years. It is what the right hemisphere of our brain is hard-wired to do. In ordinary reality, we experience ourselves as being an individual human, distinct and separate from other humans. The left hemisphere of our brain is the half of our brain that is hard-wired to work at this level, and experiences this sense of separation. This is incredibly useful of course, and central to our physical survival. For example, if faced with the prospect of being stalked by a lion, if you are to survive, you do not want in that moment to be experiencing the interconnectedness of everything. Rather, you need a strong sense of the difference between yourself and the lion. You need a strong and passionate experience of your individual existence, and the desire and will to maintain it.
Our imbalanced modern brains.
The problem with us modern, ’civilised’ humans however, is that our left brains are strongly dominant and largely suppress the experiences of the right brain. We have almost entirely fallen into an experience of life as one of separateness (and consequently, selfishness). By contrast, the brains of hunter-gatherers seem to have been much more in balance. There were times of course, particularly when faced with physical danger, where they could be fully engaged in a left-brain experience of separateness. They would simply not have survived otherwise. However, there were also times though when they could choose to fully immerse themselves in a right brain experience of interconnectedness, particularly when doing shamanic journeys and other shamanic practices. And in everyday life, the day-to-day experience of our ancestors, the way they actually experienced the world, would have been to have these two realities running side-by-side. They would have experienced a sense of self, and equally a sense of interconnectedness. They would have experienced themselves as an individual, whilst at the same time experiencing that
they were, in reality, a part of a larger whole. Like a cell or an organ is part of a larger body, they felt part of a tribe. Furthermore, they then experienced that tribe as being a part of Human, a part of Animal, a part of all living things, and ultimately a part of Mother Earth. In understanding shamanism, it is important to realise that this was absolutely not just a belief they had. This was no left-brain intellectualisation. Quite the opposite. This was a real, vivid and actual experience. This experience of interconnectedness is at the heart of what shamanism is.
The ability to move at will between these two worlds, and to go deeply into the shamanic reality (and come back with the healing gifts and knowledge) is central to shamanic practice. When we allow ourselves to drop into shamanic reality, we experience that, as well as being an individual, we are also a part of a whole. In shamanic reality, we are part of a larger blueprint called Human with a capital ’H’. It is a bit like branches on a tree. In ordinary reality, you are the end tip, the twig, at the end of a branch. You look around and see other humans as twigs, separate from you and from everyone else. However, if you were to trace back, then you would realise that you and the other humans that you see, are all parts of the same branch.
The interconnected web.
As humans, in surface reality we largely experience ourselves as being separate individual beings. If we look deeper though, into shamanic reality, then we see that we all emerge from a common branch; that on another level, we are parts of a larger whole. Of course, this does not only apply to humans. From a shamanic point of view each individual dog in surface reality is similarly like the tip of a twig that goes back to a common branch - Dog with a capital D. And in fact, this is true of everything. But for the moment let us stick with humans, and some of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, and gorillas. All the individual humans, chimps and gorillas in surface reality emerge and appear as separate individuals. But if we look deeper, into shamanic reality, we would see three branches - Human, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla. What appear to be individuals in surface reality in fact emerge from their respective branches in the deeper shamanic reality. So, if we enter into shamanic reality, we see these three branches. If we followed any one of these three branches further back towards the trunk, we would find that all three converge into larger, single branch called Great Ape. If we then looked around we would notice other branches close to us. We would see Monkey, Feline, Canine, Rodent and more. If we travelled yet further back towards the trunk, then we would notice that
all these branches, in turn, start to converge, forming a huge branch called Mammal. Next to us we would see other huge branches - Bird, Reptile, Amphibian, Fish, and so on. If we travelled further back still, we would experience that all these different branches now converge into one enormous trunk called Animal. We would now notice that this itself is one of two huge trunks, the other being Plant. If we were to explore Plant then we would experience that it too splits into smaller branches as it moves upwards and outwards. In doing so, it gives birth to Fern, Moss, Conifer, Flowering Plant, Cactus, Grass, and more. Each of these branches in turn branches further, producing the twigs that are the individual plant species (Dandelion, Scots Pine, and so on), and in turn, produce the tips that emerge as individual physical plants in surface reality. And if instead of travelling upwards and outwards along Plant we headed back in the opposite direction, down and towards the centre, we would then experience how the two great trunks of Animal and Plant themselves converge into an original single trunk - Mineral (known in shamanism as the ’Stone People'). And we would see that this great trunk itself is rooted and emerges from our mother; from Mother Earth herself. The Earth is indeed our Mother.
This experience that everything is connected and part of Mother Earth is the natural state of being for people who live (or lived) shamanically. It is why indigenous people the world over describe everything as being alive, and everything as being sacred. Shamanic people experience being part of, not separate from, a world that is profoundly alive and vibrant, and which can be communicated with.
Bill Plotkin, in his book on ’Soulcraft’ says:
If you have never traded speech with the Lizard, a rattlesnake, and elk, a desert Juniper, the wind, or a rock, you have the world-shifting treat in store for you. It's as if you just discovered thousands of new relatives, fascinating and wild beings that you can now learn from and commune with. The world is suddenly a different place; a kind of isolation you didn’t know you suffered has vanished. Most modern people would feel foolish to sit and talk with a snake or a tower of rock. Most nature-based people, in contrast, would have the sincerest sympathy for anyone who could not do that with ease, or communicate with the air, or hear the songs of the stars.’ (page 167).
The shamanic ’journey’.
This ability to be simultaneously aware of both the surface reality and the deeper shamanic reality was a natural state for hunter-gatherer peoples. This means that, for the overwhelming majority of human history, it has been our natural state. As I said earlier, modern humans, Homo sapiens, are something like two hundred thousand years old as a species. For a good one hundred and ninety thousand of those years we were living as hunter-gatherers. That is to say, living shamanically. In terms of the scale of human history then, it is only very recently that we have lost our awareness of shamanic reality (later on I will discuss why this has happened).
This ability to be aware of both levels of reality is central to shamanic practice. In fact, shamanism is sometimes described as having ’one foot in this world and one in the other’. Or, sometimes as ’walking between the worlds’. Having one foot in this world and one in the other is very important. Most people in the modern world have both feet firmly in the surface, ordinary reality, and have forgotten that shamanic reality even exists. To live shamanically is to be aware of both realities, and to be able to move between them at will. Having both feet in the shamanic reality all the time is not shamanism, but madness. This is an important point. I often hear people in the West saying that all madness is actually a form of shamanic experience or shamanic awakening. It is certainly true that sometimes shamanic awakening can feel like a form of madness (largely because in the modern world, people having a shamanic awakening usually do not understand what is happening to them). However, it is not at all true to say that all madness is, therefore, a form of shamanic awakening. In fact, shamanic cultures clearly differentiate between healthy shamanic experience on the one hand, and madness on the other. Years ago (I cannot remember where now), I read a story about a young Westerner who had gone to stay with a tribe somewhere, to find a shamanic teacher. He could not find what he was looking for, someone who seemed, to his Western eyes, to be ’the real deal’. One day he said to the villagers that he was going to set off and just walk across the desert, and not stop until his teacher appeared. The villagers warned him that he was risking his life, but that it was his choice. So, he set off, with the villagers not knowing if they would ever see him again. A few days later, he came back to the village very excited, saying he had found his shamanic teacher. The villagers were curious and asked him who the teacher was. The Westerner said ’Oh, he's amazing. He talks to trees’. The villagers said: ’Oh, him. Actually, he's not a shaman. He's just mad because he doesn't know when to stop talking to trees. Talking to trees is all he does’.
So, healthy shamanic practice involves having a foot in both worlds. It is vitally important in doing shamanic work to maintain a good, strong, grounded connection with ordinary, day-to-day surface reality; to have a foot firmly planted in this world. That is the difference between healthy shamanism and psychosis. Grounding is the bedrock of shamanic practice (and should be the bedrock of any spiritual practice really). In a moment, I am going to discuss how to enter the other world of shamanic reality, by doing shamanic journeys. But before doing that I want to make it very clear that for anyone who is actually psychotic, or having psychotic episodes, the first starting point of their shamanic practice should be grounding practices, and most definitely not shamanicjourneying. Before setting off on a shamanic journey is important to know with certainty that you can get back!
Psychosis aside though, for most of us getting back is not a problem. For most people, not being able to leave this surface reality is the problem! So, if you are not actually psychotic, there is absolutely no reason to approach shamanic journeying with any trepidation whatsoever. Remember it is our natural state to be able to journey. There is a book by Sheldon Kopp called ’If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him’ (the title is from an old Buddhist saying which basically means beware of gurus - do not hand your power away). In it, Sheldon, who is a psychotherapist, talks about how he runs groups and uses a lot of guided imagery meditations. He says that there is almost always somebody in the group who gets nervous before doing the meditation because they think that they have 'trouble is coming back’. Sheldon recounts how one day he went into the group prepared. He told the students they were going to be doing a long, guided visualisation. Sure enough, somebody started getting anxious about not being able to ’come back’. So, Sheldon reaches down into his bag and pulls out a large hat pin. He says, ’I always find that if I just jab this hat pin into someone's thigh, then they always come back straight away!’ The point that he is making, of course, is that (if we are not psychotic) we can come back if we want to, because we are used to being in this physical reality. In fact, our physical bodies are anchored here, and offer a place of safe return after a shamanic journey.
So, whilst shamanic people live with the sense of both ordinary reality and shamanic reality being side-by-side, there are times when they choose to deliberately and temporarily immerse themselves more fully in shamanic reality; to go on a shamanic journey. This involves entering an altered state of consciousness. It is a particular kind of altered state, known as ’Shamanic State of Consciousness’ to
researchers, often abbreviated to SSC. It is characterised by high levels of theta brainwaves. High theta brainwave levels are also characteristic of other deep meditative states too, and also are present when we are immersed in being artistic or creative. The shamanic trance state itself can be very light or very deep. It can be as light as a daydream, something that we can easily snap out of. Or it can be very deep indeed, where the shaman loses all connection with ordinary reality. Or it can be somewhere in between. There are many ways of venturing into this trance state. These include dancing, or other repetitive rhythmic movements such as shaking or swaying (which in more recent times gave birth to the Shakers and the Quakers of course, who used to shake or quake to enter trance states to talk to God). Other methods include singing and chanting, fasting, and the use of hallucinogenic plants. Most common though is the use of the drum and of the rattle. These are the two basic tools of shamanic practice. There are few shamanic cultures who do not extensively use the drum or some other form of rhythmic instrument. The Kahuna shamans of Hawaii are a notable exception. Other cultures where the drum is not much used are those cultures where it is very difficult to keep a drum-skin taut and protect it from rotting, due to the high humidity in the environment, such as in tropical rainforests. These cultures tend to rely more on the use of hallucinogens, the notable example being some of the cultures of the Amazon forest, who use the plant ayahuasca and other hallucinogens. In other cultures, psychotropic plants are sometimes used, but much less often than the drum and/or rattle. I am not aware of the drum being used extensively in Australian aboriginal shamanic cultures, however those cultures use other forms of rhythmic instruments, including clicksticks and the didgeridoo, which can be used in a similar way to the drum.
For shamanic journeying, the drum is used in a very particular way. It is usually played at somewhere between 200 to 240 beats a minute - so around about 4 beats per second or slightly slower. I once read that this rhythm has a particular effect on the human brain, in that ten minutes of shamanic drumming can produce the same level of theta brainwaves as two hours of transcendental meditation. As well as the effect on the brain of playing the drum at that particular speed, the drums are also usually tuned in a way that produces a lot of overtones and undertones. The human brain has trouble processing this and tends to start ’making things up’. When listening to a shamanic drum, it is common to start hearing not just the drum, but chanting, pan-pipes, whistling, singing, bird-calls, other drummers, and all sorts of other sounds after a while. In addition to this, overtones and undertones tend to produce synaesthesia, which is where the senses become crossed over. So, the drum
sounds start to be perceived as colours and visual images, sensations, smells, and even tastes. This further aids the shamanic journey, in making it a rich multisensory experience. In this way, the shamanic drums are a beautifully crafted piece of technology, perfected over thousands of years, and used worldwide to enter a rich meditative state.
In the next chapter, we are going to look at how to prepare for doing a shamanic journey, and what we may expect to find in the shamanic realms.
Chapter Three
Getting Ready: knowing the lay of the land, the shamanic realms and ’hollowing-out’.
So, what does the shamanic practitioner find when they enter the shamanic journey? The description of what practitioners encounter in journeying is surprisingly consistent between cultures throughout the world. For me, this consistency is one of the truly remarkable things about shamanism. And I am not alone in finding this remarkable - anthropologists have puzzled over it too. How can the experience of shamanic journeying be so consistent worldwide? There are two possible answers. One is that what we experience on entering shamanic reality is somehow simply a function of the human brain, some product of our neurological wiring. In other words, shamanic journeying is just a subjective experience; all in the mind, hard-wired in. Or, it could be that where we go on a shamanic journey actually exists as an objective place, independent of us. In other words, the shamanic realms are real, and the shaman really does somehow leave their body and travel there. Now, as well as being a shamanic practitioner I am also a psychotherapist. In fact, I was a psychotherapist before I became a shamanic practitioner. From a psychotherapy point of view, it is quite tempting to try and explain shamanism in a rational way; to see the experiences described in shamanic journeying as simply subjective and imaginary. Psychotherapists who do this (and not all do) have annoyed some people in the shamanic community. by saying that shamanic journeys are just imagination and subjective, which runs contrary to and denies shamans’ actual experiences. Shamans are quite adamant and clear that what they are experiencing is in no way merely ’a figment of their imagination’, but a world as real as this one (in some ways, more real!). Which of these two views is true is a very interesting question. The rational, logical part of the brain may be more comfortable with thinking that the shamanic journey is simply imagination, somehow ’made up’. But when people actually do journeying themselves, the more they do it, the more they experience that it goes way beyond any personal imagination. Usually, people come to accept that the shamans knew what they were talking about — shamanic reality is real and not just made up. However, as I have
said, shamanism is about direct personal experience, and not about an act of faith. So, whatever I say about my experiences, I only offer them as my experiences. I invite you to have your own experiences of journeying, and then you will find out for yourself whether shamanic reality for you is subjective or objective; real or imaginary.
The three realms.
Whether it is an objective reality or not, what is common in journeying is to experience shamanic reality as being divided into three distinct realms. As I said earlier, we have mostly killed our shamans in the West, and so we have lost our shamanic terminology. So, when Michael Harner was piecing core shamanism back together, he had to come up with some words to refer to the three realms. He chose to call them the ’upper-world', the ’middle-world', and the ’lower-world'. He chose the names as, when journeying, we usually experience the realms as being organised spatially, with the upper-world being above us, the lower-world below us, and the middle-world being this world that we live in (and some more besides).
The three realms are quite different to each other. Each realm has distinct qualities, and different ’inhabitants’. Each realm needs a different set of skills from the journeyer, and a different awareness and approach. So, learning to journey involves learning to recognise the feel of each realm, and knowing what signs to look for, in order to know which realm you are in at any given point in the journey. This is of crucial importance when it comes to good shamanic practice. In order to journey well it is vitally important to know what realm you are in at any given time, and to be able to move between them at will. So, next, I am going to look at each realm in turn.
The upper-world.
Probably the easiest way for most Westerners to understand the upper-world is to realise that Christians essentially pinched it and called it ’heaven'. We experience it as being somehow ’above’ us or ’higher’. People often say that people in heaven are looking down at us from above. We talk about ’ascending’ into heaven. In terms of what the upper-world looks like, it is important to say that shamanic reality is as strange as quantum reality (in some ways, it is quantum reality). Our human brains simply are not equipped to be able to perceive it, understand it and process it as it really is. To make any kind of sense of what we are perceiving, we have to ’clothe’
what we see in some kind of an image that we can make sense of. We fashion shamanic reality into metaphors and symbols that we can relate to. In his second book, ’Cave and Cosmos’, Michael Harner in his research found that although people experienced the same themes in the upper-world, they clothed their experience in different images. So, if you are of Christian orientation you might experience the upper-world as being full of monks and nuns, saints, angels of various kinds, and at the top, the holy trinity. As a Hindu you may experience it as full of Hindu gods and goddesses - Lord Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Ganesh, Parvati, Durga etc.. A Buddhist may experience it as being full of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Taras and other deities. Harner found that secular people often experienced meeting people like Mandela, Gandhi, philosophers, poets, and so on. The particular imagery that we use is not that important. The point is that the upperworld is a place of wisdom, love, healing and compassion. It is a place where we may meet ’ascended masters’; beings who have transcended their egos, and have spiritual insight, wisdom, and compassion. It is a place where we can go to get a bigger perspective on things; to ’rise above’ petty concerns and problems; to get help with transcending our own ego concerns and limitations. We can go there with something we are struggling with, to ask ’What would be for the greater good in this situation?’. Or questions like: ’What would be the most compassionate and spiritual course of action for me to take?’, or ’What would be the ethical thing for me to do?’. Plus, we can get help and healing in order to be able to align ourselves more with the upper-world; in a sense, help with coming more from our own ’higher self’.
Although there are definitely female energies and beings in the upper-world (in the form of goddesses, taras and suchlike) it is primarily the realm of what in Therapeutic Shamanism we call Father Sun, whereas the lower-world is the realm of Mother Earth. Whilst the lower-world is the realm of nature, in all its myriad forms, the upper-world is more rarefied. It is like a renaissance painting of heaven (not surprisingly, as that is what renaissance painters were trying to paint!). So, it has an ethereal quality to it, which can make it feel vague and insubstantial when you first journey there, until you get used to it. It is a bit floaty, a bit wispy, and spacious to the point of appearing almost empty sometimes. There is an amazing quality to the light. Colours are beautiful. There is a palpable sense of majesty and awe. There is usually very little nature, and what there is often tends to be formal gardens of some kind, although there are often mountains too. Animals are rare, and if they are there then they tend to be mythological ones (dragons, Pegasus, griffins etc.).
Mostly though it is filled with beautiful awe-inspiring buildings such as temples, cathedrals, monasteries, and fairy tale castles. Indeed, the cathedrals and temples we build in this earthly, physical reality are a deliberate attempt to recreate the upperworld here on earth; to give people that sense of the divine and of being in the presence of ’god’. In the upper-world there are also huge libraries, hospitals and convalescent homes, and alchemists’ workshops. The technology is generally anything up to early medieval times, in that there is metal-working and jewellery, but no modern technology (no steam engines, computers, cars or televisions, etc.).
The lower-world.
Since we fell away from shamanism, and with the rise of the organised religions, the lower-world has been given a bad press. I will go into the reasons for this in the chapter on ’The Fall'. For now though, it is enough to say that with the dawn of what we call ’civilisation’ (in reality, the birth of the patriarchal and hierarchical citystate cultures, starting around 4.000 B.C.), the organised religions emerged. As these religions developed, gradually they placed more and more emphasis on the upperworld, albeit a highly-distorted view of the upper-world. ’Up’ became ’good’ and ’down’ became ’bad’. Father Sun (God) became ’good’, and Mother Earth (and women in general!) became ’bad’. These ’sky religions’ told us to cut off from the lower-world. So, the Christian priests, for example, told us that the lower-world was Hell. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It is a terrible lie, one that has caused huge damage not just to us, but has damaged our relationship with the natural world. This, in turn, has had devastating consequences for the other creatures and life that we share this beautiful planet with.
By contrast, in shamanism, the lower-world is the realm of Mother Earth. It is also the realm of ’the People’ — Mother Earth's children. As well as us, the Human People, there are the Animal People, the Standing People (the trees), the Plant People, and the Stone People. There is a wonderful native American story that illustrates what the lower-world is about. It goes like this...
The Animal People became furious with the Human People, because of the way the Humans were harming the other People and Mother Earth herself. So, they decided to get together and kill all of the Human People (which they could do easily if they so wished). The Plant People and the Stone People heard about the Animal People’s plan. Now, remember, the Plant People and the Stone People are the oldest
and wisest of all the People. They have no egos, and so have the most compassion and wisdom, and are closest to Great Spirit. So, the Plant and Stone People called a great council of all the People. At the council, Stone and Plant said to Animal “We do hear you, and we understand your anger towards the Human People. However, what you plan to do to the Humans is not in accordance with Spirit, and as such it is forbidden. The Humans are young and ignorant, and need our teaching and our wisdom. They have also become sick andfallen away from Great Spirit, and need our healing”. So, it was decided at the great council of all the Peoples that each and every type of Animal, Plant, and Stone would take on a healing gift. That gift would be given freely to any individual human who askedfor it, and each Animal, Plant, and Stone would freely teach any human who asked them for their wisdom. That is in accordance with Great Spirit.
The lower-world is the place where, as humans, we can go to receive both the healing gifts, and the teaching and wisdom from the Animal, Plant, and Stone People, and from Mother Earth herself. It is also home to the Ancestors, the wise humans who live shamanically and in accordance with Great Spirit. The Ancestors keep the shamanic knowledge and wisdom, and so can be our shamanic teachers and guides. The lower-world is a place of love, wisdom and healing. It is as far removed from hell as it is possible to be.
In journeying, the lower-world appears as pure, unspoilt nature. It is nature as it was before humans have messed with it. There are humans in the lower-world, although they are few and far between. All the humans in the lower-world are living as we used to live, as hunters and gatherers. They live respectfully alongside the other (non-human) Peoples, being part of the web of life. As hunter-gatherers, humans in the lower-world generally live in small tribes of between twenty to two hundred people. They live a pre-agricultural, shamanic lifestyle, as our modern human ancestors did for around two hundred thousand years, before we started farming. So, in the lower-world there are no fields and no hedges. There are no domesticated animals. There is no metalwork at all. Clothing is generally animal hides, or very simple woven fabrics made from grasses or other plant materials.
We can get to know people in the lower-world, and as I have said they can be great teachers of shamanism. They can also teach us how to put right much of what we have broken in this modern age. They can help us to heal our broken connection with Mother Earth, and show us how to live in right relationship with her and with
our other brother and sisters - the Animal, Plant and Stone Peoples.
Although there are people in the lower-world, the lower-world is primarily a place of connecting with the other Peoples; with animals, plants and stones. It is a place where we can get healing from Bear; experience what it is like to be able to fly like Eagle or swim like Salmon. It is a place where Falcon can teach us the power of focus and decisive action, or where Tortoise can teach us how to slow down and be grounded. We can find a plant or one of the Stone People to help us heal our disease, whatever it may be. We can talk to Mountain, or experience being Water.
As well as healing any specific wounds or dis-ease we may have as individuals, just being in the lower-world is healing in a deeper and more profound way. It heals a deep sense of loneliness, isolation, and separation in us that, as modern humans, we all carry. This is a wound most people feel deeply, but do not know what it is, or what causes it (let alone how to cure it). It is a deep ache in us, a sickness in our soul. It is a hole that we try unsuccessfully to fill with things such as food and drugs, consumer goods, work, television, the internet and so on. It is a wound caused by our separation; by our loss of the experience of interconnection. The lower-world heals this wound, by connecting us back to the web of life. By reconnecting with the not-human (what in Therapeutic Shamanism we call the ’more-than-human') we rediscover what it is to be fully alive and truly human.
The middle-world.
If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world. Or, at least parts of the middle-world are indeed hell. The middle-world is, of course, where we live and spend most of our time. It is here; this physical reality. In fact, there are two middle-worlds, or two aspects of the middle-world. One is the physical world, and the other is energetic. Both the upper-world and lower-world are places of love and healing. Nothing ’bad’ happens in those realms. In the physical middle-world though, we can experience pain and disease. It is the realm in which bad things can happen; where children can get cancer, or our partner may have an affair and break our heart, or where our dog may get run over. It is the realm where poverty, inequality, injustice, plagues, pollution, wars, famine, torture, rape and murder exist. It is a realm of much beauty and good things too of course! It can be a realm of courage, bravery, love, hope, kindness, acts of compassion, laughter, and beauty. But it is undeniable a very mixed bag indeed, and in being so it is totally different to both the upper-world and
the lower-world. The middle-world is a realm where we need to be careful and look after ourselves, as not everything has good intentions or our best interest at heart. In the lower-world we may ingest any plant to receive its healing properties. By contrast, in the middle-world some plants are poisonous of course. In the middleworld not everything we eat is good for us! Similarly, in the upper and lower-worlds, everyone that we meet can be trusted, and we can ask for help and healing. Obviously, this is not the case in the middle-world. Some people we can trust, and some people may be out to use us and exploit us, or even hurt us. In the middleworld we need good boundaries. We need personal boundaries in terms of who we open up to and trust. We need physical boundaries in terms of having a strong immune system, and in terms of locking doors and windows in our home, and boundaries in terms of passwords for our accounts, etc.. So however lovely and beautiful some aspect of the middle-world can be, it is completely different in its nature to the lower and upper-worlds, and needs a different set of skills and approach.
As well as the physical aspect of the middle-world, there is the energetic, or shamanic, middle-world. Again, this is a mixed bag. For example, we may feel that particular places in the middle-world have an ’energy’ or vibe. This may feel positive, whether it is a natural place like a beautiful waterfall or a mountain top. Or it may be somewhere human-made, like a stunning cathedral or even a home that we love. Conversely, some places may feel bad or somehow ’wrong’ or ’dead'. We may pick up an uneasy energy in a place where something bad has happened. When I was describing the upper-world I said that we need to clothe what we experience as some kind of image or metaphor that we can work with. The same is true for the shamanic middle-world. For example, we may experience a place or person as having a heavy energy that does not feel right. If we tune in shamanically we will see that as some kind of imagery, such as a dark cloud above them, or a heavy shadow around them. We say someone is ’looking daggers’ at someone; if we look shamanically then we will actually graphically see the daggers. We can see the ’knife in the back’, the ’kick in the teeth’, the part that is ’rotting away’. The sickness, the emptiness, the addiction, the hostility, the fear, the despair — all these we see in the shamanic middle-world.
Waking up to the reality of the energetic middle-world can be sobering, disquieting and sometimes shocking and frightening. It is certainly not a place to start one’s shamanic journeying. It is one of the reasons in teaching shamanism that it is
important to give people clear instructions. Over the years, I have seen numerous examples of people being introduced to shamanic journeying with minimal instruction and clarity from the teacher. What I observed is that some of the time that worked out fine. However, there were some students who, because they had not been taught clearly, went straight into middle-world journeys and had experiences that freaked them out. A few times, when people had pre-existing mental health issues, this was pretty serious. Most of the time though, if people had a freaky experience then it simply put them off shamanism. They decided it was not for them. That is such a shame when that happens, as it is unnecessary and simply down to bad teaching. What I usually noticed was that the people doing the teaching in these situations were often themselves unclear about the different realms. They were themselves not clear about where they were and what they were doing when they were journeying (although not all of them realised this, by any means!). I have had some great shamanic journeys done for me over the years by other shamanic practitioners, but in all honesty, I have had plenty of others that have just been an absolute mess too; journeys that are a jumble of stuff from the different realms. In these cases, the journeys are also usually then mixed up with the practitioner’s own stuff too, and with stuff that is religious or new-age, and nothing to do with shamanism really. This is not all that surprising, considering we have a broken lineage of shamanism in this culture, and have been trying to piece it back together with little guidance or clarity. As a result, these days we have all sorts of religious and new-age beliefs and practices being confused with shamanism, and trainings of hugely variable quality.
As I said, middle-world shamanic journeying can be disturbing at times and in places. In reality though, we are already in the middle-world of course. We are just not seeing it clearly. So, when we are ready, waking up to the reality of what is going on around us is all for the good. For it means that we can start doing things to protect ourselves when necessary, and deal with difficult or hostile energies, and so on. It is not being aware of what is going on, and not knowing what to do about it, that is the dangerous state to be in. People say that if you put a frog in a saucepan of cold water and bring it slowly to the boil, then the frog will sit there till it dies. I have never tested this (and never will!), and do not even know if it is true. But it is a good analogy for how most people are living; unaware of the unhealthy energies and entanglements around them, as they are just so used to them and unaware of the damage being done to them.
Shamanism is sometimes described as a process of ’waking up’ and facing things as they really are. Shamanic middle-world journeys are an essential part of shamanic healing, in terms of dealing with unhealthy energies, possessions, unhealthy entanglements, soul loss, and so on. After all, the middle-world is the place where these things happen in the first place. In doing middle-world work though we need to have our wits about us and not take things at face value. We need to take seriously issues about protection and good energy hygiene, and take appropriate steps to protect ourselves. Plus (very importantly), we need to know our limitations and when we are out of our depth.
So yes, doing shamanic middle-world work is indeed important, but only once we are properly ready for it, and able to do it safely. To get to that point requires a firm and solid connection with the lower and upper-worlds first, and that is only acquired by repeatedly journeying in the lower and upper realms. For that reason, doing middle-world is outside the scope of this introductory book (it is something I will cover in later books in this series), and why the second book in this series will be devoted to lower-world journeying, and the third book devoted to upper-world work. The middle-world is notoriously tricky and often a confusing and deceptive place to journey in. Being firmly allied with, and anchored to, both the upper and lower-worlds is essential for giving us the perspective to see with clarity what is really going on in the middle-world, without distortion. In order to develop a deep and strong connection with the upper and lower worlds, to be able to really experience them, we need to be able to disentangle from the middle-world when we journey. To do that, we need to be able to ’hollow out’.
’Hollowing-out’ and the middle-world.
To understand what I mean by ’hollowing-out’ in Therapeutic Shamanism, it is necessary to understand something more of the nature of middle-world reality. Remember I said that the middle-world consists of both the physical things in the world, and non-physical things; the ’seen’ and the ’unseen'. Remember too that the word ’shaman’ means ’one who can see in the dark’ — someone who can see the ’unseen’ things. The non-physical things are many and varied, but include our thoughts, emotions, beliefs and other energies.
Compared to the upper and lower-worlds, the middle-world is the world of separation and individual identity. It is the world of this thing (this individual
person, piece of cheese, donkey, idea, individual rock, electron etc.) as opposed to that one. It is full of different things. Really, really full of things. All of the individual things; all the animal species; all the plants, all the different rocks and minerals; all the grains of sand on all the beaches; all the stars in our galaxy; all the galaxies in the universe; all the atoms in the universe; all the sub-atomic particles in the universe; and all the other stuff too! Then taking animals and plants, not just the thousands upon thousands of different species, but all the actual individuals of those species.
With animals and plants, each individual has its own life and needs, and a desire to live and succeed. In the lower-world we can work with Tiger as a loving and wise teacher and guide by working with the Oversoul of Tiger. An Oversoul is a branch of Mother Earth in the lower-world that represents the whole of a particular species. So, in the case of tigers, Tiger Oversoul in the lower-world is all tigers, the whole of the species. All the individual tigers in the middle-world are projections from this Oversoul; twigs belonging to a branch. Whilst you can safely work with Tiger in the lower-world, and receive Tiger’s gifts and healing, to an individual tiger in the middle-world you are still prey though! In the middle-world, for all its beauty, nature is indeed red in both tooth and claw. In the middle-world, although there are degrees of cooperation in places, it is also a place of the survival of the fittest, and of things eating other things, and competing with other things to survive.
Take humans. There are nearly eight billion of us. Eight billion individuals, each of us with our own aspirations, needs and wants, desires, hopes, agendas, loyalties, entanglements, scripts, fears, phobias, aversions, prejudices, loves, attractions, delusions, opinions, aspirations, beliefs and so on. Again, there is much cooperation, but there is undeniably much competition too; within families, at work, between communities, between businesses, between religions and ideologies, and between nations.
Aside from all the physical stuff that we humans have created in the middle-world (all the mobile phones, cars, televisions, cameras, shoes, plastic, pens, buttons, bridges, plant pots, teabags, and so-on, and on and on), think about the nonphysical stuff that we have created too. There are all the concepts and ideas: all the religions, with their endless factions and sects; political ideologies (again with endless factions and divisions); anthropology; economics; sociology; philosophy; psychology; laws; social conventions and manners; sexism; racism; homophobia;
conspiracy theories; the internet; goths and hippies; nations; on and on again. There are sports and games. Football, golf and rugby clubs. Teams to support. Competitions to be won or lost. There are corporations and banks. Clubs and committees. Charites. Trade unions. So many things.
Now let us take it down to the personal level. Take me for example. Amongst many, many other things I am ’Paul Francis’. I am ’male’. I am the ’son of a vicar’. I am a ’teacher’. I am ’British’. Now let us look at these. ’Paul Francis’ is just a name — a collection of letters when written, a sound when spoken, a series of gestures in sign language. It does not have any objective meaning or identity other than the stories and ’identity’ that I (and others) give to it. What does being ’male’ mean? Aside from biology, it is a whole miasma of socially-defined concepts, and notoriously hard to define and for people to agree on. ’Son of a vicar’ is a whole web of stories that I bring to it. ’What does it mean to be ’a teacher’? British’ is a human construct, and again notoriously hard to define and for people to agree upon.
The stories that make the ego.
Almost everything about who we think we are, about how we define ourselves, is just collection of stories. Personal stories, family stories, societal stories — all stories. These stories are what make our middle-world sense of self as an individual — the ego. This is what the ego is. The ego is a collection of stories; As such, it is a middle-world construct. It is a made-up thing. It is something that we created for ourselves, and co-created with others. And the process of making it was mostly done unconsciously, with little awareness of what we were really doing. The more we hold onto the stories, the more tightly we identify ourselves with our middleworld ego construct. It becomes a habit, our default position. We reinforce it by going over and over the stories in our minds, by telling them over and over again to other people, and by rejecting and denying anything that does not fit or that challenges the stories. We think ’this is who I am'. We then experience this as being who we are. This is what shamans mean when they say that things ’are as they are because of the stories they are telling themselves’.
In reality, the middle-world self is a mask. It is what Carl Jung called the ’persona’ (from the Latin for ’mask). It is the face we present to the world. The problem is that we come to think that the mask is who we actually are. To wake up to our real-self involves realising that this persona is, in fact, just a mask that a deeper self is
wearing. The practice and process of doing this is common to many spiritual paths and traditions, including shamanism. In meditation practice for example, instead of being caught up in our thoughts (the stories), we may watch them instead. So, we become aware that there is another ’I’ who is able to watch the stories. Doing this helps us to begin to separate from the stories; to realise that we are not the stories, but something else entirely. This is what shamans mean by ’hollowing-out’. It is the process of becoming the ’witness’, or ’aware self’; the part of us that can step away from the middle-world stories.
The shaman’s true source of power.
Hollowing-out has two functions in shamanism. The power of a true shamanic practitioner comes not from the practitioner, but from their ability to hollow-out and let greater, wiser spirits (their guides) work through them. It is not the shamanic practitioner who does the healing, but their guides working through them. The job of the practitioner is to ask for the healing, and then hollow-out and be a vessel (in shamanism, the ’hollow bone') that the guides can work through. Putting it slightly differently, a practitioner is said to become a ’bone flute’ - an instrument for the wiser, healing spirits.
The other function of hollowing-out is that it means that it is the ’aware self’ who journeys, not our middle-world (ego) self. The more a shamanic practitioner can let go of their middle-world identity, and instead journey as their aware self, the less they will get in the way of their guides, and be able to let their guides work through them. So too, when journeying, the more I can let go of my attachment to being the middle-world construct ’Paul Francis', the more I can then truly experience being something else, such as Yew Tree, or Panther, or one of the Stone People. The depth and extent to which a practitioner can hollow-out determines the depth and extent to which they can do real, spirit-led, truthful shamanic journeys (rather than journeys coloured, driven and distorted by the practitioner's ego). This is what shamans mean when they say that to become a shaman ’the past has to die', or that we have to ’die to the past’. The stories have to go. Or at least, we need to be able to step away from them when journeying (they are sometimes useful clothing to put back on again, when going about our ordinary, day-to-day lives!).
The past has to die.
Not surprisingly then, central to shamanism are techniques and practices to help with this process of dying to the past. These are known as the recapitulation techniques. They are many and varied. Whatever ones we choose to adopt and practice, they are central to developing one’s shamanic work and abilities. They are not magical cures. Rather, like developing a meditation practice, they take work, repetition and dedication. The more that you do them though, the more your shamanic journeys and understanding opens up and develops, because you can go deeper and your guides can teach you more.
The recapitulation practices have another interesting effect too. Shamanism is essentially a multiverse model. There are an infinite number of alternate universes. Every decision we make determines which universe we will step into. There is the universe where I get to the end of my street and turn left to go to the beach, and there is the universe where instead I turn right and walk into town. There is also the universe where I did neither of those things, but stay at home. We talk about ’the’ future as if it is one thing. In reality, the future is not set, and there are an infinite number of different futures, all of which happen. So, take a moment to think about this: of all the possible universes that you could have ended up in, what decisions did you make (whether consciously or not) that led you to this one? This exact and particular one?
Some things we have no control over or choice about, such as the laws of physics, or the existence of things like the moon, the sea, or spiders. Others are choices made not on an individual level, but on a more collective human level — the existence of tennis, Sweden, child poverty, Monsanto etc.. These are things that on an individual level we may feel that we have little or no real control over. Other things are personal. Many of these are made unconsciously (sometimes even against the will of our conscious mind!), and so again may have only limited control over them in reality. These things are made by our habits — the stories we unconsciously tell ourselves; the scripts that we unconsciously live by. It is because so much of the decision making behind our choices is done at an unconscious level, that habits can be so notoriously hard to change and break. As well as habits, they include all sorts of voices in our head saying stuff like “I don’t deserve... when this happens you just have to. I must always... I must not. in order to fit in I have to. my role is. my duty is. my responsibility is. my destiny is... it's my fate/karma... people won't like me if I... people will like me if I...”. Our heads are full of this stuff, sometimes running in the foreground, but constantly running in the background.
The problem with this stuff is that it gets in the way of journeying. Sometimes it literally makes journeying impossible. If our head is so full of middle-world chatter that we cannot get some distance from, then we cannot concentrate enough to be able to do a shamanic journey. But the chatter can get in the way in a much more insidious way too. We may think we are doing a great journey, full of rich imagery and metaphors. However, if we have not consciously hollowed out from our middle-world beliefs and scripts, then these will be colouring and distorting our journeying, in ways that we will not be conscious of.
Choosing our guides wisely and carefully.
So, in order to not let our own stuff get in the way of shamanic journeying, or at least minimise it as much as we can, hollowing-out is essential. There are other reasons though why we need to hollow-out from the middle-world. Compared to the wise, loving and transcendent beings of the upper and lower worlds, middleworld beings are vastly more limited. Some middle-world beings may have some wisdom and be loving of course, but nothing like true upper and lower-world guides. In the end, middle-world beings are bound by the same limitations as the rest of the middle-world. They have their own history, stories, habits, blind-spots, opinions, agendas and so on. The world over, human history is full of examples of people being taken in by false prophets, or charismatic leaders who turn out to be insane, deluded or manipulative. And like some people, some middle-world guides act in ways that are selfish, cunning, manipulative, deluded, spiteful, seductive, and deceitful. All over the world, there are stories about the need to be careful of trickster spirits posing as guides when doing this kind of work.
In choosing our shamanic guides and teachers, we need to choose carefully. That goes for choosing our physical, human teachers in this reality too. No human is perfect of course, and we all have our baggage and blind spots. So, in a human teacher we need to choose somebody with a good degree of self-awareness, and who is relatively sane, grounded, and who has some humility. In choosing our nonhuman shamanic teachers we need to be no less careful. But here we have a much greater range of choices. If we choose a middle-world guide, it could be a Chinese doctor from the fourth century A.D., or our deceased aunty Edna, or an alchemist from Elizabethan England. However, no matter how wise and well-intentioned these guides may be, in the end they are still middle-world beings with limitations, and so this will colour and limit our shamanic work. Or, instead of choosing
middle-world guides, we can choose to work with (the infinitely wiser) upper-world and lower-world guides instead. It is a bit of a no-brainer really. There is no sensible reason to choose limited beings as guides, when instead you can choose to work with wiser beings. Which is why in Therapeutic Shamanism, although at times we may work with middle-world beings when necessary (in doing middle-world journeys), our constant and true shamanic guides and teachers are lower-world and upper-world beings. The trick though, is knowing whether a guide is indeed truly a lower-world (or upper-world) being, or a middle-world being masquerading as one. Not all shamanic practitioner's guides are who the practitioner thinks they are, because the only way to be sure is to practice hollowing-out; to really be in the upper or lower-worlds, free of middle-world distortions. That is why hollowing-out from the middle-world is at the heart of Therapeutic Shamanism practice.
Like learning meditation, hollowing-out is something that is in essence simple. It just takes practice, and gets easier with time. Unlike learning meditation though, hollowing-out can get easier pretty quickly (enough to make a really major difference to the depth and integrity of one's shamanic journeying). In some ways, it is a small tweak, but it is one that makes an absolutely massive difference. Indeed, it makes all the difference. I know this to be true for me personally. In my mid-30s I realised that although I had great guides in many ways, my work definitely had a middle-world edge and flavour to it, and I no longer liked the consequences of that. I got rid of all but one of my guides, practiced hollowing-out, found new guides who I was certain were truly of the upper and lower worlds, and started all over again. The change in the quality and depth of my journeying and learning was startling, and took me by surprise. Since then I have seen the same thing in the students I have taught. I go on and on about hollowing-out from the middle-world with new students, and it takes people a few weeks or months to get it, but once they do, their work transforms. I have witnessed this process many times now.
Stalking oneself.
There are lots of specific hollowing-out practices, but at its most simple it involves two things. The first is what is called ’stalking oneself'. It means like a hunter, being focused, vigilant and alert. What you are looking out for (hunting) is any of your own middle-world thoughts, opinions, interpretations, agendas and so on appearing. You do this in order to put them aside when you become aware of them; to step away from them as much as you can. A successful hunter is determinedly focused
on the quarry, and in doing so needs to be alert to anything that will get in the way — any dangers, distractions or false trails. When journeying, how successful the journey is will depend upon how alert you are to the distortions, distractions and false trails that come from your own middle-world thoughts, stories, beliefs, and drives. It is similar in a way to awareness meditation practices, in that one watches and is aware of one's thoughts as they arise, but tries to not get caught up in them. Or similar to the way that a therapist has to ’watch’ their own opinions, judgements, and other ’stuff', and put them aside in order to be able to really meet the client. I do not do endurance sports like long-distance running, but I am sure there is a similar process of keeping focused on the goal, and not getting caught up in thoughts of giving up. I am sure those of you who paint, play musical instruments, or various other things have a similar process.
The important thing here is to know that this stalking of oneself is crucial, and to keep that firmly in mind and try to do it whilst journeying. Bad journeying is simply often that people just do not know how important this is, or even have any concept of it. Once you understand how important it is though, and start doing it, then the improvement is enormous. Obviously, our ability to do it depends upon our level of self-awareness and mental discipline. And developing these things is, of course, a life-long practice. The point is we start where we are, and practise.
How a plant grows (and what this teaches us).
The second important aspect of hollowing-out really is very simple to both learn and to do. It is simply to watch for any middle-world imagery or things bleeding into your journeys, and be aware when it is happening. Think about how a plant grows. The first thing a plant seed does is reach down to Mother Earth by growing roots, and then drawing Mother Earth up into itself. It is only once it has established this connection with the earth that it then reaches up to Father Sun, and draws him into itself. Only then does the plant start to expand sideways. The most important of these connections initially are the roots. If a plant tries to grow upwards too quickly, without having established its roots, it will be top-heavy and unbalanced. Likewise, if a plant tries to grow and expand outwards too quickly, without a strong connection to the earth and the sky, then it will be sickly and weak. Plants are great teachers of many things, and one of their teachings is the steps we should take, and the order in which to do things when learning to journey. The first thing we need to do in learning shamanism is to establish a deep, strong and rooted
connection with the lower-world and Mother Earth, to keep our practice safe and grounded. Only once we have done this do we then reach up to the upper-world, and establish a strong connection with Father Sun. And only then, once we have established those strong connections with both the lower and upper worlds are we ready to embark on middle-world journeying in a healthy way.
If you look around the modern world though, most people are sickly plants with shallow roots, caught up in the middle-world. And in terms of spirituality and religion, although there certainly are some healthy examples in places in the modern world, it is also undeniably true that much of it is caught up in the middle-world too; caught up in politics, ungrounded beliefs, sects and rival factions, artefacts and objects, buildings, politics, power and money. So too, much of modern spirituality can be top-heavy, with an overdeveloped connection to the upper-world, not balanced by strong and grounding roots.
In the modern world, we are mostly raised in a culture with little healthy connection to Mother Earth. We treat animals, plants and the earth itself with little thought or gratitude — just things to be used and consumed. Religions often reinforce this, telling us that the earth is corrupt and lesser, and that we should focus instead on ’higher’ things. In shamanism, we call this the Mother Wound, and it has caused us (and in turn, the other beings we share the earth with) incredible damage. Why it happened, the extent of it, and the key role shamanism can have in healing it, is something that I will return to later on. But for now, let us return to Plant as teacher. For most plants, their most important connection is their roots. Most plants can survive their above-ground parts being cut, eaten or burnt, but as long as the roots survive, they can grow back again. Our human ancestors too lived with a deep and heartfelt sense of their connection to the other animals, plants, rocks and to Mother Earth. To re-grow a healthy, grounded shamanic spiritual practice, we need to start off learning to journey in the lower-world and develop our roots.
To do this we need to be truly in the lower-world. The problem is we are used to being in the middle-world. For most of us, it is the only world that we have known. In this day and age, even much of what passes for lower or upper-world experience is still in fact just the middle-world in disguise. So, it is no surprise that when people start learning to do shamanic journeying their journeys are usually entangled up with middle-world stuff and objects. So, in learning to do lower-world journeys and make sure our shamanic practice is rooted in healthy earth, it is crucial to know the
signs to look out for; to be able to sort out what is truly the lower-world, and what is middle-world stuff bleeding in. As I said earlier though, luckily for most people it is easy to do, it is simply a matter of knowing its importance, and doing it.
So, remember, the lower-world is pure, unspoilt nature. There are people there, but they are hunter-gathers, living in absolute harmony with nature. That is Stone Age culture. That means there is no agriculture. So, no fences or fields, no domesticated animals or plants, no farms or hedgerows. There are no roads, no churches or temples or castles, no towns or cities. There are no large buildings. People would be living in simple dwellings such as yurts, tepees, wigwams, or benders, or mud huts. There is no metalwork. So no metal goblets, bowls or cooking pots, knives or swords, bangles, bracelets or amulets.
In the next chapter, we are going to get down to doing some practical exercises, up to and including doing shamanic journeys to the lower-world and meeting a Power Animal. So, when doing these you just need to remember to hollow-out from the middle-world, by spotting the signs of the middle-world intruding. If you see any of these in your journey, then you are still in the middle-world, or allowing the middle-world to bleed in. So, you need to shut that imagery out and not engage with it, and/or drop deeper down towards the lower-world (I will explain more in the following chapter).
There are a couple of other signs that the middle-world is bleeding in, or that you are in the middle-world. Remember that the lower-world is a place of absolute safety and healing. It always feels deeply safe, safer then here ever feels. If you do not feel safe, or even just feel uneasy, that is a sure sign of middle-world energy. So, if you do ever feel unsafe or uneasy when journeying, pay attention to that and know it for what it is. The other thing is that both the lower-world and the upper-world generally feel slow and steady. By contrast, the middle-world very often can feel like things are moving too fast, and that things are disjointed and disconcerting. Again, this is a sign of middle-world energy and you need to realise that is what is going on, and drop deeper towards the lower-world.
I will remind you of what to look out for in the following chapter before doing the actual journeys, and explain in more detail what to do about it when you spot it. Once you know what to look out for, then with only a little practice it becomes easy to spot when middle-world stuff is around, and take appropriate action. After only
a relatively short while, you begin to realise that the different worlds do in fact feel very different indeed. The middle-world, even the nice bits of it, feels decidedly murkier than the other two worlds, and becomes easy to spot.
Chapter Four
Getting Down To It: how to do your first shamanic journey.
In this chapter, I am going to show you how to do a shamanic journey. We will be starting off with you doing a journey to the shamanic lower-world, with the intent of meeting your Power Animal. Over the years, I have taught journeying to hundreds upon hundreds of people. When I first started teaching, I found that most people who want to learn to journey can learn how to do it successfully. On beginners’ courses that I taught, out of every ten people, maybe five people would find it easy and it came naturally to them, four people would find it fairly easy and just needed a bit of practice, and one out of ten people would find it difficult or impossible. It was those one in ten people who intrigued me. I spent hours and hours talking to them, questioning them, and trying to find out exactly what had gone on for them. Through that process, I learnt a lot about journeying, about which parts of the brain are involved, about what gets in the way, and what to do about it. I tweaked and adjusted my teaching accordingly, and these days it is quite rare that I find anybody who cannot journey at all. What has made the difference is not rushing into journeying, but taking a step-by-step approach to it. For some people, they just ’get it’, and need little or no instruction. But for most people, what works is to take it one step at a time, and have a little bit of help over the common stumbling blocks. So, over this chapter I am going to take you step-by-step through the process, and try and address any obstacles you may encounter along the way. By doing that, hopefully by the end of the chapter (if you do the exercises!) you will have done a successful journey to the shamanic lower-world, and met your Power Animal.
Getting Clear: some common mistakes and misconceptions.
The first thing I need to say is that shamanic journeying is an active, not a passive, experience. Many people think that it is going to be a bit like going to the cinema. All you have to do is sit back and relax, and this wonderful scene will play out in front of you, without any effort on your part. It is not like that at all (well, when
you are experienced at it, then sometimes it is, but not that often!). It is not something that is just going to happen to you. It requires an act of willpower and concentration on your part. This is not to say that it is difficult. Riding a bike, driving a car, reading a book - all these require both a set of skills that need to be learnt and practised, and concentration. Learning to journey is no different in that respect (but learning the basics of journeying is usually considerably easier and quicker than learning to read, or play the guitar, for example).
So, what journeying requires is for you to make it happen. Specifically, it requires a deliberate act of moving away from left-brain thinking, and instead moving into creative right-brain allowing. Remember, our brain is physically divided into two halves or hemispheres. The left hemisphere is hard-wired to perceiving and processing ordinary, everyday, reality. It deals with ’facts’ and logic. It only deals with what can be observed with the five senses, or what can be deduced by logic and mathematics. The right hemisphere is hard-wired to perceiving and processing non-ordinary, shamanic, reality. It deals with feelings; with intuitions, hunches, and impressions. Whereas the left-brain works through facts and logic, the right-brain works through dreams, imagery, art, poetry, music, and imagination. Remember too that the left-brain is concerned with separation and the sense of individual self, and the right-brain is concerned with inter-connectedness and a sense of union.
As I said earlier, the two hemispheres of the brain both have their essential role and function. The left-brain is excellent with dealing with the physical world and with looking after the self. The left hemisphere helps us to be present and survive in the physical world, and make rational and practical decisions. However, if we only live through the left-brain, then life becomes all about survival, and all about self. There are two big problems with this. One is that it is simply not very enjoyable. We are cutting ourselves off from being able to enjoy poetry, art and music; from being able to appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or the perfume of a flower. This is a cost that those who are overly left-brain orientated pay. The other cost is selfishness. We are a communal and cooperative species. Our survival as individuals is based on this. This was particularly apparent in hunter-gatherer times. To survive as an individual in those times, separate from tribe, would have been impossible in the long term. Individuals survived because they worked as part of a tribe. They had each other’s backs, and looked out for and cared for each other.
The ability to transcend selfishness, and feel connection, compassion, care and love
for others, is a function of the right hemisphere. To not only survive, but to thrive and live a full, meaningful, rich and enjoyable life necessitated using both hemispheres of the brain. From what we know about hunter-gatherer cultures, both hemispheres seem to have been in balance in people. It is only in modern times that we have lost that balance, and our left hemisphere has become dominant, leading to the self-centred and disconnected times we find ourselves in. As to why that has happened, we will explore that in a later chapter. For now, it is enough to understand that learning to journey is the deliberate act of moving one’s attention from the left-brain and to the right-brain. Shamanic, indigenous people did this with ease and at will. In fact, for them the two different worlds, the ordinary and the shamanic, ran in parallel. They were both aware of the physical rocks, trees, animals and so on, and the spirits and energy behind them. They also experienced a sense of self and individuality, whilst equally and at the same time experiencing a sense of inter-connectedness and belonging. That is how your ancestors lived and experienced the world they lived in. They could also move their attention between the two worlds at will. So, when needed, they could bring all their attention into ordinary reality (for example, when hunting and tracking), and then at other times choose to put all their attention into shamanic reality (for example, when doing a shamanic journey).
Maybe reading this has got you worried as to whether you will be able to journey though, because you do not think of yourself as being an artistic, right-brained person. It is often true that artistic people can take to journeying more quickly, as they are already more used to drawing on their right-brain. However, I myself am not what would usually be described as an ’artistic’ person, in that I can only paint and draw badly, and I certainly cannot write poetry (well, not anything that you would want to read!). I am no good at writing fiction, and I do not play a musical instrument any more. None of this has held me back from journeying however. For the reality is, if you have a right side of the brain then you can imagine stuff, and you can journey. Remember, having the two hemispheres of the brain in balance is actually our natural and healthy state, and how we have lived for the vast majority of human history. What we are seeking to do, to be able to journey, is to return things back to their natural balance. Anyway, I wish to show you with the following exercises that you can, in fact, imagine things.
Exercise one: simple imagining.
You can read through the following exercise and memorise it before doing it, or read it into your phone or another recording device and then play it back to yourself.
Closeyour eyes.
Take a moment to take a few deep breaths and come into your body.
Slowly let yourself become aware of any tension you are holding in your body, and with each out-breath see if you can let that tension relax.
With each out-breath become more relaxed.
Now imagine in your hands you are holding a book. If it helps to physically move your hands to do this, then please do so. Feel the weight of the book in your hands.
Feel the texture of it.
Notice what kind of a book you have imagined. Is it a paperback, hardback, dusty leather bound volume?
What size is it?
What colour is it?
Is it old or new?
How does itfeel in your hands when you flick through the pages?
What colour is the cover?
Put the book down and open your eyes, and become aware of your body and the room you are in.
Thie majority of people can do that. If you found you could not, just try it again and really use your willpower. Be really single-minded, determined and dogged about it. If you are still struggling, then know this: I can pretty much guarantee that your right-brain is doing it fine. The problem is that your left-brain is getting in the
way. The left-brain can be a bully. Like all bullies, it wants to be in control. And like all bullies, it needs to be stood up to. One of its greatest tricks is to undermine your confidence in what you are imagining, and make you dismiss it. It says ’you just made that up’, and says it in a pompous and confident way that implies that making things up has no use or validity. It is talking rubbish! It is true that you made it up, but there is no such thing as ’just’ making things up. Think about an author writing a novel, or a screenwriter writing a screenplay. If every time they went to type something their left-brain said to them ’you just made that up’, and they then went ’oh, yeah, right’ and their shoulders slumped and they stopped typing, then nothing would be written. There would be no bedtime stories, no novels, no poetry, no plays, no films. If composers and artists did the same there would be no music, no art. That is not a world I would want to live in. It is not just the obvious ’arts’ that would be missing either. It would be a world without vision of any kind. Even many of the great breakthroughs in science, technology, and engineering required vision and imagination. And on a personal level imagination is our hopes, our dreams, our vision of the life we want to live.
So, if your left-brain is trying to get in the way, you need to politely but firmly tell it to shut up. You need to tell it ’yes I am imagining this, and that is what I am choosing to do now, so for now you need to shut up’. Some people find this easy, but for most people it requires practice. However, once you know that is what you need to do, it is just a question of keeping doing it, and like most things, it just gets easier with practice.
If you found the exercise easy, then great! Try doing it again, this time pay even closer attention and add in finer details. Like painting or playing an instrument, it just gets better and better with practice. Practising imagining things is something I do regularly and often, to keep my imagination ’muscles’ in shape.
It is not always visual.
In talking to the people who found journeying difficult initially, one of the things I noticed was that they were expecting it to be visual. This is not entirely surprising since as a species we are highly visually-orientated. We are primates, and as such sight is our primary sense. We use it to look the food and look for danger. Of our five senses, it is the one we most habitually ’inhabit’. As such, sight can keep us rooted in physical, ordinary reality, which makes shamanic journeying hard. It is for
this reason that shamanic journeying is usually done in the dark, to cut sight off. In indigenous cultures, often it is done at night-time (and remember, in the days before artificial lighting, their night-times would have been vastly darker than what we are used to). Often journeys were done deep in the earth in dark caves, or in dark yurts, long-houses or tepees. In many cultures, masks or eye coverings were used. In some cultures, blind people were considered to be better at shamanic journeying, with some cultures even going so far as to deliberately blind apprentice shamans. In most instances though, wearing a blindfold will do! It is not absolutely essential, but whilst you are learning to journey it can be of huge help, and is really worth trying. So, for the next exercises in this chapter I do strongly suggest that you have a blindfold to hand to use whilst doing the exercises. A scarf tied around your head will do.
Once you are imagining and/or journeying, for some people it will still be quite visual. But (and this is important!) not for everybody. With many of the people who said they were struggling to journey, what I found was that they were in fact journeying, but just not realising it because they were dismissing the non-visual things that were happening, and not paying attention to them. It is important to learn to pay attention to the non-visual. From my own experience, my journeys are sometimes very visual and sometimes not at all. What I do know is that whenever I get stuck in a journey, all I need to do is to deliberately turn my attention to different senses; ’what can I smell, or hear, or taste, sense or intuit?’ and then the journey will start up again.
Exercise two: detailed imagination.
In this exercise, we are going to take things a bit further, going deeper into a rightbrain state, and explore imagining in the different senses (in terms of vision, sound, smell, taste, etc.). Again, you need to read through this exercise, remember it, and then close your eyes and do it. Or again you could read this exercise aloud and record it on your smart phone or another recording device, then close your eyes and play it back to yourself The exercise starts with a simple ’hollowing-out’ process, to step away from left-brain, ordinary consciousness, and from middleworld thoughts, concerns and distractions. It then goes more deeply into the realm of right-brain imagining and consciousness.
Make sure you are sitting comfortably. Close your eyes. Bringyour attention to your breathing.
Allow yourself to become aware of how your body moves as you breathe.
Just notice the inflow and outflow of your breath.
As you are doing this, allow yourself to become aware of any tension held in your body.
As you become aware of any tension, with each out-breath, see if you can let that tension relax.
Allow your body to become more relaxed with each out-breath.
Now, ask yourself what thoughts, issues or concerns are you carrying around in your head right now. Just notice whatever pops into your mind. And as you become aware of what the issue is, simply notice it, and, without getting caught up in it, simply put it to one side. You don't have to deal with whatever it is right now, you can always come back to it later if you wish.
Ask yourself a second time, what other thoughts, issues or concerns you are carrying around in your head right now. Again, just notice whatever pops into your mind. And as you become aware of what the issue is, simply notice it, and, without getting caught up in it, simply put it to one side. Knowing that you don't have to deal with whatever is right now,you can always come back to it later if you want.
Now one last time, ask yourself what other thoughts or issues or concerns are you carrying around in your head right now. Notice what it is, and put it to one side for now too.
Now, imagine that you are standing at the side of a beautiful wild-flower meadow. As you look out across the meadow, in the centre of the meadow you notice a single tree is growing. Looking at the tree, describe to yourself.
What kind of the tree is it?
As if you were writing a descriptive novel, describe the tree in detail.
How big is it?
What shape is it?
How old is it?
Go over to it and examine it in detail. Look at the leaves close up.
Examine the bark.
Touch the bark with your hands and see what it feels like.
Sit on the ground with your back leaning against the tree, and relax. Knowing that you are completely safe.
As you do so, sink back a little way into the tree.
Imagine being that tree, standing rooted and drawing water and nutrients up from the earth.
Drawing energy from the sun.
Breathing the carbon dioxide that you need from the air, through your leaves.
You feel unhurried.
There is nowhere else you need to be.
Everythingyou need is already around you.
You can slow down and relax, seeing the seasons come and go.
Calmly watching the years pass by.
Be Tree.
Now it is time to leave the tree.
Become aware of your body, leaning against the tree. Return to it.
Say goodbye and thank you to the tree.
Now stand up, and walk through the beautiful meadow.
Become aware of the weather. What kind of day is it?
What time of day is it?
What season of the year is it?
What is the temperature like?
Can you feel a breeze or the wind on your skin, or the warmth of the sun, or the chill of the air, or the fall of rain?
Become aware of what you are wearing.
Again, take time to describe what you are wearing in detail.
What noises can you hear?
Sniff the air. What can you smell on the breeze?
Looking down, notice the ground you are standing on.
Become aware of what the ground feels like under your feet.
Become aware of what you are wearing on yourfeet.
Looking around you, become aware of the plants you can see in the meadow.
Notice a plant that somehow grabs your attention.
Walk over to it and sit in front of it.
Examine it in detail. Again, as if writing a story, describe the plant in as much detail as you can.
Now pick a small part of the plant (the plant won’t mind — that is why it called you over). Place it on the palm of one of your hands and look at it.
Now rub it between yourfingers and feel its texture. Bringyourfingers up to your nose to smell the plant’s scent.
Now place the plant part in your mouth (no need to be worried about it being poisonous — we are safe in this realm), and become aware of the initial taste in your mouth.
Now, slowly and with awareness, chew the plant, and become aware of the taste. Notice how your body responds to this taste.
Now swallow the plant and feel its energy spreading out into your body. Allow yourself to become aware of this plant’s healing medicine.
Where does it go in your body?
What is its healing?
How does your body respond to it?
Now, bringyour attention back to the plant in front of you and thank it.
Now it is time to leave the meadow and finish this exercise. Bringyour awareness back to your physical body. Become aware of the sounds around you. Wiggle yourfingers and toes, and when you are ready, open your eyes.
Unpacking exercise two.
Again, if you found the exercise difficult, then just try again. It will come with practice. It may work to try doing it on another day. I have been journeying for decades now, and I still find that journeying is much easier on some days than it is on others. Or you could try a different time of day. Or come back to it in a week or so. You will also find that journeying can be difficult when we have middle-world ’stuff’ going on; when we are stressed, anxious, wound up, or worried about something.
Assuming you got on with the exercise, there are some things to notice...
-
• You probably found some bits of it easier than others. That is perfectly normal, and nothing to worry about. When it comes to journeying, some bits will be very clear, and other bits will be vague and hazy.
-
• You probably found some senses easier than others. Maybe you could not smell things, or taste the plant. Again, that is perfectly normal, and nothing to worry about. You can do journeys to deliberately practice working with senses you find difficult, until they become easier for you.
-
• Your mind may have wandered at times. Again, like a meditation, that is perfectly normal, and some days it happens more than others. It is just a matter of noticing when your attention has wandered, and then bringing your attention back to the task at hand; being the witness, rather than the wanderer.
-
• You may have found that it took some time for things to settle into a tangible form. For instance, it may have taken some time, and an act of concentration and willpower, to determine what kind of tree it was. Again, that is normal and happens a lot in journeys. You may also have noticed that the physical forms things had were quite loose and fluid, in that things change and morph into other things. That too is perfectly normal in journeys, and nothing to worry about. After all, it happens all the time in dreams, and seems perfectly normal to us when we are in a dream state.
-
• You may also have noticed that some bits seemed much more vivid than others. Some bits may have felt vague. Other bits may have felt very much like you were making it up. But some bits may have felt very real and not made up. Again, this is normal, particularly when you are new to this. The thing is, at this stage, not to worry about whether you are making stuff up or not (this is a very important point, something I will come back to later on).
-
• More often than not, there is a reason why we saw certain things, or imagine things in certain ways. It is not always the case that everything in a visualisation has meaning and significance. But it is the case that things often do. One way to find out if things do have significance is to do some
research on them. This is where the left-brain comes in. Go on the internet and look up the plant you saw. When I am researching plants on the internet there are four different searches I try. Let us say you were looking up a dandelion. First, you need to look up the Latin name for dandelion (it is ’taraxacum’). Then try searching:
o Dandelion flower essence.
o Dandelion magical uses.
o Taraxacum herbal uses.
o Taraxacum homeopathic uses.
Obviously, you can do the same thing with the tree you saw, and anything else you see in a visualisation or journey. Animals are easier to look up. Usually all you need to do is look up whatever animal it is with the word ’totem’ included - searching for ’Panther totem’ for example. Rocks and crystals are usually also easy. Just add the words ’healing properties’; search for ’Ruby healing properties’ for example. With other things, try adding the words symbolism and/or meaning. So, search ’mountain symbolism meaning’ for example. With only a bit of digging around and research, you often find that what you have seen and encountered is indeed highly significant. As you get into doing actual shamanic journeying you will find that, on researching the things you saw in the journey, they turn out to be jaw-droppingly and astonishingly spot-on and relevant. It is by having that experience, over and over again, that the left-brain realises that there is something in this journeying business after all. It then becomes fascinated with the process, and stops trying to get in the way (well, most of the time anyway!).
-
• Noticing the effect that the plant was having on you is a form of what is known in shamanism as ’groking’. To find out the healing properties of something, you tune into it and notice what you feel, and then ingest a minuscule amount of it and notice what happens to you. It is much more powerfully done in an actual shamanic journey. It can also be done in ordinary physical reality, by actually taking a small amount of the substance
(assuming of course that you are one-hundred percent sure that it is not poisonous!).
Preparing to do an actual journey.
All this, of course, is just warming up to doing the actual shamanic journey. To do that there are a few more things that need to be put into place. One thing is to come back to the issue of imagining things. As I have said, you need to ignore the left-brain saying you are ’just’ imagining things. Tell it to shut up. I cannot emphasise that enough! The reality is that you will only get going with journeying if you do imagine things. In fact, you need to purposefully and wilfully imagine things. There will be lots of times in journeys when you get stuck; when nothing seems to be happening. It is at those points you need to use your willpower to deliberately imagine something and make something happen. If you do that, you will be able to journey. In doing so what you will find is that, in the beginning, when you are new to journeying, a large portion of the journey is indeed made up. Maybe even ninety percent of it. But what you will find, after the journey when you go to look stuff up, is that some of it definitely was not made up, because you find out that it is astonishingly relevant and meaningful. Sometimes, even the bits that you really thought that you had ’just made up’ still can turn out to have surprising significance and meaning. What then happens is that, as you go on journeying, you worry less and less about whether you are making stuff up or not, and learn to surrender and trust the process. What you then find, in researching the journey afterward, is that less and less of it was just ’made up stuff’, and more and more of it is relevant. These days I find that ninety percent of what I encounter on a journey is highly meaningful and relevant (and on a good day, one hundred percent). I got there by practice, and a lot of allowing myself to ’make stuff up’.
So, when doing the following exercises, it may help to imagine that you are telling a story (you can do it out loud, or silently speaking the words in your mind). A good story needs good description, so pay attention to the details, including the smells, sounds, sensations and so on.
The next exercise is to do an actual shamanic journey. It is going to be a brief, guided journey, down to the shamanic lower-world to have a quick look around and then come back. To do a shamanic journey we usually start at a place called the ’axis mundi’. ’Axis’ means centre, and ’mundi’ means ’world’. So, the ’world’s centre’. Or
more accurately, a place where the different worlds come together. The axis mundi is a place in this reality where the veil that separates this world and the shamanic worlds is thin, and so it is a place where it is easy to step between the worlds. You may be surprised to know that axis mundii are in fact very common. They are all over the place. You will have already noticed them yourself, probably without realising or knowing that is what they are.
To find an axis mundi for you to work with, all you need to do is give yourself a moment to think about a place in this actual world, in nature, that you know and like, and feel good about. It might be some woodland where you walk the dog. Or a favourite tree. Or a beach or some mountains, some hills, or a lake that you know and love. It might even be in a park. In needs to be an actual, real place, not imaginary, as the whole point of an axis mundi is that it is a place that connects the worlds together, including this physical one. It is also crucial that it is somewhere in nature. [You might want to take a moment to do that now.]
In the journey, you are going to imagine yourself at this place in nature, and then look at the place anew, with your ’shamanic eyes'. In doing so you are going to notice the entrance to a tunnel. It may be under the roots of some trees, a small cave entrance, an animal hole, or even a pool of water that seems to have no bottom. It does not matter exactly what is, as long at its something natural and not human made. In the journey, you are going to spend a bit of time examining the entrance to the tunnel, and then entering the tunnel (shrinking down to do so if necessary!). You will follow the tunnel as it slopes gently downwards, and emerge from the tunnel’s exit and step out into the lower-world. This will not still be underground, but a complete new world, with sky, geology and vegetation. Remember, the lower-world is pristine nature. There are no cars or roads; no farms, hedges or fields, just beautiful nature. So, if where you arrive has any of these things then you are still in the middle-world. In that case, you need to go back into the tunnel, travel further down, and come out in the lower-world.
A word about getting into the tunnel. In teaching people, I have noticed that the entrance to the tunnel is a place where some people get stuck. This is simply more resistance from the left-brain. At some level, the left-brain knows that if it passes into the tunnel then it will have to let go and let the right-brain take over, and it does not want to relinquish control. It is also that the left-brain is rational and literal, and lacks imagination. The left-brain cannot understand how it is possible to
get into a hole or tunnel that may be too small to squeeze into. If this happens then you simply need to realise that this is what is going on (the left-brain being in charge), and approach it from the perspective of the right-brain, the imaginative brain, instead. Imagine a bigger tunnel entrance! After all, you are imagining it, so you can imagine it to be any size you wish. Or you could shrink until you are small enough (maybe eating the magic mushroom that helps you to do so). Or you may need to just squeeze and wriggle a bit! The point is that you use your imagination to do whatever is necessary to get into the tunnel, and then move a little way into it until it opens up enough for you to be able to stand up comfortably inside it.
Remember too that if you are truly in the lower-world then it will always feel safe. Nothing bad can happen there. If you do feel unsafe during the journey, or if things feel they are moving too fast, then you are in the middle-world again, or the middle-world is bleeding into the journey. In that case, you need to simply head deeper down, until you come to the purely lower-world again. To do this, you can go back to the tunnel and head deeper down and re-emerge. Or sometimes it works to simply ’will’ yourself to be lower down. Similarly, remember that the humans in the lower-world do not practice metal work. So there are no metal knives, bowls or jewellery etc.. All knives will be of flint or other sharpened stones such as obsidian. Jewellery will be made of shells, wood, bone, horn etc. If you come across any metal work, then ignore it (do not interact with it), and if that does not feel enough then head lower down. The same with clothing. The people you encounter in the lower-world will not be wearing jeans and shirts. They will not even be wearing silk, or any other such fabric from modern times. Again, if you come across anything like this, head lower down.
So now for the journey. Again, to do this I suggest you read this exercise out aloud and record it on your smart phone or another recording device. Read it slowly, allowing a pause between each sentence. Then when ready to do the journey you can play it back to yourself.
When you are ready to do the journey I strongly recommend using a blindfold, as discussed earlier. You can sit or lie down to do the journey. Some people find it easier to relax when lying down, but other people find if they lie down they tend to fall asleep; whatever suits you is fine. What is important is to do it in a place where you feel safe and know that you will not be disturbed (otherwise you will not be able to relax into it properly).
I also suggest you get some paper and pen and have it ready beside you before you do the journey. This is so that, as soon as you finish the journey, you can write your experience down whilst you can still remember it. It is often said that the job of the Shaman is to be able to go into shamanic reality and then bring the information back into this reality. We are all familiar with the experience of waking up from what we realise has been a deep and profound dream and thinking ’I must remember that', and then the memory of the dream disappearing despite our best efforts to remember it. It can be hard to bring the shamanic experience back into this realm and ordinary consciousness. The more we practice it, like most things, the easier it becomes. But it does take practice. What really alerted me to this was the experience of watching my students doing spoken journeys. This is the practice of journeying as a team, usually in pairs, threes, or fours. One person is leading the journey, and as they are doing so they are describing what is happening out loud, in real time. The other person or people are listening and following the person leading the journey, so that everybody is in the same journey together, having a shared experience. When they come out of the journey they help each other remember what happened and write it down. What amazed me the first few times I watched people doing this was that, even though they had all experienced the same thing only minutes earlier, in recounting the journey afterwards different people would have forgotten different parts of the journey, even quite crucial parts, until reminded by somebody else. The extent to which I saw this happening truly surprised me. So, I tried an experiment on myself. When on my own, I did a journey and, as I was journeying, I spoke the journey out loud, whilst recording it on a recording device. When I finished the journey, I sat and wrote down what I could remember. I then played back and listened to the recording, whilst at the same time reading what I had written down, When I did this I was shocked to realise how much I had forgotten in writing the journey down, even though I had written it down straight away. In experimenting further, I found that even leaving a relatively short gap between finishing the journey and writing it down meant that I forgot significantly more information again. As I said, recall of journeys gets better with practice (in experimenting on myself I found this to be true). But for the first few years of shamanic work, getting into the habit of writing journeys down as soon as you have done them is a very good habit to cultivate.
So now let us go to the lower-world.
Exercise three: a guided visit to the lower-world.
“Close your eyes, and become aware of your breathing.
Just notice the inflow and outflow of your breath.
As you are doing this, allow yourself to become aware of any tension held in your body.
As you become aware of any tension, with each out-breath see if you can let that tension go.
Allow your body to become more relaxed with each out-breath.
Now, ask yourself what thoughts, issues or concerns are you carrying around in your head right now. Just notice whatever pops into your mind. And as you become aware of what the issue is, simply notice it, and, without getting caught up in it, put it to one side. You don't have to deal with whatever it is right now, you can always come back to it later if you wish.
Now again, ask yourself what other thoughts, issues or concerns are you carrying around in your head right now. Again, just notice whatever pops into your mind, and as you become aware of what the issue is, simply notice it, and, without getting caught up in it, put it to one side. Again, you don't have to deal with whatever it is right now, you can always come back to it later.
Now one last time, ask yourself what other thoughts, issues or concerns are you carrying around in your head right now. Notice whatever it is, andput it to one side for now.
Now, imagine that you are drifting out of your body and being drawn to the place in nature that you thought of earlier. A place that you know and which you like. Picture yourself there, and examine your surroundings. In your mind's eye, describe to yourself the scene you see, as if you were writing a description for a story, or describing it to someone who can’t see it.
Describe the weather. Is it sunny, or cloudy, misty, warm, or cold? Is there a breeze or a wind? Or is it still?
What time of year is it?
What time of day or night is it?
Is there vegetation around? If so, describe it.
Are there any noises — like birds, animals, water? Describe them.
Are there any smells on the air?
Describe what you are wearing.
Feel the ground that you are walking on. Feel what it is like to walk on it.
Looking around, out of the corner of your eye, you now notice something — a natural opening of some kind — the entrance to a natural tunnel that leads underground. Go up to it and examine it. What size is it? What shape is it? Know this is an axis mundi; an entrance that leads to the shamanic lower-world.
Then,, imagine yourself easily and effortlessly entering the opening, doing whatever is necessary to do so.
Once inside the tunnel simply move into it enough until it widens and you can stand up comfortably inside it.
Take some time to pay attention to the tunnel. Notice what the floor is made of and how itfeels under yourfeet. Notice what the walls and ceiling are made of.
Now move deeper into the tunnel. As you do so, notice how the sounds change as you move deeper into it. Notice how the temperature changes. Notice the smells in the tunnel.
As you move deeper into the tunnel it starts to gently slope downwards. The deeper down you go, the more you can feel the middle-world dropping away behind you, as you move closer towards the lower-world.
Continue deeper and deeper still, drawing nearer to the lower-world.
Now the tunnel starts to gently level out again. Ahead of you, you can see the exit. Now, step out of the tunnel, into the beautiful, pristine natural landscape of the lower-world. Again, as if you were describing the scene to someone, take some time to describe what you see.
What can you see in the distance?
What can you see close up?
What is the ground like?
Now you are going to set off, in complete safety, and explore.
Pay attention to the environment you are moving through. What do you see?
What sounds can you hear as you explore?
What is the air like to breathe? Do you notice any smells on the air?
What is the temperature like? What time of day is it?
What time of year?
What is the weather like?
Eventually, you arrive at some kind of a clearing. Move a little way into the clearing. Now, remembering that you are completely safe here, you become aware of a friendly animal in the clearing with you.
Go over to it.
What kind of an animal is it? Describe it in detail.
Look at it from close up and notice what you can see.
You can touch it if you wish. If so, notice how itfeels.
Enjoy spending some time in the company of the animal.
Now it is time to come back. Say ’thankyou’ and goodbye to the animal. Say goodbye to the lower-world for the time being.
To come back, you do not need to retrace your steps back to the physical middle-world, as your physical body is your anchor and is already there. All you need to do is to become aware of your
physical body again. Become aware of the sensation of what you are sitting or lying on in the room that you are in. Take a few deep breaths, and be aware of your body moving as you breathe. Wriggle yourfingers and toes. If wearing headphones and/ or a blindfold then take them off, and become aware of the sounds in the room and open your eyes. Make sure that you are fully back here and in your body. ”
Now write your experience down before you forget anything! Write down every single thing that you can remember, no matter how insignificant or fleeting it may have felt.
If you managed to get down to the lower-world and have an encounter with an animal, then great — you are ready for the next step. If not, then please do not be discouraged. You just need to practice this exercise until it becomes clearer and feels easier. It sometimes takes people a few attempts. It is also just the case that some days journeying is easier than others. So, if you try again and it still is not working, then I would suggest try again another day.
Doing your first proper shamanic journey.
When you are ready, then the next step is to do a proper, free-style shamanic journey without a voice guiding you. Instead of a voice, you will be doing this to the shamanic drum. To do this you need a recording of shamanic drumming to listen to. These are easily available to buy online as CDs or digital downloads. You will also find them on Youtube. Alternatively, you may use the free downloads from the Three Ravens College website www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/downloads.html I would suggest starting with either a ten or a fifteen minute one for your first journey.
Again, you may sit or lie down to do this. It is important to be in a place where you feel safe and know that you will not be disturbed. As before, have a paper and pen ready for when you finish. And most people find a blindfold really helps greatly with this one.
To help you know when it is time to come back, most shamanic drumming recordings have what is known as the ’call-back'. The bulk of the drumming will be the standard shamanic journeying rhythm, a steady rhythm of around three to four beats a second. Towards the end of the session you will hear the drumming slow
down and then stop. This will be followed by thirty seconds of deliberately loud, fast and erratic drumming. This is the call-back, and your time to say thank you and goodbye to the lower-world (and whoever or whatever you have been engaging with), and come back to your body here in the middle-world. As before, you do not need to retrace your steps back to the middle-world; your physical body in the middle-world is your anchor and place to return to. All you need to do is to become aware of your physical body again, the sensation of what you are sitting or lying on, your breathing, and wriggle your fingers and/or toes.
Once the drumming starts, a good tip is to ignore it. Allowing the drumming to distract you during the journey is another classic trick the left-brain plays to sabotage things if it is allowed to. Pay the drumming no attention. Do not worry about missing the call-back. It is designed not to be missed. Just relax, let the drumming go, and concentrate on the journey instead.
In the journey, you are going to go to your axis mundi as before, and then go down the tunnel and step out into the lower-world as before. The place you step out into in the lower-world may be the same place you stepped out into in the last exercise, or somewhere different. It does not matter, as long as it is the lower-world. So, remember, no agriculture, no modern buildings, no metal-work and no modern fabrics, etc.. Again, if any of these appear at any point in the journey, go lower down. Once in the lower-world, set off and explore, with the intent of finding an animal and asking it for some healing. If you are struggling to find an animal, make one appear! Use your imagination. Call out to summon one. Do a dance to attract one. Sit and meditate and send your energy out to attract one. Fly up in the air (yes, you can fly if you choose to!) and soar high enough to spot an animal that you can swoop down to. Do whatever is needed. Remember to useyour imagination and willpower to make things happen whenever you get stuck in a journey, or whenever nothing seems to be happening.
Once you have found an animal, remembering that you are completely safe and that it (like all the Animals, Plants and Stones) has a healing gift for you, ask it for some healing. Now, healing in the lower-world can take many different forms, and some of the things that happen down there would feel (and be!) alarming in this middleworld, but feel absolutely fine and safe down there. So, the animal may do things like use its beak or claws to remove your liver, then wash it clean in a waterfall before putting it back into you. It may take things out of you that are not meant to
be there, such as unhelpful or untrue thoughts, dis-eases, other people's energy etc.. These will be in some symbolic form and appearance, such as a grey sludge, thorns, lumps or rock etc.. If anything is taken out of you then something healthy and healing will always be put in its place, such as healing herbs, crystals, energy etc.. In doing this, the animal is performing a classic shamanic extraction healing on you. It may tell you to eat certain plants, to rub yourself with certain muds, or wash in a waterfall. The animal may even eat you entirely, digest you, and then regurgitate you reformed and healed. This is also a classic shamanic healing known as a dismemberment — being taken apart and put back together whole and healed. Similarly, the animal may bury you, and then dig you up whole and healed (a resurrection - the Christians pinched this and called it Easter, of course!) or burn you to ash and then reform you from the ash.
Another thing that can happen is that you may experience riding the animal (even if it is as small as a mouse or a dove!). You may also experience becoming the animal, and experience what it is like to have a tail or claws, fur, feathers or wings. You may experience what it is like to run on four legs, swim like a fish, swing through trees like a monkey, burrow underground like a mole, or soar like a buzzard. This is classic shamanic shape-shifting, and a wonderful experience.
Remember that the point of the journey at this stage is to start to build your experience and connection with the lower-world, and central to doing this is to hollow-out from the middle-world. So, what should be happening in the journey are lower-world things and only lower-world things. There should be nothing middleworld going on. So, what should not be happening is the animal telling you about middle-world stuff and your life here. So, no advice about whether to apply for the new job or not, or whether to stay with your partner or leave them, or how to handle your difficult friend or work colleague. None of that sort of stuff, the things of your life here, should be in this journey at all. The lower-world is a transcendent place, outside of this earthly space-time, and way bigger and beyond your individual life here. Middle-world stuff is very likely to bleed in at times, your aim is to notice it, if and when it does, and weed it out.
In terms of what to ask for healing on, you can ask for something physical (healing on your bad back, headaches etc.) or something mental or emotional (anxiety, procrastination, lack of confidence etc.). Just ask for the thing to be healed though, and leave the middle-world stories and content about it behind. Or you can just ask
for a general healing if you prefer. Very, very importantly though, if your anxiety, lack of confidence or whatever is connected in some way to a person or people in this physical world (a critical parent, bullying partner, or whatever), it is entirely unethical to do anything to that person in this journey. In fact, if you are really hollowed-out, and really in the lower-world, the animals and other guides and helpers there just will not do it. They will not work on another person without their permission. So, if you do see that happening, then it is a sure sign that the middleworld is bleeding in or that you are not really in the lower-world. This really is a massively important point, and I will come back to it in detail in the chapter on doing shamanic healing for other people. But for now, the only person from your life in this physical reality who should be in this journey is you. This is a healing for you, in a place of healing far beyond the details of your life here.
You may work with the same animal throughout this journey, or different animals may appear. You may also meet a person (or more than one) who helps with the healing. Remember these should be lower-world shamans, not anyone from this physical reality.
Lastly, it is relatively common in journeys for things to periodically come to a halt. This does not mean that the journey is over, or that there is nothing more that needs doing. There is always more to do. If things do seem to come to a pause, it is a sign that you need to ask the animal (or shaman), ’what else needs to be done?’, or ’what now?'.
Exercise four: a lower-word shamanic journey to the drum.
Set up your recording of the drumming, ready to play either through speakers or headphones. Make sure that you will not be disturbed. Have paper and pen ready for when you finish. You may sit or lie down. Start the drumming and put your blindfold on. To do the journey, when the drumming starts you need to...
Go toyour axis mundi.
Enter the tunnel and travel down to the lower-world.
Set off and explore.
Encounter an animal and ask it for healing on whatever it is you want help with.
If things seem to come to a pause with the animal, ask it what next.
If things get stuck, make something happen. Useyour imagination.
Throughout the journey, watch out for any middle-world stuff bleeding in. Stay in the lower-world and do not interact with middle-world stuff.
If your left-brain tries to butt in, ignore it, orfirmly tell it to shut up.
On hearing the call-back, thank whatever animal(s) and people have been helpingyou, and come back to yourphysical body.
Make sure you are fully back in yourphysical body, and open your eyes.
Read through these things until they are clear in your mind, and you can fix them as a clear and focused intent.
Then, when you are ready, start the drumming, put your blindfold on, and set off to explore.
Have a good journey!
Finding your Power Animal.
Once you have done the last exercise (you can repeat it as many times as you like), and feel ready to move on, then the next step is to find your Power Animal and begin the process of bonding with it by doing a ’Power Animal retrieval'. Doing this will involve playing the drumming and journeying to the lower-world exactly as in the last exercise, the only difference being that instead of just finding any animal to ask for healing, this time you are going to find your Power Animal instead. Your Power Animal is an animal that you will have a special bond with, and which, should you take up shamanism, will become your constant and dearest companion, and your greatest guide, ally and teacher.
This journey will involve going to the lower-world and find a clearing, and with
clear and focused intent and determination, ask your Power Animal to appear. So, how do you know whether the animal that appears is your Power Animal, and not just any old animal? There are four different ways to know if the animal you meet is your Power Animal...
-
1. Ask it! It is surprising how often people forget this, or do not think of doing it. If the answer is yes, you may actually hear the animal speak, but more commonly you just ’hear’ the answer somehow in your head, like telepathy. Or the animal may do something that signals to you that it is saying ’yes', like hugging you for example.
-
2. You see the animal from four different directions in close succession. For example, if it is an eagle, you might see a close-up of its beak, then of its talons, then its feathers and then one of its eyes, all in close succession. This is the animal saying ’yes'.
-
3. It follows you around in the journey and will not leave you alone. Often this is because you are wanting a Power Animal like Tiger or Bear, but are being followed by Rabbit or Mouse! Remember, all Power Animals have their own powerful healing and wisdom, and none are ’better’ than others.
-
4. You just know. You know it in your heart. It is a recognition, a rightness, like something clicking into place, even a love at first sight. As soon as I first saw Panther, I just knew.
Remember that your Power Animal is Mother Earth trying to tell you that she loves you, in a form that she thinks you will understand. So, your Power Animal is not going to be an animal that you have a revulsion for, or a fear of. So, if you have a fear of spiders or snakes, or do not like dogs, then do not worry as they are not going to be your Power Animal. It will be an animal that you like and can have a close and loving bond with.
If the first animal you meet is not your Power Animal, then move on, and ask your Power Animal to appear. It may take a few attempts and encounters. Be persistent and determined.
When you do meet your Power Animal, then ask it for some healing. As in the last journey, this healing may take many forms. Again though, it will not involve
anything of the middle-world, and you need to be alert for that happening, and take the appropriate action if it does. As before, the journey may seem to come to a halt at times. If that happens, then you just need to ask your Power Animal what is next. Whatever happens though, in this journey, stay with your Power Animal, even if other Animals and/or humans appear. You may also ride your Power Animal and shapeshift into it. And again, this journey is about you and your bonding with your Power Animal, and not anyone else from the middle-world.
It is one thing to meet your Power Animal, but in order to turn it into a Power Animal retrieval, then you need to bring your Power Animal back with you from the journey, to be with you in your life here. To do this, when you hear the call-back, gather your Power Animal up into your hands (yes, even if it is Whale or Elephant!) and push it into your heart. I do not mean to do this just in your mind's-eye, but to actually do it with your physical body in this reality, as the call-back is happening. Literally physically move your arms and push your Animal into your heart, really taking the time to feel if flowing into your body and bonding with it. The physical, somatic aspect of this is important in helping ground, deepen and anchor the experience.
Exercise five: the Power Animal retrieval.
Set up your recording of the drumming, ready to play either through speakers or headphones. Make sure that you will not be disturbed. Have paper and pen ready for when you finish. You may sit or lie down. To do the journey, when the drumming starts you need to...
Go to your axis mundi.
Enter the tunnel and travel down to the lower-world.
Set off and explore, with a clear and focused determination and intent to meet your Power Animal.
When you meet an animal, determine if it is your Power Animal (using the methods outlined above). If it is not, then carry on until you find it. Be determined.
When you find it, ask itfor healing.
If things pause, ask your Power Animal What next?'.
If things get stuck, make something happen. Use your imagination.
Whatever happens, stay with your Power Animal throughout the journey.
Throughout the journey, watch out for any middle-world stuff bleeding in. Stay in the lower-world and do not interact with middle-world stuff.
Come back on hearing the call-back. During the call-back, gather your Power Animal up using yourphysical arms and hands, and press it into your heart and really receive it into your body.
Make sure you are back in yourphysical body and open your eyes when ready.
Read through the above instructions until you are clear about them and can remember them. Then, when you are ready, start the drumming, put your blindfold on, and set off on the journey.
After the journey, straight away write down every single thing that you can remember.
Again, it may take a few attempts — it will come with practice.
Chapter Five
What Did the Journey Mean: and what do I do next?
Understanding a shamanic journey.
All sorts of weird and wonderful stuff can happen in journeys. Maybe your Power Animal took you to the bottom of the sea and told you to become kelp. Maybe you were taken somewhere and had powdered dried snowdrop root blown up your nostrils. Or you had an amethyst crystal placed inside your abdomen. The question is: “what does it mean?”. The right side of our brain is the bit that can go and do the journey, and come back with the information. The left side of our brain then wants to understand what has happened. Quite rightly so. This is the job of the left side of the brain. Having got the information, we now need to make sense of it.
The first thing I want to say is that in Therapeutic Shamanism the real and deepest meaning of the journey is what it means to the person whose journey it is. This goes for the things in a journey too; the meaning of a particular stone (or plant, animal, object, landscape, or anything at all) is what it means to the person whose journey it is. In doing one-to-one healing, people often come out of journeys and ask me what something in their journey means. The first thing that I usually say is to ask them what it means to them. In doing that I have found that it is amazing how often people do in fact have a personal meaning for the colour blue, or hedgehogs, or why they were buried, or anything else that happened to them in a journey. But people’s first response is often to ignore what they know, and hand their power over to somebody else (the ’expert’). Part of what is wrong with us in the modern world is how much we are disconnected from our own inner wisdom and power, and how conditioned we are to hand power over to other people (I will be exploring what this is about in the next chapter). So, when people hand their power over to me and ask me what something means in a journey, I do not want to collude with them disempowering themselves. Rather, I want to help them connect back to their own inner knowing as much as is possible. To me, this is an essential part of shamanic healing, to help people reconnect back to their own inner
wisdom, and to learn not to hand their power over to others unnecessarily.
So, in helping someone unpack the meaning of their journey, my first intent is to help them discover their own meanings and interpretation. Having done that, and only after having done that, there will often still be things that do not mean anything to the person whose journey it is. It is very common for a particular plant, crystal or animal to come up in a journey, and for the journeyer to have no conscious connection with it, or understanding of what it means. In that case, then it can be useful to do some research, which is where the left-brain (and the internet!) come in.
What a Power Animal is (and what it is not).
As I have said before, the problem is that in this culture we killed all our shamans, and in doing so we lost our precise shamanic terminology. These days, the term ’Power Animal’ is often used very loosely by modern shamanic practitioners and in new-age circles. It is used to cover a whole host of different relationships with animals that indigenous tribes would have had separate and specific words for. So, I want to be clear what I mean in Therapeutic Shamanism by the term ’Power Animal'. I reserve the term to describe a very special kind of relationship. Should you decide to practice shamanism, over the course of journeying you will meet many different animals. Some animals may only appear for one journey, and you may never work with them again. Others you will see intermittently. Yet others may become regular companions, and be with you for periods of weeks, months or even years. Indeed, some may become lifelong companions. These are animal helpers, guides and teachers. They are sometimes referred to as animal totems. They are not, however, what I mean by the term Power Animal. In Therapeutic Shamanism, a Power Animal is something different altogether. It is a much deeper bond. Think of the difference between friends on the one hand, and a lifelong, committed, deep soul bond on the other. Other animals are like friends. Some of them are fleeting acquaintances, others are friendships that will last months or years, and some may even last a lifetime. They may become very dear to you, and you may get to know them and understand them very well, and even love them deeply. Your relationship with the Power Animal however, should you choose to enter into it, is of a whole different level of depth, intensity, loyalty, and love.
It is important to realise that what you call your Power Animal, the word or words
that you use when you refer to it, will determine what exactly your Power Animal is (or more precisely, what exactly it is that you are relating to). Shamans are very clear that words have power, in that they shape how we experience reality (and can to some extent actually shape reality itself). You have a choice here. You can choose an extraordinarily wise, transcendent lower-world being as your Power Animal, or you can choose a much more limited and less wise middle-world being to bond with instead. Whichever one it is will be determined by the language you use. Remember that the middle-world is the realm of individuality and separation, whereas the lower-world is the realm of unity and of the transcendence of separation. For example, my main Power Animal is Panther. If I think of it as an individual panther, if I think of it as being either a male or a female, and particularly if I were to give it a name and an individual personality, then what I would be doing is relating to it as an individual, middle-world being. As such it would have all the limitations in terms of awareness and abilities that this brings. However, if I think of it as Panther, in terms of being all panthers, the sum of all the individuals in the species, what we call the Oversoul - the lower-world Panther that all middle-world individual panthers spring from - then I am relating to an infinitely wiser and more powerful being. So, I refer to my Power Animal as Panther. Similarly, when talking about Panther I do not refer to it as ’my’ Panther, since it is not an individual (i.e. it is not ’my’ panther as opposed to somebody else's panther). I do not think of Panther as having a gender; it is both male and female. It is both old and young. I do not even describe it as ’a’ or ’the’ Panther, since again that makes it an individual. So, it is good practice to refer to your Power Animal as simply Panther with a capital P, or Horse with a capital H, Wolf with a capital W (or whatever your Power Animal is), with no ’a’ or ’my’ before it. This is also why I write ’Power Animal', rather than ’power animal', to remind you to think of it as the wise, transcendent, collective Oversoul, from the lower-world. Lowercase means of the middle-world, uppercase of the lower-world or upper-world.
A quick word about individual animals. Sometimes people ask about working with an individual animal they know or have known in this life - often a beloved dog, cat, horse or other individual animal. Correctly, this is referred to as a ’familiar', rather than a Power Animal. I have lived with cats most of my life. One in particular I had an extremely close bond to. His name was Sol, and we utterly, utterly adored each other and understood each other. At the time of writing this, it is over 10 years ago since he died. I still think of him virtually every day though, and his presence is often around me, and sometimes accompanies me when I do shamanic journeying.
Likewise, I am also very close to the cat who I currently share a home with, whose name is Pan. He sometimes accompanies me on shamanic journeys. The first time it happened with Pan, I was journeying one day to do a shamanic healing on another cat that was very ill. Pan suddenly appeared in the journey, and took over the healing. It turns out that he is very gifted shamanically. Since then he has become a fairly regular journeying companion; my ’familiar'. With hindsight, I should not have been too surprised about this. He was a stray and starving when we first met, and the circumstances in which we found each other was no ordinary encounter, and he is no ordinary cat. So, I do work with individual animals as companions. But I am also aware of both their limitations and of my limitations, as we are middleworld beings. The animal Oversouls in the lower-world are of a totally different league altogether.
A sacred marriage.
I once read somewhere (unfortunately I cannot now remember where) someone beautifully describing one's Power Animal as being Mother Earth trying to tell you, in a form that she thinks you will understand, how deeply she loves you and how much you are welcome on the earth. Your Power Animal is a great and profound gift of love from Mother Earth.
With most relationships, the extent to which the relationship is healthy, and will grow and blossom, is dependent on both the individuals within it. However, the extent to which your relationship with your Power Animal is healthy, and will grow and blossom, is entirely up to you. You have been given the gift of a potential. You can meet your Power Animal, and then do nothing much more about it. In which case, nothing much will happen! Your Power Animal though, is already fully committed to you. But if the relationship is to develop then you need to open up and commit to it too.
In this physical world, no matter how deep and loving a relationship may be, the reality is that all human relationships are conditional. They are conditional on things like not having an affair, not being violent or abusive, being kind and considerate, listening, and spending quality time together. By contrast, your Power Animal loves you unconditionally.
Unconditionally.
Your Power Animal will never fall out with you. It will never abandon you. If you abandon it, or drift away from it, or get distracted, whenever you do come back to it then it will always welcome you when you return. It will show more love, acceptance, understanding and compassion to you than you show to yourself. Remember, it is a gift from Mother Earth, the ultimate mother who shows unconditional love. In doing so, it helps you to learn to love and be compassionate to yourself. It helps heal the self-criticism and lack of self-compassion that most people have deep inside. And it helps to begin to heal the deep Mother wound - the disconnection from nature, the sense of not really fitting in or of being welcome in the world, of being cut-off and isolated, that is pervasive in modern-day humans.
At times your Power Animal may chide you. It may tease you, or be stern with you. That is as any good mother should be. It will also guide you, teach you, and protect you. It loves you deeply, and has your best interests at heart.
How to bond with your Power Animal.
Should you choose to bond with your Power Animal, you will gradually come to realise that, second only to the gift of your precious life itself, your Power Animal is probably the greatest gift you will ever be given. However, all the wonderful things that it brings will remain seeds that never grew unless you commit to bonding with it. So how do you do that? There are many things you can do. First and foremost, is to make the decision to commit. I have met shamanic practitioners who claim to have many different Power Animals, or that their Power Animal regularly changes, in that one comes and then another goes. What I have noticed with a lot of these practitioners is that they seem to have commitment issues in terms of relationships in this physical reality too. If you are always holding back from committing, and thinking ’I am not sure this is the right partner (Power Animal) for me. How can I be sure they are the ’one'? Maybe another better partner (Power Animal) will come along.’ then ultimately the healing, growth and learning that comes from risking opening up to a deep and committed lifelong relationship will forever evade you. In the end, with a human partner and with a Power Animal too, it comes down to choosing to commit. Choosing to commit to a human partner though always does come with the risk of being hurt, and it is usually the fear of being hurt that holds people back from commitment. By contrast, with your Power Animal there is no risk. It will never hurt you. There is nothing to lose. There are only things to gain. So first and foremost, you need to make a heartfelt and soulful commitment to your
Power Animal, if you really wish it to truly be your Power Animal, and not just another animal guide. It may be enough for you to simply choose to do this. Or you may want to do a shamanic journey and express your commitment, and ask what the two of you can do in a journey to symbolise and cement this commitment. Be led by your Power Animal in doing this.
There are many other things you can do to deepen your relationship. After making a commitment, the next most important thing is to keep doing shamanic journeys with your Power Animal. What I am about to say next is of crucial importance in determining how your shamanic work will develop. When journeying, always journey with your Power Animal. As a teacher, it is a constant source of amazement to me how often I say this to students, and yet they still ask me ’do I take my Power Animal with me on this journey?'. The answer is always ’yes'! There are no exceptions to this. None whatsoever. There are various reasons for this. First and foremost, the more time you spend with your Power Animal, the better you will get to know it, and bond with it. It is important to realise that a shaman’s true power comes not from within themselves, but from the depth of their connection with their Power Animal (and other guides). It is not the shaman that does the healing, but the guides. Shamans invite the helpful spirits to work through them. Earlier on, I discussed the process of ’hollowing-out’ to prepare for the work, and becoming the ’hollow bone’ or ’bone flute’ through which the healing spirits can communicate and work. Your first and foremost guide working through you should be your Power Animal. If you have done what I said above, and ensured that you are working with the Oversoul, lower-world being, then your Power Animal is infinitely wiser than you are. If you develop the habit of you leading the journeys and you being in charge of the healing, rather than your Power Animal, then your shamanic work will always be severely limited. To develop any depth to your shamanic work means cultivating the practice of getting out of the way and allowing your Power Animal to lead the journeys and work through you. You need to develop the habit of constantly asking your Power Animal what to do next; of constantly checking in with it and watching its behaviour and reactions. You are the apprentice and your Power Animal is your principal teacher. Your job is simply to ask for the healing, and then to watch, remember, do as instructed, and learn. If you do this then you will realise just how wise and knowledgeable your Power Animal truly is, and that you can trust them utterly.
A major way that you can deepen your bond with your Power Animal is to regularly
journey and ask it to heal you. As well as gaining the immense benefits of its healing, by letting your Power Animal work on you, your trust in it will deepen, and your love and respect for it will grow. In addition, by paying attention to exactly what it is doing when it is healing you, you will begin the process of being its apprentice. It is my experience that Panther rarely teaches me by using spoken words. Words are limited, mostly left-brain and middle-world things. Rather, Panther teaches me by doing and by demonstrating. It took me a while to realise this; that not only was Panther healing me, but that it was also showing me techniques and methods, and imparting knowledge. Once I realised this, I started to really pay attention, and the more attention I paid, the more my respect for Panther grew.
Trusting your Power Animal, and always working with it, will also keep you safe. As I have said, the lower-world and upper-worlds are completely safe places in any case. But as you go further into shamanic work and start doing middle-world journeying, then safety becomes an issue. Plus of course, we live in the middleworld, so safety and protection are issues whether we are doing shamanic journeying or not. Your Power Animal, if you pay close attention to it, has your back. It is there to protect you and keep you safe as much as it can. When doing shamanic journeys, it will not let you come to harm if you pay attention to it and trust it. If however, you ignore it or override it, then in the middle-world you certainly can come to harm, or inadvertently do harm to others despite your best intentions. I always try to pay attention to my Power Animal when journeying, but when doing middle-world work I am especially careful to do so. If you cultivate that as a habit, you will begin to realise that your Power Animal has you on trainer-reins. Like any good parent or teacher, it will let you make mistakes, as mistakes are a vital aspect of any learning process. However, like any good parent or teacher, it will not let you make dangerous or fatal mistakes. It has a training programme for you, literally an apprenticeship, planned and mapped out for you. This is something I came to realise in my own shamanic work, and then later as a teacher saw over and over again in my students as I saw their Power Animals teaching them things in measured stages too. We do of course have choices, and are free to choose to ignore our Power Animal. But every time I have made a mistake, or something has gone wrong in journeying, it is because I was not paying attention to my Power Animal or trusting it. Every time I see a student make a mistake or something goes wrong with their journeying, if I ask them ’What was your Power Animal saying or doing?’ then the answer is always that they were not paying attention to it, or had decided to ignore what it was telling them. Every time. If you pay attention and
trust your Power Animal, then it will only let you work within your competency. If something is outside your competency then it will advise you not to do it, and if you encounter something that is really dangerous in middle-world journeying then it will even haul you out of the journey altogether. In a journey, it will let you work within your competence, and it will do any stuff outside of your competence that also needs doing. Sometimes it will even do things but not let you see what it is doing, until such times as it knows that you are ready to learn that stuff. It will show you the next set of skills and/or knowledge that you need when you are ready for it.
Another major reason to always work with your Power Animal when journeying, is that it brings you power. That is why it is called a ’Power’ animal! By ’power', here, what shamans mean is essentially ’life-force'. Shamans say that ’power loss’ is one of the major ways we get ill. Power loss is caused by disconnecting from the natural world; by cutting oneself off from Mother Earth. Power loss is endemic in modern life. Most people these days live in urban environments and spend most of their life with little, or at best sporadic, contact with nature. But these days, even those people living in the countryside are usually still suffering from power loss. Since the discovery of agriculture, going back to around 11,000 B.C. we have been disconnected from the consciousness and intelligence in nature, and largely treat the natural world, and the beings in it, as commodities to be used and exploited as we see fit. This is utterly different to how our hunter-gatherer ancestors related to nature. To them, everything was alive and conscious and to be treated with respect, and humans were not in any way special or better than any of the other Peoples (Animal, Plant or Stone). Rather, everything (humans included) was part of an interconnected web of life, and that web of life was Mother Earth. Everything was a living part of Mother Earth. Life-force ('power') and health come from being connected to that web of life. Your Power Animal is your primary and most powerful means of connecting back to that web.
As well as regularly journeying and asking your Power Animal for healing, there are a couple of other things that you can do when journeying to help you deepen your bond with it. One is to practice shape-shifting into it often. This often just happens spontaneously in journeys in any case, but it is good to deliberately choose to practice it as well. You can do it by ’flowing’ into it and becoming your Power Animal, or by asking it to flow into you and you become transformed into it. Once you have done this, really experience what it is like to be it, with its body and its
senses. Another variation on shape-shifting is to invite it to flow into your body and for it to shape-shift into being you and experience being you. When you do this, you are then experiencing it being in your body and it ’inhabiting’ you.
As well as shape-shifting, the other major thing you can do is to ask for a dismemberment. This involves asking your Power Animal to eat you and digest you, and then regurgitate you reformed and healed. It might sound a bit strange (well, it probably does!), but in the lower-world it usually feels perfectly normal and fine. As I said previously, this is one of a series of classic shamanic practices known as the transformation practices (literally, ’to transform'; to change your form). They involve being taken apart and then put back together again in a healthier state. They include: burials, burnings, dissolvings and various other ones. As well as being powerful healings to be practised often, each one brings an added ’flavour to it'. Burials help with grounding and developing a deeper connection to Mother Earth. Burnings help with trusting the fire element and its transformative nature, and in cultivating healthy ’fiery-ness’ and personal power. Dismemberment greatly strengthens the bond between you and your Power Animal.
A Power Animal is not just for the lower-world.
When I have been discussing working with your Power Animal in the middle-world, I guess you will have worked out that this means that your Power Animal is not confined to the lower-world, and indeed it is not. Your Power Animal can and should come with you to both the upper-world and the middle-world too. And in terms of the middle-world, that means not just when doing shamanic middle-world journeys, but in this physical middle-world day-to-day reality. That was the point of the retrieval — to have your Power Animal with you here too. Shamanism is not just about doing shamanic journeys. It is a way of living in the world, and of experiencing the world. It is about experiencing both ordinary reality and shamanic reality at the same time. There are many practices to cultivate that experience, but your relationship with your Power Animal is the most important one. Your Power Animal keeps you connected and plugged-in to shamanic reality. It is both your connection to, and your reminder about, the shamanic realms. So, as well as journeying with your Power Animal, it is important in developing shamanic practice to cultivate an awareness of the presence of your Power Animal in ordinary reality too. A powerful way to develop this is, as often as you can remember, sense your Power Animal being with you as you go about your day-to-day life. Sense its
presence next to you whatever you are doing, whether you are watching TV, lying in bed, walking through town, or doing your shopping. Do this literally as often as you can remember to do it. This does not mean that you will always be aware of it of course, in the same way that you are not always consciously aware of what you are wearing on your feet or carrying in your pocket at any given moment. But just as what is in your pocket is there whether you are aware of it or not at any given moment, your Power Animal will gradually become more and more present, and eventually be there all the time, whether you are aware of it or not. In doing this you will probably find that it settles into a favourite place beside you. It may be on your left side or your right, behind you or in front of you, or on one of your shoulders — it does not matter where. The point is that it becomes a familiar, real and reassuring presence that you can rely on, and turn to when needed and at will.
Other ways you can deepen your connection with it in this reality include: getting a soft toy of it (or more than one!); putting some pictures up on the wall around your home, and in your workplace if possible; making it the screen-saver and/or wallpaper on your phone and computer; carrying a picture of it in your wallet; getting an earring, ring, pendant or other jewellery that depicts it in some way; getting a carving of it. You can also read about it. You can read about it as a Power Animal by googling it as a ’totem’ (googling ’Panther totem', for example). You can also read about it as a physical animal by reading about it on sites like Wikipedia or by buying books about it. You may be able to find video clips of it, or even documentaries. And importantly, support it in this physical reality by finding a relevant charity and volunteering and/or donating money to it. It is not respectful to ask it to teach you and heal you shamanically, and then to ignore its plight in the middle-world.
A Power Animal is not just for Christmas.
One question that I often get asked is ’Can your Power Animal change?'. The first thing to remember is that there are no absolute rules about this, or for that matter, pretty much anything in shamanism (which is one of the things I love about it). It is more a case of what you reap will depend on what you sow; what you cultivate in your practice will determine the direction of what happens and what you experience. Some shamanic practitioners say that your Power Animal can change every so often. As one chapter of your life closes, your time with the Animal who was relevant for you then will come to an end, and a new Animal will appear,
relevant to the next phase of your life. Again though, I can only offer that for me this comes down to what we mean by ’Power Animal'. It has certainly been my experience that at different times in my life some Animals appear and others leave. That makes absolute sense. For much of my childhood, Fox was around, Lynx too, and they were exactly what I needed to survive a childhood of emotional abuse and neglect; Fox with its quick wits and ability to scavenge for food and survive, and Lynx with its ability to see the truth of what is going on and see through family lies. In my late teens and twenties, once I had left home and started psychotherapy and the process of healing, Fox and Lynx faded into the background. Instead, Eagle appeared, with its gift of detachment and seeing the bigger picture. Then as I healed and grew happier, Dolphin appeared, with its gift of playfulness, ease and embodiment. I still work with all of them from time to time and am full of love and gratitude to them. Fox, in particular, I am very close to. If I had been ready, and if I had then the knowledge that I have now, I do not doubt that I could have chosen to commit to any one of them as being my Power Animal, and they would have become my lifelong partner, guide and teacher. But I was not ready to commit then, and I did not really know what I was doing either. Given my childhood, I had attachment issues that I needed to work through. For me personally, it took a complete breakdown, a shattering of my life and of myself in my thirties, before I was really ready to commit and understood what I needed to do. It was at that point that Panther appeared. Again, Panther could have been just another in a long line of animals. I could have chosen to be a serial monogamist, moving from one Animal to another. But I chose to commit instead, and what has come out of that is immeasurably deeper and richer than anything I had before, or could have had without making that commitment. So, for me, my relationship with Panther is for life.
If you choose to do the things that I have been outlining in terms of working with your Power Animal, then the bond between you will be strong, steadfast and deep, and it is likely that you will find that it is a life-long relationship. It may not be, of course. As I said, there are no rules, and you will find your own path and your own way. But like with most things, much will depend on you and on your choices and actions.
Another question that often comes up is how many Power Animals can someone have. Again, for me, the answer to this is entirely dependent on what one means by the term ’Power Animal'. In a way, it is a bit like asking how many friends you can
have, and how many deep, soulful and committed relationships. Again of course, there are no rules, and you have to answer that question for yourself. But for most people, the answer is that they can have lots of friends and friendships, of varying degrees of closeness. For the majority of people though, in terms of being able to sustain a truly deep, connected and intimate relationship, most people find that doing that with one person is enough. In fact, many people would say that doing that with even one person is hard enough! True, not everyone is monogamous, and some people can have a deep and committed relationship with two people (to be clear here, I'm talking about two primary relationships, not just one primary relationship and then taking lovers in addition to that), but it does tend to be the exception rather than the rule. An even smaller percentage of people may be able to sustain primary relationships with more than two people, but that is fairly rare. Primary relationships are time-consuming, and take working at. They need tending, nurturing, commitment and dedication. So, if we are defining the term Power Animal as being a deep, soulful, committed, primary relationship (as opposed to friendships), then most people find a single Power Animal is more than enough. For a smaller number of people, it has been my observation that a second Power Animal may then turn up, but this is usually several years later. I have a second Power Animal, Raven, but it was many, many years after meeting Panther before Raven arrived. There are many other animals I work with, and some are very close and dear friends. But at the moment I would find it hard to conceive of having a third Power Animal, because of the time and resources needed for me to sustain a third relationship at that kind of depth. Again though, I can only offer my personal experiences and observations; there are no rules and it is up to you and to your guides.
Plants, Stones and other things in journeys.
In terms of Plants that appear in journeys, as I have said, you can research them online by searching for things like their meaning and use as a flower essence, a herbal medicine, their magical uses, their folklore, and as a homeopathic remedy. Stones and crystals are usually easier to research - just search for their ’meaning', or their ’healing properties'. You can also research the symbolism of any part of a journey such as mountains, the sea, seashells, spears, smudging, caves and so on. By doing this research you start to learn and understand the powerful symbolism and meaning of journeys, and your guides will then be able to talk to you and teach you using this rich symbolic language, rather than through the limitations of spoken
’SpjOAY
Chapter Six
The Myth of ’Civilisation’: how we lost our way, and how shamanism can help us heal.
A very different take on history and the story of ’civilisation’.
Part of understanding what shamanism really is involves looking at human history and why shamanism nearly disappeared. So, in this next chapter we are going to be taking a break from the experiential and practical work (we will come back to it in the chapter on journeying for other people), and be looking at shamanism in an historical context. That might not sound interesting but, having taught this to literally thousands of people over the years, my experience is that people usually find this fascinating, illuminating, and life changing. I have to say though that this information is also something that some people find uncomfortable and so would rather not know about. It is not New-Agey or fluffy. It is sobering, tough, and uncomfortable. It is, however, the truth, and to borrow a phrase, ’the truth will set you free’. It is also vital in understanding what shamanism really is. There is so much more to shamanism than it just being for doing soul retrievals and other healing on oneself and others (important and useful though that is). I know plenty of new-age shamanic practitioners who just practice shamanism at that level, and want to keep it all light and fluffy. But in doing that they are profoundly missing the point of what shamanism truly is, and the immensity of what it can do. Shamanism, the wisdom of our ancestors, holds the key to our very survival as a species, and to healing the damage we have wrought on this planet. To really understand this, and what we then need to do, we have to take an unflinching look at the state we are in, how we got here, and why it happened. In order to put things right, we first have to understand what went wrong. So, the next chapter is not a fun ride. But if you really want to understand shamanism, and play your part in our recovery, then please do stick with it as it is vital information. In doing that you will be stepping into what has always been the role of the shaman: to be someone who is determindly awake, and who fearlessly faces things as they really are. They do that so that they can help the tribe to survive, and help the tribe live in correct relationship with the other
beings that we share the world with.
So here goes...
The dominant view (the story we are told).
The usual view of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (often referred to as ’cavemen’) is that they were ’primitive’ and lived lives that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described in his book ’Leviathan’ as being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes goes on to describe life before the (in his view) civilising effect of the emergence of centralised governments as being a time of “Warre [war] of every man against every man”. We even call this era ’pre-civilisation’ or ’prehistoric’, ’civilisation’ starting around four thousand B.C. with the birth of the first city-states. This is the common and dominant cultural narrative we are fed and taught. This view is typified by the American academic Keeley in his book ’War Before Civilisation: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage’, published in 1996. In his book, Keeley seeks to show that hunter-gatherer life was one of regular warfare, with horrific violence and high casualty rates.
Keeley’s book is controversial. The question as to whether he is right or not is far from settled. As with most academic, left-brain arguments, each side produces evidence to support their case, and questions the validity of the ’evidence’ of the other side. I am not here go into the arguments for and against the case Keeley makes. That would be a book in its own right (however if you are interested you will find plenty of stuff on the internet). It is not what we are here for. This is a book about shamanism, and one of the things shamanism shows us is that the leftbrain analysis is only one way of knowing the truth. Equally valid is a right-brain approach. So, what I do want to say is that on a right-brain, gut level, Keeley’s arguments just do not feel right to me personally. For one thing, given that the ’winners write history', the kinds of arguments he advances have always seemed to be convenient ones to justify colonialism. This does not necessarily mean that the view of hunter-gatherers being savages is not true of course. But it does make me sit up and think ’hang on a minute, this is important, so let's look at this very closely and not take it at face value'. Portraying hunter-gatherer civilisations as violent, cannibalistic, and savage can be used (and has been used) to justify turning up on their shores and in their lands, to ’save’ them from their own barbarity. Depicting them as barbaric and in need of ’civilising’ has been used as a justification for
waging wars on other cultures for thousands of years.
Steve Taylor and ’The Fall’.
The British academic Steve Taylor challenges this view in his book ’The Fall’. Here, Taylor gives a very different view of prehistory and the lives of hunter-gatherer tribes. Before I go any further I wish to acknowledge that some people have also questioned ’The Fall’ for romanticising hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and for going too far in the opposite direction to Keeley. And, to a certain extent, I agree. That being said, it does provide an essential and rarely heard counterpoint to the views of people like Keeley. Most importantly for me however, was that the overall arguments of the book rang true at a very deep level. In fact, it was a huge relief to read it, as the dominant cultural narrative has just never quite felt right to me, and at last I felt I was reading things that felt closer to the truth. The likelihood though is that the actual truth (as with most things) probably lies somewhere in the middle. To decide for yourself though you first need to know what the counterarguments are to the dominant narratives about hunter-gatherers being brutal and savage. So, I am going to go through the counterarguments, starting with those provided by Taylor and then moving on to another important figure, the author Daniel Quinn.
A summary of Taylor’s main arguments in ’The Fall’.
’Civilisation’ is usually said to start around six thousand years ago with the birth of the first city-states. We usually call anything prior to this time ’prehistory’. If modern Homo sapiens are around 200,000 years old as a species, then that is about 194,000 years of human history (of recognisably modern human beings) being lumped together as ’prehistory’. Although academics may divide this prehistoric period into distinct eras, to most people it is a time they know little or nothing about. For most people, it is the time of ’cavemen’ (and cavewomen!)
So, what was actually going on in this time? The period from 11,000 B.C. to 4,000 B.C. is known as the Neolithic era. It is characterised by the discovery and development of agriculture, which takes off big-time and rapidly expands, replacing hunter-gathering as it does so. As agriculture spreads human beings give up huntergathering and move into settlements. These range from being just a few families, through to small townships of up to fifty thousand people. Many hundreds of these have been found and excavated. The astonishing thing is that of all the
settlements that were built at this time, not one has been found built in a place that is militarily defensible. By contrast, once ’civilisation’ starts around 4,000 B.C., people rapidly leave these settlements and start building new settlements in militarily defensible areas, even though that makes them much harder to live in. People start building homes on the tops of hills, in cliff faces, behind stockades, on islands or floating rafts. If no suitable place exists in the landscape, then people go to great lengths to make one, fashioning huge earth mounds to build on. Given the technology of the time, to effectively build an entire hill to put your city on would have been an extraordinary investment of time and effort. They must have really felt it was essential for their safety and survival. By contrast, the earlier Neolithic people seem to have felt no need to do this. This alone would seem to suggest that Neolithic people lived in more peaceful times. There are a number of other factors that seem to back this up. None of the artwork in the Neolithic era depicts warfare. This is a huge contrast to the artwork of the city-state cultures that spring up after the Neolithic era. A great deal of city-state art depicts warfare; usually of the kind that depicts the emperor slaying ten thousand of his enemies in a river of blood. On top of this, no weapons designed specifically for the killing of humans are found in the Neolithic era. All the weaponry from the Neolithic era that has been found is hunting weaponry. With the start of ’civilisation’ we see the emergence of weapons designed specifically for killing people.
According to Taylor, it appears that people seem to be living in relatively non-hierarchical societies. The evidence for this largely comes from burial sites. Although there are some burials that seem to indicate positions of wealth and status, these tend to be not that common, and from the later Neolithic period. Even these wealthier grave sites though show far less inequality of wealth than is apparent in the later city-state cultures (and the times that we live in now). On the whole, it appears that people are living in relatively egalitarian cultures with a much fairer distribution of wealth, and far less inequality then we are used to. Interestingly too, there is little or no evidence of patriarchy in Neolithic times, nor of matriarchy. Men and women are usually buried with equal status, children too. The notion of one small section of society having most of the power and wealth seems to be a relatively modern injustice in human history.
In this whole seven-thousand year Neolithic era, from the start of agriculture and leading up to the first city-states six thousand years ago, there have been extraordinarily few sites found of massacres and mass killings. There really is a
remarkable lack of evidence of mass violence. Compare this to the last six thousand years of so-called civilisation. In the period that we call civilised, we have littered the world with literally countless sites of killings, with bodies in their hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands. We have waged wars that have caused the deaths of literally millions of people.
The Neolithic period also shows evidence of extensive and sophisticated trading. There is evidence of roadways, and goods being traded huge distances across Asia and Europe. This is a sophisticated, largely peaceful, and relatively egalitarian culture. It may not quite have been a golden age, but it certainly compares incredibly favourably to the last six thousand years of virtually non-stop warfare and bloodshed, slavery, and profound inequality and social injustice.
Pre-agricultural life.
So how were people living prior to the discovery of agriculture? The era before agriculture is known as the Palaeolithic era. In this time, we would have been living as hunter-gatherers. However, given that we are talking about time periods in excess of fourteen thousand years ago, obviously archaeological evidence is scanty, aside from the fact that hunter-gatherers in any case tend to leave few lasting traces on the landscape. What we do have from modern times, however, is hundreds of years of records and studies of hunter-gatherer cultures. Although hunter-gatherer cultures show an incredible richness of diversity, they do tend to share certain common characteristics. They tend to have different roles for men and women (although how strictly these roles are adhered to varies enormously from culture to culture), with men tending to be the hunters and women the gatherers (although this varies somewhat from tribe to tribe). However, although they practice gender role differentiation, there is usually still equality and mutual respect between the sexes. In other words, they tend not to be either patriarchal or matriarchal, but egalitarian. No one section of society has power and oppresses another. Children are usually treated with great respect. The elderly, infirm and disabled are usually all looked after and cared for. Decisions tend to be taken by the tribe as a whole, with the ’chief’ and/or elders main role being to hold a discussion space, and maybe make the final decision once everybody has been heard.
Fighting does exist in hunter-gatherer cultures in the form of skirmishing between tribes. However full-scale warfare in the sense that we understand it, of obliterating
another tribe and taking all their land, is virtually unheard of. In many huntergatherer cultures warfare is contained and limited by rituals and conventions.
A more leisurely way of life.
Taylor points out that, on the whole, hunter-gatherer tribes tended to have a large amount of leisure time. Exactly how much time will vary from tribe to tribe, depending on where they are living of course, as some landscapes will be harder to live in than others. But on average, hunter-gatherers tend to spend between two to four hours a day on all survival needs. That is between two to four hours spent hunting and gathering the food, preparing the food, preparing the shelters, and in making and repairing tools, clothing and other equipment. The rest of the time was spent in socialising, playing with the children, sleeping, making love, laughing, dancing, singing and practising shamanism. Compare this with our lifestyles. We work eight hours a day, maybe spending another hour or two getting to and from work each day. After work, we have to go to the supermarket, fill the car up with petrol, come home and cook, do the washing up, pay the bills, decorate the house, mow the lawn, wash clothes, clean the house, and countless other things. No wonder most people only have the energy to collapse in front of the television for a couple of hours before it starts up all over again. Yes, we have lots of things; mobile phones, computers, cars, modern medicines, central heating, running water and so on, many of which definitely have upsides. But to have these things we pay a truly enormous price in terms of time, effort and stress.
The price we pay for our lifestyle of high stress and long working days includes a huge toll on our mental health. Compared to most hunter-gatherer cultures, the mental health of modern-day human societies is truly, truly awful. There are many reasons for this poor mental health. They include lifestyle causes such as lack of exercise, poor diets, the absence of greenery and connection to nature. Other things that contribute include the vast and unjust wealth inequality that we live with, and the subjugation and oppression of women, children, people with disabilities, gay and bisexual people, ethnic minorities, and all sorts of other groups. In modern cultures, most people feel almost entirely powerless in terms of decision-making with regard to the wider political process and the way our society operates, and a sense of powerless is one of the main causes of depression and anxiety.
Looking at this from a shamanic point of view, modern society is riddled with
power-loss and soul-loss. The consequences of this include the huge mental health problems we see. Power-loss and soul-loss tend to be transitory things in huntergatherer cultures, in that any individuals who suffered from them would be healed as a matter of urgency, and so those cultures tend to enjoy excellent mental health. Depression is almost unheard of (some tribes do not even have a word for it).
In all the literally thousands of different hunter-gatherer cultures that have been studied, we have no recorded evidence of any hunter-gatherer culture having destroyed the environment they live in (and so, consequently, destroying themselves). This is extraordinary, as with the birth of both agricultural and citystate cultures we have numerous examples of such cultures destroying their environment, and themselves in the process (something that should be a great warning call to us, of course). It is possible, and probably likely, that some huntergatherer cultures did hunt certain species to extinction. However, that makes us no different from any of the other animals. When a new species moves into a region, they often change the ecological balance, and consequently, there are winners and losers. The wholesale destruction of ecosystems, however, is something we only see with the rise of agricultural societies. In contrast, hunter-gatherers lived sustainably, and in harmony with the land (I shall explore more about why this is later).
Contrary to modern popular opinion too, hunter-gatherers tended to be healthy, generally far healthier than us. They lived active lives. Obesity, and the many health problems it brings, would not have existed. The average hunter-gatherer diet was incredibly rich and varied too, consisting of an average of around two hundred different foods (all fresh and organically-grown of course!). When we discovered agriculture, the early agricultural diets were terrible by comparison, consisting of one or two staple food stuffs (usually a carbohydrate such as wheat), a small number of vegetables, and some animal protein. With the onset of agriculture, on average we actually shrank around eight inches in height, only regaining our height slowly over a period of several thousand years. Nowadays, of course, we have thousands of foodstuffs to choose from, an apparently wonderful bounty, but you have only to walk around a supermarket to see that the vast majority of it is based on sugar and fructose, trans-fatty acids and other unhealthy fats, refined carbohydrates, salt, sprayed with pesticides, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, and wrapped in hormone-disrupting plastics.
So why did it all go so wrong:
Hunter-gathering seems to have been a good life, and something that served us well for hundreds of thousands of years. In his excellent book ’Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind', the historian Yuval Noah Harari describes our abandoning huntergathering and adopting an agricultural lifestyle as probably the biggest single mistake we have ever made as a species. The scientist and historian Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book ’Guns, Germs and Steel’ calls agriculture the worst mistake in human history (he wrote an excellent article on it - google ’The worst mistake in the history of the human race’ by Jared Diamond). Indeed, many people have expressed this sentiment, including people ranging from the British television presenter, naturalist and author Chris Packham, through to the anarcho-primitivist philosopher and author John Zerzan. What does seem absolutely clear to me is that hunter-gathering was the most successful and longest-lasting culture in the whole of human history, and that agriculture threw us into a mess that it is unclear whether we will survive (and how many other species we destroy whether we survive or not). That being said, as I have been outlining, the first seven thousand years of agriculture did still seem to go reasonably well too; maybe not a golden age, but a silver one. Then, around four thousand B.C., at the birth of ’civilisation’ it all started to go catastrophically wrong, and very quickly too.
Our descent into madness.
So, what happened around four thousand B.C.? It is the birth of the modern era. In it, we see the birth of the first cities. Before long cities are popping up all over the place and people are moving en-mass into them. Why is this happening? There are probably several factors, but the main one is almost certainly ’safety in numbers', because this is a violent time. Cities rapidly become city-state cultures, with organised armies, and are expansionist, aggressive and hostile towards their neighbours. Cities are essentially huge fortresses. If not in cities, people in these times build forts at the top of hills and cliffs. People dig moats and build earth ramparts and stockades. People are living in fear of being attacked.
Societies in the modern era start to become increasingly unequal and hierarchical. For the first time in human history we see one group in society seize power and oppress another. Men seize power and oppress women, and patriarchy is born. We see the rise of huge wealth inequality, kings and rulers living with immense riches whilst other people are left to starve in the street. The notion of caring for everyone in the tribe, of looking after the ill, the handicapped, the elderly, and the
vulnerable, disappears. Most people lose any meaningful power in the decisionmaking processes of the society in which they live. Instead, decisions are made by a totalitarian ruling elite. Dissent is ruthlessly crushed, and power maintained by oppression, torture, organised religion and terror.
We see the rise of mass slavery, of oppression of minorities and of the vulnerable. Children are treated appallingly. In hunter-gatherer cultures, homosexuality was at the very least usually not an issue. And some hunter-gatherer cultures regarded homosexuals as being blessed, because they had two souls. In the macho and warlike city-state cultures however, with only a few historic exceptions, homosexuality is ruthlessly persecuted. Nor do we limit our cruelty and oppression to our fellow human beings in the modern era. Far from it. Our hunter-gatherer forbearers treated the Peoples - the other animals and the plants, and the earth herself - with great respect. They acknowledged a kinship with the other Peoples, referring to them as brothers or sisters, all part of Mother Earth. With the birth of the modern era though, we now treat animals and plants with no respect whatsoever, just as ’things’ to be used and exploited as we see fit. Animals, in particular, we start treating with astonishing cruelty. We lose any sense of living in balance and harmony with nature, with the consequence that many city-state cultures end up destroying their environment and then collapsing.
To both justify and enforce this madness, and the devastation and cruelty we are wreaking on Mother Earth, we see the birth of the ’sky religions'. The sky religions essentially tell us that ’up is good, and down is bad’; that Father Sun (God) is good and Mother Earth is bad; that spirit is good and that matter is corrupt; that men are good and that women are dirty, unclean, inferior and not to be trusted; that God gave humans (basically, men) the world (including women) to use as they see fit. The sky religions are deeply rooted in a hierarchical world view. At the top of the pyramid is God, and the emperor is the living embodiment of God, and so the emperor's word is the word of God. To question the emperor then becomes to question the word of God himself. And so, for the first time in human history, the notion of ’heresy’ is born, and the need to persecute ’heretics’ in the name of protecting the ’one true faith', and so we unleash six thousand years of bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism, torture, wars, inquisitions, crusades and terror.
The birth of ’civilisation’ is in reality ’The Fall'.
What on earth happened!?
In his book ’The Fall', Steve Taylor puts forward an explanation as to why we fell. Around four thousand B.C. the world entered a period of rapid global warming. Within the space of only a few hundred years, the temperature rose significantly. This would have had a catastrophic effect on agriculture. There would have been devastating crop failures where people were practising farming in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and parts of Asia in particular. Faced with starvation, people would have had to organise to protect what scarce resources they had left, and almost inevitably they would have started to raid nearby communities. The tribes who would be most successful at doing this would have been the ones who were willing to be the most aggressive, and the ones willing to organise militarily. Successful armies, or even war-bands, do not operate well as anarchist collectives. History has shown us that armies work best as disciplined, organised, and hierarchical structures. So, the tribes that would have been the most successful in raiding other tribes and in protecting their own resources, would have been the tribes who gave command and power over to a strong and aggressive leader - the warlord. The most successful warlords would gain control of more territory and more resources, and rapidly grow in stature and in power. The rise of the warlords gave birth to the rise of kings, and then to emperors, and empires. Within only a relatively short period of time, a handful of successful tribes would have been able to subjugate, slaughter, assimilate or enslave their neighbours. Whether through slaughter or slavery, out of the hundreds of thousands of tribes that would have been around originally, before long there were only a handful of tribes remaining, as the ’winners’ assimilated the ’losers’. These successful tribes then became the different tribes, or races, that we now know. So, a tribe called the Han became the modern-day Han Chinese, and rose to become the most numerous tribe on the planet in terms of population. The Rus tribe became the modern-day Russians. The Semites became the modern-day Arabs and Jews; the Finno-Ugrics became the modern-day Finns, Hungarians and Estonians. Most aggressive of all, the IndoEuropean tribes conquered most of Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian continent, and over the next few thousand years went on to slaughter and enslave people across all five habitable continents on the planet.
Giving power to psychopaths.
In order to be able to do this, we gave power to the psychopaths amongst us. From
what we currently know about psychopathic behaviour it does seem to have genetic markers, meaning that some people seem to have a disposition towards it. Estimates vary, but it seems that somewhere around one in twenty-five people carry these genes. We have no reason (that I am aware of) to think that this would have been any different in hunter-gatherer peoples. What we do know is that in huntergatherer cultures, psychopathic behaviour was usually contained and constrained by the tribe. Although an individual may be able to survive well for some time by hunting and gathering on their own, ultimately it is a lifestyle that is dependent for its success on cooperation with others, and working with others as a team. Successful hunter-gatherer tribes would have been those tribes who were high-functioning; tribes where there was a good degree of cooperation, communication, and people looking out for each other. A tribe where people did not like each other, and where there was strife and conflict, would have been a tribe at risk. For the tribe to survive, conflicts and personality clashes needed to be resolved. Psychopathic behaviour is characterised by aggressiveness and a lack of empathy, and usually creates divisiveness, anxiety, fear and paranoia in groups. It is not conducive to creating a high-functioning hunter-gatherer tribe. So, signs of psychopathic behaviour would have been nipped in the bud. In many tribes, anyone who started to get too cocky or arrogant would have been teased to take them down a peg or two. If that did not work, they would have been told off. If that did not work they would have been called to council and shamed in front of the whole tribe, knowing that if they persisted in their behaviour the next step would be to be cast out of the tribe. In hunter-gatherer times being cast out of the tribe would, sooner or later, in effect have been a death sentence.
So as far as we can tell, for hundreds of thousands of years, psychopathic behaviour was generally not allowed to develop. Then six thousand years ago, for the first time in human history, we not only hand power to the psychopaths, but give them free rein (and free reign). The result has been unsurprising; they became bloodthirsty warlords, tyrannical kings, mad and monstrous emperors. As times moved on, they moved with the times, and became the robber barons, the ’nobility', priests and popes, the ruthless businessmen, lying and manipulative politicians, greedy investment bankers, celebrities and the super-rich; people we continue to hand our power over to (although there are some signs that this may be beginning to change - I will come back to this later).
Not all people are psychopaths of course! But most people, if they are subjected to
enough trauma, can end up showing some psychopathic traits. As part of a warband or an army, in order to go into a defenceless village and slaughter the elderly, and slaughter parents in front of their children, in order to rape and take children as slaves, you have to have really hardened your heart. You have to have killed empathy and compassion within you. Shaman is the very definition of empathy. It is about the deep empathic connection with ’other'. Shape-shifting into ’other’ involves hollowing-out, putting yourself aside, and experiencing what it is to actually be that other person, animal, or plant, (or even stone, river, or mountain). That is a deeply empathic act, and doing it changes you. It brings with it a lasting sense of compassion, kinship and connection; of ’we’ rather than ’I'. This is, of course, a right-brain act. The left-brain, on the other hand, is all about separation. It is about ’I’ rather than ’we'. It is selfish and self-centred. It is logical, unemotional, and un-empathic; rational, calculating and capable of being cold and ruthless. It is concerned with ’me’ and what is ’mine', and with the ego. In order for the Fall to happen, the left hemisphere of our brains had to dominate and suppress the right hemisphere. Steve Taylor calls this ’the ego explosion', or egomania, a theme he explores in his book ’Back to Sanity', which he wrote after writing ’The Fall'. In suppressing our right-brains we cut off from our sense of interconnectedness and compassion not only to each other but to our fellow animals, plants, and Mother Earth herself, and instead enter a period of selfishness and heartlessness.
Not everybody would have been like this of course. There would have been (and still are) many who still felt and showed compassion and love. There would have been (and still are) countless acts of kindness and compassion through these dark times. They are candles in that darkness.
But that still doesn't really explain why it happened.
Steve Taylor's explanation about the Fall being instigated by rapid climate change is, I think, almost certainly true. However, it is only a partial explanation, for it leaves a major question unanswered. The climate changes all the time. There are periods of rapid warming, and of rapid cooling. Any successful species has, by definition of being successful, learned to adapt and cope with this as if it does not, then it goes extinct. In the hundreds of thousand years of human history we would have lived through many periods of cooling and warming, and the fact we are still here means that we knew how to cope with them. In none of those previous episodes of sudden warming did we react how we did when the sudden warming happened six
thousand years ago. What we did in four thousand B.C. was extraordinary. It completely changed us. It would be hard to overstate just how enormous a change this actually was. We entered an entirely new period of human history, not only in terms of how we were living, but in terms of our very consciousness itself. And it is not only us humans that it has had a dramatic effect on. Human activity has fundamentally changed the planet. We now live on every continent and have altered over 80% of the planet’s viable land. We have greatly accelerated the extinction of species, and are now in the midst of a mass extinction event, caused by our activity. Our influence has impacted on ecosystems, and even the geochemistry of the earth itself. We have polluted the air, the land and the oceans. Atmospheric, geological, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth systems and processes are all now being profoundly altered by humans on a global scale. Such is the scale of our effect on the planet that scientists have said that we are now in an entirely new geological epoch. They have called it the Anthropocene — the human era.
So, the big question is this: in all the numerous times in human history that we have had to adapt to climate change, why this time did we respond so utterly differently? Well, there is one obvious answer to that question. Hunter-gathering is characterised by being highly flexible and adaptable. Hunter-gatherers are not reliant on only a few food sources. They often have hundreds of possible foods, including knowledge of foods that can be relied on in times of famine. They also were mobile, and moved on when food became scarce in a particular area. By contrast, farming is highly inflexible. It is usually reliant on at best only a handful of food sources. If you pay attention to nature over the years you will notice that in any given year, some particular plant species are flourishing more than others. As I sit here writing this it is autumn, and this particular autumn the rowan berries have been stupendous. I have never seen so many of them, nor them looking so vibrant. Lots of people I know have also been noticing them and commenting on them. A few years ago, it was the ox-eye daisies putting on a spectacular display in the early summer, the like of which I had never seen them do before. Another year it was the year of the dandelions. Animal species too have good years and lean years.
In previous periods of climate change that were unfavourable to humans, human population numbers would have declined, and then risen again as the conditions improved. In this, we were like any other species, and part of the natural cycle of life. Agriculture, to a significant degree, buffered us from this cycle. It allowed us to build up a surplus in good years, to see us through the lean times. However, if
unfavourable conditions persist, if the crops fail, then people would have had to go back to their hunting and gathering skills to see them through. The problem is that the more agriculture spread, the more it destroyed the natural environment, and made hunting and gathering impossible, as the flora and fauna that hunter-gatherers would have relied on were no longer there. Plus, the longer agriculture went on, the more hunting and gathering knowledge and skills became lost. And on top of all that, because agriculture in good times produced surplus food, human populations grew to a level and density far above those that could be sustained by huntergathering on the same area of land. So, by the time that the great crop failures of around four thousand B.C. began to happen, returning to hunter-gathering was not an option. People really did face starvation, and in numbers that would not have been seen before.
However, this still does not fully explain the level of violence and dramatic and rapid change in culture that we see happen at this time. People could have died in large numbers, and the survivors could have gone back to hunter-gathering, abandoning agriculture as a failed experiment. There is evidence that some early agricultural societies probably did exactly that when their crops failed (usually once they had degraded the environment to a level that was no longer sustainable). To really understand the drastic changes in human behaviour that the famines of four thousand B.C. precipitated, we have to turn to another author — Daniel Quinn.
The line we crossed.
Quinn has written several books outlining his ideas about what happened with the rise of agriculture. In his novel ’Ishmael', a sentient gorilla (Ishmael), is giving a critique of the human race. One of the things Ishmael says goes like this: Lions do not come home at night after a day of hunting and say ’You know what, those hyenas are competing with us for food. Tomorrow instead of going out to hunt the zebras, why don't we spend the day killing all the hyenas instead. That way all the zebras will be ours forever-more.'. But that is in effect what the first people to practice agriculture decided to do. They decided to eradicate the competitor species. Now you may say that the reason lions do not do this is because they lack the sophistication of human language and cognitive ability to be able to discuss and organise this. And it is true that lions do not have this ability. The point Quinn is making here though is that humans do have the language and cognitive ability to organise this. The thing is though, that for tens of thousands of years, even
hundreds of thousands, humans chose not to do this. Now you may argue that the reason humans did not do this earlier is because nobody had ever thought of it. There is a problem with this argument though. If it were true then once agriculture did develop, as it spread out, hunter-gatherers who first saw it and came in contact with it would have slapped their foreheads and said ’What a wonderful idea! Why didn't we think of that? Let's all stop practising hunter-gathering and join the agriculturalists.'. Now, this may have happened now and then. However, there are many accounts of hunter-gatherers first encountering agriculture. Most of those accounts record hunter-gatherers as being horrified by what they saw. To huntergatherers, the devastation of the natural environment that agriculturalists practised was an unfathomable monstrosity and aberration. It is true that agricultural culture spread very quickly. But this is not to do with hunter-gatherers embracing it with open arms. It is because the hunter-gatherers, in the end, had no choice. When agricultural cultures arrived, they destroyed the environment that makes huntergathering possible. As agriculturalists spread throughout Europe and Asia, then Africa, Australasia and then into the Americas, hunter-gatherers time and time again were forced to abandon their lifestyle and adopt the agricultural life-style, as the natural habitat was destroyed. And any hunter-gatherers that tried to resist were wiped out by the agriculturalists (as after all hunter-gathers were only ’uncivilised savages', barely human at all, to the agriculturalists). It is still going on to this day, where the last remaining true hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon are being either assimilated or wiped out as logging and deforestation destroys the land they live in.
Hunter-gatherers did not decide to systematically wipe out any competitor animal species. This was because they just would not act in that way. Hunter-gatherers experienced the world shamanically. Shamanism gives us a deep sense of the sacredness and interconnectedness of all life. To such people, the other hunter animals, the wolves and bears, the jaguars and foxes, were brothers and sisters. They were treated with reverence and respect, as were all living things. Everything had its place and its right to exist. The land belonged to all the Peoples, human and the more-than-human. In fact, the Peoples belonged to the land itself.
A profound shift in consciousness.
It is important to remember that this relationship with the other Peoples and the land was not an idea or a thought. Nor was it a belief, nor a concept; not an ideal, principal, nor a law. It was something much deeper than that. It was a heartfelt
thing, something that arose and emerged from soul and from spirit. Shamanism gives us the ability to talk with animals and plants, and with the land itself. If you remember, earlier I said that the experience of communicating with another being in this way, of becoming it and shape-shifting into it, brings with it a deep sense of empathy and connection.
In the modern era, we are so used to agriculture, to keeping animals and owning land, to gardening and weeding, that it can be hard for us to really grasp just how utterly shocking agriculture would have appeared to hunter-gatherers. To our shamanic ancestors, to witness the wholesale destruction of forests, and the mass slaughter of animals, would not have looked like seeing their kin massacred, it would have been seeing their kin massacred. There are reports of native Americans weeping when they saw the slaughter of the Buffalo; of indigenous people weeping when they first saw ploughs being used, as the ploughs were tearing the skin of Mother Earth.
The adoption of agriculture involved a profound shift in the human psyche. Rather than being a part of the land, children of the earth, and sharing the land with our non-human relatives and kin, we decided that we owned the land, and that we would now decide who lives on it. We decide that ’This is now our land. All you goats, you are now ours too, and we will do anything we wish with you. You wolves, you are dead.'. We say ’This is our land. We want to grow wheat on it. All you other plants, we will now kill. All you animals that try and share the wheat with us, from now on, we will kill you'. We decide to elevate ourselves above and beyond all other beings. We elevated ourselves to gods, deciding what lives and what dies, and lose our compassion and empathy for the non-human.
I find it almost impossible to really convey just what a shocking, radical and profound change this was in us. Why on earth did it happen? We do not really know, and probably never will. It is worth remembering at this point that I said the truth of whether Palaeolithic peoples were savage, as Keeley would have it, or peaceful as Taylor would have it, probably lies somewhere in between their two opposing views. Where you place yourself between Keeley and Taylor’s opposing views will probably come down to what your core beliefs are about human beings. It will depend upon how much you think human nature is selfish, as opposed to how much you think it is human nature to be cooperative. Personally, I lean more towards Taylor, but I also fully accept that some tribes would have been more
aggressive and less empathic than others. Some may have even been taken over by bullying psychopaths. Daniel Quinn himself leans more towards Keeley's views, from what I can see. The point is, that amongst all the thousands of tribes, there would have been some who were less empathic than others. We do know that the Neolithic revolution, the start of what Daniel Quinn calls ’totalitarian agriculture’ probably started with a group of tribes known as the Natufians, who lived in the Levant (an area in and around what is now modern-day Syria). And it would have only needed one tribe to start the unstoppable ball rolling, because of the inherently expansionist and aggressive nature of the mindset of totalitarian agriculture. But whoever did it, they crossed a line.
The ’Taker’ culture and the ’Leaver’ cultures.
In his book ’Sapiens’ Yuval Harari outlines a plausible theory that taking up agriculture was probably not so much a decision as something that we slid into over a period of a few hundred years. Interesting though it is to speculate as to why it happened, the most important thing here is to understand the consequences. Daniel Quinn refers to pre-agricultural cultures (for there were many of them, in a splendid range of variety and diversity) as being ’Leaver’ cultures, in that they took what they needed at any given time, and left the rest. Indeed, many of these cultures have the concept of leaving a share for the other creatures. For example, unless they were starving, they would take only a certain number of berries, with the idea of leaving the rest for other animals. By contrast, the agriculture of the Neolithic and modern eras, Quinn calls the ’Taker’ culture. The Taker culture is wholly orientated towards building up a surplus. It takes everything that it possibly can, with no regard to other animals or species.
Taker culture is inherently aggressive in its underlying mindset, which is one of ownership and of eradicating any perceived competition. It is aggressive in other ways too. Early agricultural diets may have been poor nutritionally compared to hunter-gatherer diets. However, generally, agriculture produces surplus. This surplus means that the land can support more people than hunting and gathering can. The result is that the population grows under agriculture. Whereas hunter-gatherer population sizes tended to be fairly stable, with the advent of agriculture the human population started to grow rapidly. This meant that the sheer numbers of agriculturalists soon started to overtake and overwhelm the hunter-gatherer tribes. More people, in turn, means that more land needs to be found for agriculture. So,
whilst Taker culture started in a small area of the world, once it got going it spread like wildfire and rapidly overran and eradicated any Leaver cultures in its path. We are all aware, not least because of its portrayal in films, of the way in which the arrival of the Taker culture, largely in the form of white agriculturalist settlers, rapidly overran and destroyed the way of life of the indigenous North Americans. What most people do not realise that the same thing was also happening around the same time in Africa, South America and Australasia, and had already comprehensively happened in Europe and much of Asia.
A further reason Taker culture is so aggressive is because of the investment that goes into the land, and the need to then protect it. To clear forests and plough land, particularly with only the stone implements that the early agriculturalists had to use, requires a phenomenal amount of time and effort. If a hunter-gatherer tribe felt threatened by their neighbours, the tribe generally had the option of moving on. By contrast, if an agricultural tribe feels threatened by their neighbours, they also could move on, but the stakes in doing so are much higher because of the investment they have already put into the land, and the effort that would be needed to clear new land. For agriculturalists, the first option will always be to try and stand and fight, and often even to pre-emptively wipe out troublesome neighbours to remove the threat.
So, from its origins in a small area of the Middle East, the aggressive and expansionist Taker culture swept throughout the world. Within only a few thousand years it had almost entirely eradicated a successful and sustainable way of life that had existed for hundreds of thousands of years before it came along. Today only a tiny handful of true hunter-gatherer tribes remain, in places like the Amazon jungle, and the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and their continued survival as hunter-gatherers does not look promising.
Interestingly, once agriculture had started in the Middle East, it also spontaneously emerged in a few other places in the world, including the Americas and China. These new Taker cultures followed the same pattern of territorial aggressiveness and expansion as the original Taker culture that originated in the Middle East. The only reason that they did not expand as much as the original Taker culture was that they were limited by various factors such as the kinds of animals they had available for domestication, geographical constraints, and in some cases that they destroyed their environment (and themselves in the process). If you are interested, this is
covered in Jared Diamond's excellent book ’Guns, Germs and Steel'. The only reason I mention it here is because most of the examples Keeley gives of ’precivilisation’ cultures being violent are not in fact examples of hunter-gatherer cultures, but settled, agricultural cultures. He does use the example of the Inuit (possibly) having finished off the struggling Viking (agricultural) colony in Greenland, but this is an example of hunter-gatherers trying to protect themselves from aggressive agricultural settlers (and a rare example of them managing to do it successfully, although it was only a temporary reprieve). What Keeley misses is that the problem is almost always agriculture.
So, back to four thousand B.C. and the birth of city-state culture. Prior to this time, when the climate had changed unfavourably, hunter-gatherers had either moved on to somewhere more favourable or, as with any other living thing, the population died back until the situation improved — all part of the natural cycle. But when the climate suddenly warms up in four thousand B.C. and the crops begin to fail, this time we responded differently, because this time it is happening to a Taker culture. We now have population densities that can no longer be supported by returning to hunter-gathering, and have in any case lost the necessary skills and knowledge to live like that anymore. We also have a completely different mindset now, with aggressive concepts of ownership, of taking land, of domination and of wiping out the competition. Given we have already lost our empathy, it is not a huge step to go from wiping out ’competitor’ species of plants and other animals, to now wiping out ’competitor’ humans too. And so, we go to war with each other, to seize land and food, and to kill the competition. We do this on a scale that we have never done before. To do it we organise into armies, and hand power over to ruthless psychopaths to lead them. To protect ourselves we move into defensible cities and other fortifications.
The Fall has begun.
Once it starts, the Fall is very swift indeed. We see the rapid emergence of the first city-state cultures. Initially, it appears that the first of these retained some pre-Fallen characteristics, in that they seem to have been at least relatively egalitarian. However, as we fell further, these were soon replaced by much more hierarchical and aggressive cultures. We see the rise of the first empires, with massive wealth inequality, patriarchy, slavery, huge armies, and the birth of organised religions - the sky religions - to justify and organise all of this. These are brutal cultures, and the
children born into them grow up brutalised, and accordingly, raise their children in the same manner. And so, once the brutality started, it rapidly became selfperpetuating, passing on from one generation to the next. On and on, for the last six thousand years of violence and destruction of the environment that we call ’civilisation'.
The Great Forgetting.
Why do we call this period of madness and brutality ’civilisation’ and refer to hunter-gatherers as being the savages? Because the winners really do write history. In order to justify its behaviour, the Taker culture has to deny that there is any alternative. It has to deny that, prior to its arrival, we had been living much more peacefully, fairly and in a sustainable way for hundreds of thousands of years. This is what Daniel Quinn calls ’the great forgetting'. The Taker culture, if it acknowledges the existence of a time before its arrival at all, then it refers to it as a time of savagery. A time when people’s lives were ’poor, nasty, brutish and short'. And by the time history began to be written down, thousands of years had passed since people had given up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and so it is assumed that people had always been farmers. Even when archaeologists and palaeontologists eventually discover three million years of human generations prior to agriculture, for a long time this changes little, and is dismissed as “pre-history” and “precivilisation”, and is an era that most people have still forgotten and know little about.
Remember too that we have handed power to the psychopaths. To justify their aggression, the psychopaths tell us that violence and selfishness are innate and normal behaviour for humans. So, they tell us that it is important for us to keep handing power to them, and make them leaders so that they can protect us. This, of course, becomes a self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling process which we still live in to this day. Any notion that the vast majority of human history shows that our nature is not intrinsically violent and warlike, but that for the majority of human history we were peaceful, has to be forgotten or derided.
Most people simply do not want to face any of this at all. Sometimes too, when I am teaching about the Fall, I get accused of being ’negative’ by new-age people, who want to keep things fluffy and light. Sometimes they tell me that it is all going to be alright because we are about to magically shift into a fifth dimension, or that a
more advanced alien civilisation is about to save us. Such avoidance and denial just means that our fall continues, and the reality is the trajectory is not good. We are about to fall off a cliff, and we will take thousands upon thousands of other species with us if we do. From a shamanic point of view, that really matters. Part of the vital role of the shaman has always been to try and make sure that humans live respectfully alongside the other, more-than-human, Peoples. There is more to shamanism than the ’nice’ bits like doing shamanic healings. It is also about being the voice and advocate of the non-human Peoples (which is, of course, one of the reasons why the Taker culture ruthlessly and systematically would wipe out shamans whenever it came across them).
The truth is that we have become addicted to a middle-world cycle of violence and unsustainable consumption. We have to get real about our addiction. The first stage of any recovery from addiction is always to face things as they really are, and face just how bad things really are. That means no more avoidance, no more lying to ourselves, no bargaining, no rationalising, no excuses. That is what I have been attempting to do in this chapter — face things as they are, underneath the lies of the Taker culture. So, in the next chapter, we can move on to how we can recover, as there is indeed hope and ways forward.
Chapter Seven
How We Can Recover: and shamanism's vital role in this.
Baboons!
Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share studied a troop of wild baboons in Kenya for over 20 years, starting in 1978. Sapolsky and Share called them “The Garbage Dump Troop” because the baboons took much of their food from the garbage from a nearby tourist lodge. However, the aggressive, high-status alpha males in the troop generally did not allow the lower-status males, or any females, access to the garbage. Then, infected meat in the dump led to the deaths of nearly half of the adult males in the troop, with the biggest proportion of the deaths being the aggressive, dominant males. Essentially, all the alpha males died.
Now, the Taker culture, with its view about the innateness of aggression, would tell us that what would happen next is that the beta-males would now rise up. They would seize their chance, and step into the vacancy left by the alpha-males deaths. They would become the new, dominant and aggressive leaders of the troop. But that is not what happened. Instead, aggression and bullying dropped off dramatically. New leaders did step up. But these new male leaders, in stark contrast to the previous alpha males, directed little aggression to lower-status males, and none at all towards females. Instead the troop began to spend much more time in grooming and other bonding activities, and sat closer together than they used to in the past. Blood samples taken by the scientists studying the troop showed that levels of stress hormones in the baboons showed a dramatic decrease. Most interestingly of all though, if any adolescent males showed any sign of aggressive and bullying alpha-male behaviour, then they were slapped down for it, and so grew up learning that such behaviour was not tolerated in the troop. So, the new, kinder, less stressful culture persisted. It became a permanent cultural change, passed on from one generation to the next. Even when adolescent males who had grown up in other troops joined the “Garbage Dump Troop,” those adolescents too displayed less aggressive behaviour than in other baboon troops.
The ’great forgetting’ exists to cover up a lie. If you look at the whole of human history, and not just the period of Taker culture, it shows that for the vast majority of the time we have exhibited nothing like the levels of violence and destructiveness that we have in the last six-thousand years of the Taker culture. The violence and destructiveness of the modern, Taker culture era is cultural, not innate. And that means that it can be changed. Knowing this is ’the great remembering'.
Taking power back.
The culture we call ’civilisation’ is a psychopathic culture. At the time of the Fall, we handed our power over to psychopaths, and put them in charge of things. If we are to have a healthy society again, in fact if we are to survive at all, then we now have to take power back from them. It will not be easy. They will not willingly relinquish control. However, we have already been slowly starting to do it. In any time between the start of the Fall, and then up until only a few hundred years ago (a period of around five and a half thousand years), you and I, as ordinary citizens, would have had virtually no rights or power at all. Power was almost entirely in the hands of the ruling elite, and generally, the king or emperor had absolute power. It is true that for a period of time in ancient Greece there was a form of democracy. It was founded in 507 B.C. and lasted for nearly two centuries. However, it never really caught on in the rest of the world at the time, and was in any case limited only to adult men with full citizenship. Women, foreigners and slaves - the vast majority of the population - had no vote or voice. There were some elements of limited democracy in the Roman Empire that followed, in that there were laws that mediated between the ruling families (the patricians) and the rest of the population (the plebeians). But the next democratic government did not appear until well over a thousand years later, when in 903 A.D. the Althing - the oldest continuous parliament in existence - was founded in Iceland. This was followed by the Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man. Then in England in 1215 A.D. the Magna Carta saw the first attempt to place some limits on the absolute powers of the monarchy. King John did not honour it after signing it, and it took a war and John's death for it to be enforced. Slowly though, over the next few hundred years, throughout Europe some power began to be wrested back from the psychopathic elite. Parliaments placed greater and greater limitations on the rights and power of monarchs. Parliaments themselves became more democratic as more and more people gained the right to vote. Democratically-run guilds, councils, unions and workers’ collectives sprang up. Ordinary citizens gradually gained more rights and
the protection of the law.
Obviously, we still have a long, long way to go. We still give our power to sociopathic politicians. Wealth is still largely in the hands of the psychopathic elite. We live in a culture that puts narcissistic celebrities on a pedestal. Nevertheless, we have still come a remarkably long way in a relatively short period of time. The degree of rights, protection and power that we enjoy now is extraordinary compared to even just a few hundred years ago, and incomparable with citizens of early city-state cultures. As well as the right to vote, we now enjoy health care, pensions, free education, social security, freedom of movement, legal protection, the right to a fair trial, free speech, freedom of worship, and much more. All of these changes, that many people now just take for granted and are complacent about, have been fought for and hard won. People have literally died fighting for them. The psychopathic elites did not concede any of them willingly, and never will. It is not in their nature to relinquish any of the power and status they have, not without a fight. The progress that has been made has been won through countless demonstrations, petitioning, popular uprisings, revolts, riots, campaigns, lobbying, voting, educating, boycotting and more.
Whilst there is still much more to be done in reclaiming society back from psychopaths, one of the things that really gives me hope is a change I have witnessed in just the last few years. As a psychotherapist, I have been familiar with the term ’psychopath’ for most of my working life — some thirty-plus years now. During most of that time though, what I observed was that ’psychopath’ was a term that most people (non-psychotherapists) did not really use or understand. For most people, it was a term they reserved for describing axe-wielding massmurderers. Recently though, that has changed enormously. Public understanding of the term has grown hugely. A quick search on the internet using phrases such as ’psychopath bankers', ’psychopath politicians', ’psychopaths in business', or ’psychopaths and the rich’ will now turn up a plethora of articles, nearly all written in just the last five years or so. It is now common knowledge and an accepted fact that many of our politicians, heads of business, investment bankers, and the superrich, are psychopathic. More than that though, significant numbers of people are beginning to be able to spot the tell-tale traits. It is common these days to hear people refer to politicians and celebrities such as Tony Blair, Donald Trump or Kanye West as being narcissistic or psychopathic. Increasingly I also see people being able to spot and identify these traits when they are present in people that they
know in their lives. And most importantly, more and more people are beginning to understand that these traits are not something to be admired or looked up to, but are exactly what the problem with society is. For much of the last six-thousand years, in the era of the Fall, we have glorified people who are egomaniacs; manipulative, bullying, ’successful’ in terms of accruing wealth and power at other people's expense, and who think they are special. Indeed, psychopaths have carefully held themselves up as people to be admired, respected and looked up to, worshipped even. This was absolutely the norm until very recently. Yes, there are indeed still many people who look up to them. But there are also a large and growing number of people now who do not; people who see psychopathic behaviour for what it is — destructive, and actually shameful.
The wetiko epidemic.
Shamans have always known about this destructive, psychopathic energy. Different shamanic cultures would have had a name for it. Again, because we killed our shamans in the west we have lost our terminology, so we have to adopt words from other cultures (as we did with the word ’shaman’ itself). So, to describe the destructive, psychopathic energy we have adopted the word ’wetiko’ from the Algonquin peoples of North America. The word was popularised by Paul Levy in his book “Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil”, and by Jack Forbes in his book “Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism”. These days, you will now find plenty of articles and other information and resources about wetiko online. Wetiko is a parasitic spirit or thought-form. It is highly destructive and is motivated by greed, selfishness and excessive consumption. It infects people like a virus, literally possessing them. Once it has taken hold of someone, it deludes them into thinking that consuming the lifeforce and energy of others for self-aggrandisement or profit is a natural and admirable way to live, and steers them into living a predatory and parasitic lifestyle; essentially, cannibalising other people and the planet.
Wetiko is a middle-world spirit. It does not exist in the upper or lower worlds. But it is rampant in the middle-world (which is another reason for hollowing-out, and being cautious about middle-world work). It both thrives and hides in destruction, and feeds on deception. To deal with it, we first have to become aware of its existence, be able to spot it and understand what it is that we are dealing with. It has always been with us. Shamans say it is a very ancient spirit. Indeed, it was the
knowledge that the shamans had about wetiko that kept it in check in the past, and that kept hunter-gatherer cultures safe from it. For hundreds of thousands of years, the shamans were our guardians. Shamans know and understand the power of spirits, and were awake to just how truly dangerous something like wetiko can be if it is allowed to take hold. It is precisely for this reason that any sign of wetiko was slapped down and rooted out in hunter-gatherer societies (and it is of course what the ’Garbage Dump Troop’ of baboons learned to do too). It was only when we turned our back on shamanism that wetiko was free to really take hold and infect human culture, and become the epidemic that we now see and live in.
Remember, shamanism says that we get ill for one of two reasons — soul-loss and power-loss. When we suffer soul-loss or power-loss it weakens us and leaves holes in us. In this weakened, vulnerable state other things (intrusions) can then get into us, making us ill and potentially taking us over. As a society as a whole, when we disconnected ourselves from the natural world and Mother Earth, we suffered massive, collective power-loss. When we domesticated ourselves by sending our true, wild souls away in order to fit in to our complex society and our tamed, modern-day lives, we suffered collective soul-loss. Suffering from massive soul-loss and power-loss, society as a whole became wide open to being infected by wetiko, and wetiko seized its chance.
What is important to recognise about wetiko is that it is not just something that psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists are infected by. They are people who are more susceptible to it, and more easily infected. In reality though, wetiko is something that infects all of us to some degree. It is not so much ’us against the psychopaths’ as ’all of us against wetiko'. Wetiko is any time we take more than our fair share, or when we act with disregard or a lack of compassion for others. Our selfish, self-centred culture, our over-consumption with disregard for its consequences, our exploitation of the natural world, all these are wetiko. To overcome wetiko needs both inner and outer action. We have to personally wake up to it, and become aware of it within ourselves; name it, and then choose to act differently in our own personal lives. Equally we have to wake up to it in society, name it and shame it, resist it, and spread awareness of it, so that others can wake up to it too. If we are to recover, then both the inner and the outer work are needed.
As well as being tough on wetiko though, we also need to be tough on the causes of
wetiko. For hundreds of thousands of years, shamanism kept us safe from wetiko, and it is also shamanism that can save us, now that we have allowed ourselves to become infected. Shamanism gives us the vital knowledge and understanding that means that we can begin to spot wetiko, and start to do something about it. Even more crucially though, shamanic healing is specifically tooled and equipped to deal with what causes a wetiko infection in the first place — soul-loss and power-loss — and therefore treat not just the symptoms but the underlying cause.
This is why we need shamanism back.
Post-fallen recovery
It is not just recently that we have started the process of dispelling wetiko though. We may have only just begun to consciously wake up to doing it, but unconsciously our recovery has been going on for a while. It is easy to become overwhelmed with despair about the Fall and the state that we are in. However, in ’The Fall’ Steve Taylor invites us to step back and take a wider view of human history. Taylor points out that, if we do this, we see signs of what he calls our ’post-fallen recovery’ (shamanically, ’dispelling wetiko'), starting around five hundred years or so ago, and gathering pace ever since. In that period, we slowly seem to be recovering our natural empathy. Some of the examples of this that Taylor points out include...
-
• The abolition of slavery. Slavery was the norm for the first five to five-and-a-half thousand years of ’civilisation'. Then gradually people started to call for its abolition. In Britain, the act of Parliament abolishing slavery was passed in 1833. However, Britain was by no means the first country to pass such a law. It had, for example, been abolished in Lithuania in as early as 1588, and in Russia in 1723 (although they retained serfdom), and in Portugal in 1761. In fact, it was first banned in Iceland as early as 1117, although it was reintroduced as a form of serfdom (known as Vistarband) in 1490. It was banned in 1214 by the Town of Korcula (in modern-day Croatia), and was probably no longer practised in Norway by 1274. Sweden (including Finland at the time) made slavery illegal 1335. Gradually laws were passed banning slavery all over the world.
-
• Animal Rights. The pressure to outlaw things such as cockfighting and bear-baiting began in the Elizabethan era in England, in the late fifteen
hundreds. We still have a long way to go in putting right our relationship with our fellow animals, and we have come a long way too. Now we have lots of animal charities, animal sanctuaries, campaigns and legislation for more compassionate farming practices and to protect animals in the wild, and so on. Such things would have been incomprehensible to most people living in earlier city-state cultures, kingdoms and empires (but probably comprehensible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who treated animals with respect).
-
• Changes in the penal system. In the last few hundred years, we have seen the growth of the compassionate notion that even if people have done things wrong, as a society we should still treat them with a degree of compassion and respect. So, gradually we see the movement in many countries towards the abolition of torture of prisoners, the phasing out of things like the stocks and other cruel punishments, and the ending of capital punishment. In this period of time prison conditions also improve, and the notion of rehabilitation, not just punishment, begins to grow.
-
• Women's rights. In most countries, we see women gaining not just the right to vote, but the right to equal legal status and protection, and moves towards equal pay and opportunities including education, and so on. Again, there is more to be done, but again we have come a long way too.
-
• Voting rights. The campaign for the right for women to be able to vote was the last in a long line of earlier campaigns to wrest some measure of control back from the psychopathic elite. Prior to the Reform Act of 1832, in Britain only the rich had been allowed to vote. The 1832 Act extended voting rights to about one in seven adult males (based on property ownership). It would take a succession of further Acts before all adult men were finally granted the right to vote in 1918, with the Representation of the People's Act. Prior to that Act forty-percent of adult men still did not have the right to vote. The 1918 Act also gave forty-percent of women the right to vote based on property ownership (the first time any women had had the right to vote), with universal suffrage finally passed in 1928.
-
• The Welfare State. There is much evidence that hunter-gatherer tribes, whenever it was possible and practical, cared for the vulnerable in their tribe. By contrast, throughout most of the time we call ’civilised', if they
had no family to care for them then the poor and the weak, the destitute, elderly and infirm, all were left to beg and starve to death. Monasteries and friaries may have provided some basic and sporadic assistance, but the idea that society as a whole should care for the vulnerable amongst us only really began to take off with Victorian-era philanthropy. In Britain, this eventually resulted in the founding of the Welfare State by the Labour government shortly after the Second World War, with the idea that everyone should have access to free health care, education, and to equal opportunities.
-
• Workers’ rights. The right to things like sick pay, holiday pay, maternity leave, safe and non-exploitative working conditions, fair pay etc. have gradually been won in a series of steps and stages.
-
• Child protection. The treatment of children throughout most of the time of the Fall has been truly horrific. Slowly, a series of laws has given children legal protection and freedom from exploitation and cruelty, plus the right to education, health care and so on.
-
• The environmental movement. This did not really start until the 1960s in any big way, but in that short space of time, the awareness of the need to put right our relationship with the environment has grown incredibly. From not really being in most people's consciousness at all only a relatively short while ago, there are now huge numbers of environmental protection laws, campaigns, charities and activists, and so on.
-
• Tolerance of gender preference. Gay, bisexual and transsexual people were generally accepted and integrated into hunter-gather cultures, and even sometimes regarded as being blessed. By contrast the Fallen cultures have generally ruthlessly and cruelly persecuted them. So, it has been amazing to see the changes that have happened in many areas of the world with regard to this, as we regain our sanity and compassion. This has been in terms of things like anti-discriminatory legislation, legalisation of gay marriage and so on, and the uplifting sea-change of attitude amongst many people in recent times.
There are so many other examples of us gradually recovering from the Fall and wetiko. For all that we still have a long way to go, it is still an impressive amount of changes and progress in a relatively short space of time. What is also striking is that
our recovery is gaining pace. The changes that have happened in just the last fifty years are as many as happened in the previous hundred-and-fifty years, and as many as happened in the few hundred years prior to that.
When feeling despair, this is worth remembering and holding on to.
How shamanism can help in saving us.
Remember, shamanism is a highly pragmatic form of spiritual practice. In huntergatherer times, it catered not only for our spiritual needs and well-being, but literally kept us safe in this reality too. It helped us to hunt and to heal, and to live in sustainable and right balance with ourselves and the other Peoples. And it protected us from wetiko. To do this, what our shamanic ancestors always did was to take core shamanic principles and practice, and make that applicable and relevant to the times and the environment in which they were living in. We have to do exactly the same thing. We have to learn from our ancestors, and take shamanism and adapt it to the times that we find ourselves living in. We have to let it show us how to live in right relationship again, with each other, with other beings, and with Spirit. Our survival depends on this. It always has.
Rediscovering our empathy.
The outer changes that have been happening in our process of recovery are wonderful: all the legislation to try and make society more equal and fair; legislation to protect minorities, the vulnerable and the environment; all the charities and organisations; people experimenting with models of sustainable living like ecovillages, re-wilding, organic farming, renewable energy, and so on. However, as Daniel Quinn points out, if these outer changes are to be lasting and take root, then they need to be planted in a soil of deep inner change. Early on I pointed out that hunter-gather cultures did not destroy the environment because they had laws saying that they must not, but because the people in those societies, as individuals, simply would not. Whilst laws and legislation are necessary, in the end, they can only go so far. You can legislate to protect a minority group, but you cannot legislate to make people more empathic towards that group. Empathy must come from within.
There are many different ways to develop empathy. Psychopaths aside, it is a learnable thing for most people. It can even be taught. So, another one of the
positive changes we are seeing in our recovery from the Fall is the growth of things like compassion-based meditation practices and psychotherapies, the introduction of empathy lessons in some schools and businesses, and so on. Shamanism too has really important contributions to make to this re-discovery of our empathy, for empathy, deep empathy, is absolutely at the heart of shamanic experience and practice. In fact, I think that the huge growth and resurgence of interest in shamanism that we are seeing these days is directly a reflection of this process of recovering our deep empathy.
The Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as ’feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune (as in ’they had great sympathy for the flood victims’). Empathy goes further than sympathy. It means ’the ability to understand and share the feelings of another'. It is an embodied, emotional and visceral thing. To feel it we have to open ourselves up to experiencing being the ’other'; to shapeshift into them to a degree. As we have explored, shapeshifting is intrinsic to shamanism, and shamanism provides us with direct and practical ways to do this and experience it for ourselves. It shows us that re-connecting with people brings empathy in its wake. In a way, we do not so much learn empathy, but learn to open up and reconnect, and empathy then follows. Further still, shamanism teaches us that, in order to deeply regain empathy, we have to go beyond the human. We have to reconnect with the more-than-human world too. To do that, we have to reconnect to ourselves too; to our true, wild, and empathic souls. And again, the knowledge and skills as to how to do that are absolutely at the heart of shamanism and shamanic practice.
Rewilding ourselves.
As a species, we humans are often very proud of how we have domesticated other animals and plants. We see it as a sign of our cleverness and intelligence, and in some ways it is. But it has also come at a cost. For in order to practice agriculture, there was one species we had to domesticate more than any other. That species is, of course, ourselves. If we are to really recover our sanity, if we are really to heal from wetiko, then we have to connect back to our true self, underneath the layers of separation and domestication. We have to re-wild our own selves.
How to do this is a theme I will explore in the next book in this series ’Rewilding Your Soul: exploring the shamanic lower-world', for shamanism has so much to teach us and offer us in doing this. For now though, I do want to clarify that this
process of re-wilding ourselves cannot be a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life. Short of something like a pandemic wiping out ninety-nine percent of the human population, there are simply far, far too many of us now to be sustained by hunting and gathering. We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward. We need to take shamanism and learn from its wisdom, gifts and lessons. In doing this though, just as our ancestors did before us, we have to take shamanism and adapt it to the times in which we live. Shamanism has always been a dynamic and evolving thing. In that sense, shamanism itself is on a journey. The title of this book is ’The Shamanic Journey’. It is called that not just because it is about shamanic journeying, but because shamanism itself is on a journey too — a journey of change and adaptation. It always has been. It is one of the reasons that I have little time for the notion that modern shamanic practice is not valid because it is not ’traditional'. It is not a religion! It has no fixed way of doing things. There is no book of rules. It is a practical and pragmatic practice. We can indeed learn much from indigenous shamanic cultures in terms of what core shamanism is; about what is at the heart of it. But in the end, much of the application of the core shamanism by indigenous cultures was relevant to the times in which they lived. What we now need is the development of a new, modern shamanism that applies core shamanic knowledge and techniques in ways that are relevant and practical to modern times.
We will return to examining what a modern, post-tribal shamanism would look like later. In the meantime, in the next chapter, we will be returning to the practical and experiential work. Specifically, we will be looking at how to give a basic shamanic healing to somebody else.
Chapter Eight
How to Give a Simple Shamanic Healing: basic principles and practice.
Important! A word about ethics and healing.
This chapter is about how to do a simple shamanic healing on somebody else. Before we get into the practicalities of how to do this though, there is something that needs to be addressed first. It concerns ethics. Ethically, the healing practice that I am about to outline should never be done on somebody without that person's express and conscious consent. By conscious consent I mean their actual, physical, real consent; not just seeking consent from that person's ’higher self'! To do a shamanic healing on somebody without their express permission is a huge invasion of that person's privacy, shows no respect for their right to set their own personal boundaries, and quite simply is an assault, no matter how well intentioned! I am saying this because, in teaching introduction to shamanism days, it is a regular occurrence that I meet people from other healing backgrounds who feel it is fine to send people healing without asking that person first, and religious people who feel it is fine to pray for people without asking that person's permission. It is not my place here to get into the rights and wrongs of other, non-shamanic, healing methods and religions. What I can say though is that it is simply wrong to do a shamanic healing on somebody without their permission. Sending somebody healing is not the same thing as doing a shamanic healing on them. The equivalent of sending somebody healing in shamanism is to ask your guides to bless them, or possibly to ask your guides to heal them, but (and this is the crucial part) without you having any involvement or awareness of what the guides then do. Asking for blessing is a part of shamanic work. But it is not the same thing as doing a shamanic healing. Shamanic healing is a lot more involved and intimate a process than simply asking for blessings for them. Doing a shamanic healing on someone involves you actually doing things to them, and your being involved in the healing process, albeit on an energetic level. It needs prior consent.
As well as it being an assault to do shamanic healing on somebody without their permission, it will also have negative consequences for the person who does the healing. Earlier I was talking about being clear about exactly who and what your Power Animal and other guides actually are, in terms of how much they are middleworld beings with all the limitations that brings. Or whether they are truly lower-world, or upper-world beings, who are transcendent of those limitations. In the years I have spent immersed in shamanism, the more I have practised hollowingout, and the more I have chosen only to ally myself with truly upper-world or lower-world beings as guides, I have really learnt that lower-world and upper-world beings are ethical to their core. My guides categorically will not assist me in any way, shape or form to do something that is unethical. Someone can still choose to do something unethical, as we have free will. If someone does do something unethical shamanically, they may even think that their guides have helped them. But in that case, they have not been working with being from the upper or lower worlds (even if they think that they have been). No true upper-world or lower-world guide will assist someone doing something unethical. To do so is fundamentally against their nature. If a practitioner persists in using shamanism unethically then the great and transcendent upper-world and lower-world guides will leave them, to be replaced by lesser middle-world guides. The practitioner may not realise this. Some middleworld beings are notorious for disguising their appearance and tricking people into thinking they are someone or something that they are not. There are stories all over the world to this effect. Which is why with my students I drum into them, over and over and over again (just ask them!), about watching out for middle-world signs, and about practising hollowing-out.
I was saying earlier that the power of shamans comes not from the shaman themselves, but from their guides. It follows then that how powerful a shaman is depends on who their guides are. In some cultures, shamans do practice sorcery. And I do know shamanic practitioners myself who practice shamanism unethically, and even for harm (sometimes out of misguided ’good’ intentions, and sometimes not). It is certainly possible to use shamanism to do harm. In fact, it is not that difficult to learn and to do. But it does come at a cost. For one thing, to do so involves working with corrupt middle-world beings (however else they might be disguising themselves, or whatever the practitioner working with them might be deluded into thinking that they are). Such beings are not without some power, and certainly can do harm in the middle-world. However, in the end, they are only middle-world beings, in the true scale of things, and their power and knowledge are
severely limited. Anyone who works with them will only ever be able to go so far in shamanic work, no matter how clever or skilled they think they are, or how impressive they may appear. Huge, and I mean huge and vast areas of shamanism will be closed off to them, as it is only possible to learn that knowledge and those practices from truly transcendent, ethical, upper and lower-world beings.
In my early years, when I first encountered shamanism I was appalled by some of the unethical practice I witnessed, and withdrew from the teachers who were around at the time. So, I was left stumbling around on my own, trying to learn and piece things together with no human guidance. Whilst (mostly!) trying my best, I certainly made lots of mistakes and did some things that I am not proud of. Through this process, it was my experience that the more I tweaked and tightened up my ethical practice, the more my spirit guides would reveal things to me and teach me, and the deeper my bond with my guides became. I could sense them trusting me more. So, for me personally, it became very clear that ethics are at the heart of good shamanic practice.
So, in doing the following shamanic healing on someone else, obviously you need to find someone to practice on. In doing that, you will need to seek their explicit consent.
Grounding, cleansing and protection.
The process I am going to outline is a lower-world practice, and as such, it is done in a safe place where no harm can occur. So, there is no particular need to make a big deal about issues around safety here. Sometimes people can wind themselves up about doing energy healing on other people, in terms of picking up ’negative energy', and make a big drama about it. I like to keep things grounded and drama free. All you need to do in working with someone else is just follow some basic, sensible precautions, and then 99.999% of the time, everything is fine. So...
-
• Whilst learning this stuff, do not work on people that you do not feel comfortable with. Trust your gut and trust your feelings; do not ignore or dismiss them.
-
• Do the journey in a place and environment that you feel safe in and comfortable in.
-
• Again, whilst you are still new to this stuff, do not try and work with big issues such as someone with major mental health issues, or with issues involving powerful and destructive energies such as sexual abuse, or violence for example. Start off with the easier stuff !
-
• It is easiest to work on someone or something when we do not have a strong emotional attachment to the outcome. If we are strongly personally affected by the other person’s issue, then there is much more likelihood of our not hollowing-out properly, and our stuff getting in the way of our guides being able to do what is actually needed, or of us distorting or colouring what we see.
-
• Make sure that you are in the right place mentally and emotionally to do a healing. You need to be reasonably grounded and calm, and able to put your own stuff aside and not let your stuff leak into what is, after all, a journey for somebody else.
-
• Last, but most important of all, always, always ask your guides before doing any work on anyone else. If they say ’no’ then do not do it!
With those things in place, as this is a safe lower-world journey, there is no particular need for any additional protection. It certainly does no harm though to do things like smudging beforehand, or clearing the space in the room, or using an energy-cleansing spray before-hand. But since there is no particular need here, I am not going to go into the whole issue of protection here. It is an issue I will cover in depth in the book on the middle-world (in this series of Therapeutic Shamanism books), since it is really a middle-world issue. If you do want to explore it in the meantime, then I recommend the book ’Psychic Protection’ by William Bloom as a good, down-to-earth guide.
Similarly, after the journey, if you have taken the basic precautions above and, above all, if during the journey you have really trusted and listened to your guides, then there should be no need to do any specific cleansing afterwards. Again, it does not hurt to use a cleansing spray or smudge afterwards, or some other cleansing ritual. It is good practice to at least ask your guides to briefly check you over. If you do feel odd after journeying for someone else, then no need to wind yourself up about it (be mindful of your own thoughts!). You can just do another short journey for yourself, to ask your guides to cleanse you, and most importantly to ground you.
Having a shower or a bath with some salt added to the water can also help, consciously washing off and releasing anything you need to let go of.
Preparation.
I am going to refer to the person you are doing the healing on as the ’client', for want of a better word. Having obtained the clear and explicit consent from your client to do the healing, and having taken the sensible precautions in terms of protection, you need to decide whether you want to do the healing face-to-face with your client, or by distance. For those of you reading this who are new to the idea of distance healing, the idea might sound a bit odd. If you think about it though, the shamanic healing you are about to do is going to be done in the shamanic lower-world. We are not doing anything directly to the client's physical body. This is not a ’hands-on’ technique. So, it really does not matter where the client's physical body is in relation to your physical body; whether the two of you are sitting in the same room opposite to each other, or whether you are five-thousand miles away from each other. Some people find a face-to-face approach preferable as they find it more ’intense’ and ’real'. However, from a purely shamanic point of view, for the healing I am going to show you, it really makes no difference. There are other shamanic healing methods and practices that do need to be done face-to-face, but for this particular method, you are free to choose.
Another decision is whether you want prior information or not from the client as to what they would like the healing to focus on. Some shamanic practitioners like to journey ’blind', i.e. with no prior knowledge or information about the client or what the client wants. They want to just ’trust their guides'. That is fine. Personally though, I prefer to have some prior information. This is for a few reasons (and none of them have anything to do with not trusting my guides). The first is that most people have a whole host of things that need healing, from physical things through to mental, emotional and spiritual things. In psychotherapy, there is the concept of what is in the ’foreground’ for a client, and what is in the background for them. Think of a painting or photograph that has lots of different things in it, and lots of action going on. In this context, the ’foreground’ for the client is the thing in the painting that they are drawn to first, and the ’background’ is the other things in the picture that are not grabbing their attention at the present time. In working with someone I am interested in hearing what they want me to focus on. As a client, we generally go to a healer of some kind (whether it be a doctor,
counsellor, homeopath, or whatever) with a particular thing we want them to focus on. If so, then it can feel disappointing and frustrating if the healer pays no attention to what we want, and instead they impose their own perception and agenda. As a shamanic practitioner, and as a psychotherapist, I do not want any clients of mine to come away from a session feeling disappointed and frustrated. It is the client's session, and it is up to them to decide what we work on; it is not for me to impose my agenda onto the client. This is important to me. I always seek to empower my clients as much as possible. I have no desire to make choices or decisions for them, as I have no desire to have any power over them whatsoever. Instead, I try to be there to help them look at what they want to look at, at their pace, and in a way that feels comfortable to them.
Another reason I prefer to work with prior knowledge is that, although we all may have plenty of symptoms and issues that could be worked on, we are not always ready to do the work that is necessary to heal a particular thing. As a therapist, I may be able to see all sorts of issues that a client could deal with. However, my experience of being a therapist has really taught me that people have to face particular issues at their own pace, and in their own time. We often may have an investment in an illness, or in particular behaviours, strategies, thoughts and beliefs, but not be consciously aware of this. So, even if part of us does want to change, there is often another part of us that is fearful and resistant to that change. Many times, I have seen shamanic practitioners ignore a client's resistance, and just barge past it and do the healing work that they, the practitioner, thinks necessary. To the client this at best may feel disrespectful and invasive, and at worst may feel downright abusive. However, in the vast majority of times that I have seen practitioners doing this, the main thing I see is that no real healing happens at all. Or at least, no lasting healing of any real consequence. Resistance needs to be respected and honoured. It is there for a reason, after all. Plus, in the end, people only change when they are good and ready, and that is fine with me.
Another reason that I want information before doing a healing is that, yes, I do indeed trust my guides. But I also know how hard it is to truly hollow-out; to perceive what is going on accurately, and not let my own stuff get in the way and distort what I am seeing. Hollowing-out is a skill that takes a lifetime to learn. I have been practising it for decades now, and I am still learning. These days I probably could journey ’blind', in the sense of having no prior information from the client. But I am going to be a lot more accurate and focused if I just ask the
client for some information before journeying.
Again, I can only offer my experience and observations. You may want to experiment with doing ’blind’ journeys, and find out for yourself. But for the reasons I have said, for your first attempt, I suggest that you ask your practice client what it is that they would like some healing on. You do not need a lot of information — just what the symptom is, and maybe a bit of information about it. So, things like: a shoulder injury from a bad fall when they slipped on an icy pavement; lower back pain that flares up when under stress; anxiety that stems from having a strong inner perfectionist and never feeling good enough; lack of confidence that goes back to having had a very critical mother; angina that stems from grief and broken-heartedness; migraines that come on when feeling angry; and so on.
What shamanic healing is, and what it is not it.
I want to try and be as clear as I can about what shamanic healing is and how it should differ from mediumship, ’doing a reading', or other forms of healing that people practice. The key difference is that it is categorically not about getting messages, advice or guidance, or predictions about the future. It is simply about doing the healing. As I said earlier, it is quite rare for my Power Animal or my other guides to actually speak to me in words. This is because of hollowing-out from the middle-world. Words are middle-world things. They have little place or use in the upper-world and lower-world (particularly not in the lower-world). Poetry aside, words usually bring us more into our left-brain, and how real and true a journey is depends entirely upon how much we can temporarily get out of our left-brain, and allow our right-brain to take over. Remember, the right-brain largely does not operate through words, but through imagery and metaphor. Of course, we need words in order to be able to recount and describe the experience of the journey to the client afterwards, but that is all the words should be - an accurate description of what happened.
The following example may help clarify what I mean here. A while ago someone came to me as a client for a shamanic healing. Previously she had been to another healer, and was dissatisfied with her experience of that encounter. The client was suffering from a lack of confidence and deep anxiety that went back to a childhood history of having had a very critical mother. What follows next are two brief
descriptions of the gist of what she was told had happened in the healings. The first one is from the first healer she went to see, and the second one from when she came to see me.
From the first healer...
“I met you down in the lower-world, we met an angel who radiated light. She said that it was time to forgive your mother. The angel said your mother loves you very much really, and that in criticising you so much, she was only trying to help you to learn to be strong. Remember that you chose to be born to your mother, and that you have been together in many past lives and have a strong karmic bond and duty between the two of you. To get rid of the anxiety you need to use the affirmation “I am perfectly safe and protected by Angels watching over me”. Also, wear more blue, as it is a very calming colour. Also, next weekend, be wary of the woman wearing a red scarf, as she does not have your best interests at heart. And I have a message from your dead grandfather... ”
Before moving on to the transcripts of her session with me let us just unpick what you have just read. There are so many things wrong with it that it is hard to know where to begin. But let me have a go...
-
1. Starting at the beginning, the healer goes to the lower-world and meets an angel. Now it is not entirely impossible to see an angel in the lower-world, but it is an extremely unusual occurrence to say the least. It is far more likely that she simply does not understand the difference between the shamanic realms, and/or is not hollowed-out and is allowing her own belief systems to get in the way and distort what she is seeing (and is probably not actually in the lower-world at all).
-
2. Next, she tells the client it is time to forgive. True forgiveness is something that arises organically when, and only when, someone has worked through and fully resolved the issue within themselves and come to terms with it. It is not something you can usefully just tell someone to do, or decide when it is time for them to do it. Doing that would be rushing the client's process and trampling over any unresolved feelings they may actually have. If you do this as a practitioner, then usually one of two things happens. Either the client comes away feeling judged, and that you are not someone they want to work with again (which is what happened with the example I am using
here). Or (and this is far worse) the client feels they should be able to forgive, but find that they cannot, and so they end up beating themselves up. Personally, I would rather a client did not leave a session feeling judged by me, and I would be mortified to think that any client went away beating themselves up and feeling bad about themselves.
-
3. Next, the healer imposes their own belief system on the client by assuming that: the notion that we choose our parents is true; that reincarnation is true; and that the notion of karmic bonding and karmic duty is true. Now you may believe in reincarnation, or karma, or the idea that we choose our parents. Fair enough. What is neither useful or okay in working with people though is to impose our beliefs on them, or to assume that other people go along with our beliefs. What the healer has done in this case is no different than if she had said: “All of this is a punishment from God for your past sins and what you need to do is fall down on your knees and pray to Jesus for forgiveness”. It is just not on.
-
4. The idea of a karmic bond and duty deserve special attention here. What the healer has done here is put a thought-form into the client’s head. It is not a healing thought-form. It is a binding. It is, essentially, a curse. Any shamanic work that is healing is concerned with the removal of such thought-forms, not placing them on people.
-
5. Then the affirmation about being ’perfectly safe'. Nobody is ’perfectly safe'! That is just not the nature of the middle-world. Affirmations can be very helpful if used correctly. The problem with this kind of affirmation though is that deep down we know that it is not true. Carl Rogers, who founded counselling, said essentially that the degree of someone's anxiety is directly in proportion to the gap between what they know deep down to be true on the one hand, and what they are pretending to be true on the other hand. What heals us is facing things as they are, not pretending that they are something else.
-
6. Wearing blue may help a little bit, and certainly will not do any harm. But it is unlikely to be of that much help in severe anxiety. As a suggestion, it probably does not make the client feel that the practitioner really understands them and what deep anxiety really feels like.
-
7. As for being wary of the woman in the red scarf, planting wariness in someone is not a healing seed to plant. It is also probably nonsense.
-
8. Messages from dead relatives...
I will stop now! I hope you get the point of what I am trying to say. By contrast, this is (part of) what I said to her, about the journey I did for her...
The first thing I want to say is that the shamanic realms are a bit like quantum reality in that it is very different to ordinary reality, and hard to describe. To make sense of it, we need to clothe what is there in some kind of imagery and metaphors.
So, what I am about to describe is not literally true but a symbol of the healing, in much the same way that dreams have symbolic meaning. So, this is what I saw. In the lower-world one of my Power Animals used their beak to peck some grey stones out from your solarplexus. Then a hole was dug in the earth, and you were planted waist deep like a tree. You grew roots deep into the earth, deeply grounding and rooting yourself. Then,, down the roots all your anxiety drained out of you, taken away by Mother Earth, completely leaving your body. Then up the roots flowed a rich, dark-green, loving, calm energy from Mother Earth, like a liquid jade. It flowed into all of your body, replacing the anxiety andfilling the hole that removing the grey stones had left. As it did so, I saw your spine strengthening and straightening. You started to grow upwards, becoming a great, strong Oak tree. You were standing solid and rooted in the ground, drawing energy into you from the sunlight. Birds came and nested in you. Tribalpeople came and sat by you, leaning against your trunk and resting. Seasons came and went. Next... (etc. etc.).
Let us unpack that a bit. It is just a description of a healing that I witnessed. There are no messages, no ’shoulds’ or ’oughts', no telling the client what to do (and so, no taking away their power, or telling them to do things that they might not be ready to do). It is all lower-world imagery, because I was hollowed-out and really in the lower-world. It is all healing imagery that can be drawn on, in that the next time she feels ungrounded and anxious she can draw on the sensation and imagery of being that calm, solid and grounded tree. Other than shamanic things, there is no other belief systems being woven in; it is a shamanic healing (which is, after all, what she came for and asked for). It is also a journey with some classic shamanic themes. It contained extraction work, and then filling the space left with something healing, healing from Mother Earth and reconnecting to her, help from a Plant Spirit, what
is known as a ’planting', grounding and shapeshifting (by contrast, the ’journey’ with the first practitioner had nothing recognisably shamanic in it). And most of all, it was Spirit-led, not practitioner-led.
Doing a healing journey.
So, having sought permission from your client, collected the information as to what they would like some healing on, and prepared yourself by grounding and any necessary protection, you are ready to proceed.
Exercise six: doing a simple shamanic healing for someone else.
As with previous journeys, have your blindfold, paper and pen, and shamanic drumming CD or MP3 all at the ready. Start the drumming and put your blindfold on and go to your Axis Mundi as normal.
At your axis mundi, tell your Power Animal who you are journeying for, and what it is they want the healing to be focused on.
Then set off down to the lower-world with your Power Animal as usual, this time with the intent of finding your client in the lower-world in order to do the healing on them. All you have to do is to tell your Power Animal this is what you want to do, and then follow them. Your Power Animal will know exactly where to find the client in the lower-world, and what to do.
You may find yourself in a landscape or part of the lower-world that you have not been in before. That is because it is a place appropriate and relevant to the client, not to you. When you find your client in the lower-world very often the issue that they wanted help with is quite apparent when you look at them (although that is not always the case).
Remember that you do not need to know what to do in terms of the healing. Your job is simply to ask for the healing to be done, and then to follow your Power Animal's lead, and watch and learn from it. So all you need to do is ask your Power Animal to do the healing that the client requested.
As always with any lower-world shamanic journey, always keep checking with your
Power Animal that everything is okay. So too, always check for signs of the middle-world bleeding into the journey, and take appropriate action if it does. Keep hollowed-out, in other words.
Any of the usual things that happen in the lower-world may now happen, including: extractions; burning; burials; smoking and smudging; using crystals and/or plants; and anything else. Other animals may also appear and help. A human shaman or shamanka (female shaman) may also appear and help (if so, as always, double check with your Power Animal that this is okay, if the human is someone that you do not already know and trust).
As usual with journeys, things may come to a pause or halt. If the drumming is still going and this happens, then ask your Power Animal what else needs to be done, and things will start up again, as there are always more things that can be done. You keep going until you hear the call-back.
On hearing the call-back, you simply come back into your physical body as normal. As usual, check that you are fully back in your body and grounded. You may also want to ask your Power Animal to just double check that you are fully cleansed and ’disentangled’ from the client.
Again, straight away write down everything that you can remember. Or instead, straight away recount the journey to the client whilst they write it down.
Once you have told your client what happened, it can be useful to help them unpack the journey. Remember that the true meaning of anything (or anything that happened in a journey) is what it means to the client! Your job is simply to help them explore what it means to them. You may have ideas, but these should only be offered tentatively and as possibilities. If you offer anything and it does not feel right to the client, then you need to drop it. It is the client's healing, not yours. Remember too about what seeds you plant. Use your discretion; anything you say must be both true and healing if you are to say it. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.
Helping the client to unpack the journey, as well as obviously helping the client, also helps you to gain confidence and experience in your journeying. When I see students recounting a journey they have done for a client, time and again I see the students being amazed by the client saying how accurate and spot-on parts of the
journey were. Again, when we start off doing this, much of it will be made up. But a percentage will not be. It is seeing a client's mouth drop open, or seeing them surprised and gasp when we recount something that happened in a journey, that builds our confidence and our trust in what we are doing.
One last thing. Although the healing was somebody else's healing, there is still an awful lot of learning you can take from it. This is where the left-brain comes in and has its useful place. As well as doing healing, your Power Animal is also trying to teach you things. If you are to learn from them then you need to realise that, and pay attention. When a particular plant, stone, animal, or anything else you are not familiar with comes up in a journey, then if you want to ’maximise your learning’ you can look it up and do some research on it as I described earlier. You will learn and gain a tremendous amount from doing this.
Remember too, like most things, it just gets easier with practice. So just practice it and enjoy the learning!
Chapter Nine
We Are Not What We Used To Be: how domestication and the Fall have changed us.
We are not the people we once were.
If we are to develop a shamanic practice that is relevant to modern times, then we need to understand more about the way the Fall has affected us, and about the kind of people that we now are as a result of it. For we are now psychologically significantly different to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. When practising shamanism today, it is important to understand exactly what these differences are, and how shamanism needs to be adapted in response.
In social animals, there is a balance that must be struck between the needs of the individual on the one hand, and the needs of the group on the other hand. Some animals, such as social ants or bees, have little individual consciousness, and operate more as a collective consciousness - a hive mind. In this case, there is little tension between the needs of the individual and those of the group. However, in social animals that have more of an individual awareness, there can be a conflict between the individual’s needs and those of the group. In things like a wolf pack, to fit in and be accepted by the group, the individual must learn to curb and suppress their individualism to some degree. The same is true for a lion in a pride, an elephant in a herd, or a monkey living in a troop. It is part of the cost of belonging to a group. But it is worth paying if the cost is outweighed by the benefits of belonging to the group. This was true of our hunter-gather ancestors too, of course. Belonging to a tribe brought huge benefits, but there was a cost involved - some reining-in of one's individuality, to learn to fit in and follow the tribe’s rules and customs. However, hunter-gathers still enjoyed a huge amount of individual freedom. They were still wild and free beings, same as the wolves in a wolf pack, the elephants in a herd, or the lions living in a pride.
All this changed dramatically for humans with our adoption of agriculture (the start
of our domestication), and then even more dramatically still with the Fall and the start of modern ’civilisation'. Hunter-gatherers, as I said earlier, only had to be busy for between two to four hours a day. That is between twenty to twenty-two hours a day to largely please themselves. They could sleep and wake when they wanted - no alarm clock to shock them out of sleep, and nowhere they had to be at a particular time. There was no boss at work, telling them to do things that they did not really want to do. No teachers telling them to sit down and be quiet for six hours a day. Relatively few laws and rules to follow — certainly nothing like the thousands upon thousands of rules and conventions that we have to follow as modern humans. No bills to pay, no tax returns to do. No cars to fill up with petrol. No houses to mortgage, paint and decorate, clean and maintain....
To fit in to our current civilisation we suppress our individuality and curtail our freedom to a degree that is unprecedented in the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human history. Our domestication has brought us great benefits of course — modern health care, a vast array of foodstuffs to choose from, homes to live in, fridges and freezers, cars to drive, computers and the internet, and so on. But it is also true that all the benefits have come at the cost of our freedom and wildness. Whether you think that the costs of modern life outweigh the benefits, or whether you think that they are worth it, is for you to decide of course. I would say though that it is something that we should consider as a society, given the epidemic levels of mental health problems that we currently face. However, that is a debate for another time. The point I want to make here is that, whatever the cost-benefit balance, our domestication of ourselves changed us.
Conditions of worth.
Carl Rogers, who founded counselling, referred to ’conditions of worth'. These are the conditions that we must meet in order for other people to accept us and include us into the group. As children, we learn that there are certain things that we must do to be accepted, and other things that we must not do. In doing so, we learn ’introjects’ (the word is from the Latin meaning ’thrown into'). Introjects are ’shoulds’ and ’should nots', ’oughts’ and ’ought nots', ’musts’ and ’must nots'. They are ’thrown into’ us from other people, school, religion, advertising, and society as a whole.
It is not just modern humans who have introjects of course. Hunter-gather
children, growing up in a tribe, would have had to swallow a whole pile of introjects too. Similarly, whilst the introjects may not be verbal ones, all the other self-aware social animals have to learn the rules of belonging to the group too. However, the more complex a group’s culture is, the more rules there are, and the more introjects are needed, in order to keep people in line. Modern human civilisation is way more complex than hunter-gatherer tribal cultures, and so way more introjects are needed to keep people in line.
Not all introjects are bad of course. Some introjects are essential for survival -things like ’you shouldn't stick your hand in boiling water', and ’you should look both ways before crossing the road', for example. Other introjects are necessary for social interaction, and form the basis of a cohesive society. These are things like table manners, saying ’please’ and ’thank-you', and other social mores and conventions. However, other introjects may not serve us well at all. These are ones that we took on board to survive childhood situations, at home, school or church, but which now hold us back in adult life. Things like ’I must always be a good girl', or ’I must never show weakness or vulnerability', ’I must never be angry or assertive', ’I must always be wary and on guard', ’I must always push myself and never relax', and so on.
If we are regularly told that we are bad or unlovable for being angry (or for crying, being assertive, answering back, being noisy, or whatever it is), then we gradually learn to police ourselves. We learn to turn a ’condition of worth’ from others into a ’condition of self-worth'; we turn other people saying to us ’you are unlovable for being boisterous’ into ’that boisterous part of me is unlovable'. We then learn to repress that part of us and send it away. Rogers said that doing this opens a gap up between our real-self, and what he called the self-concept (the self-concept being what we learn to be instead of being our real-self). The self-concept is also sometimes referred to as the ’persona’ - the role that we play when interacting with other people; the mask that we wear to disguise our true self.
The mask we wear.
The persona is a middle-world construct. It is made up of stories that we tell ourselves, wonky-thoughts, beliefs and scripts. It is our ego — our ’self’ identity. It becomes who we think we are. We police it with introjects, to keep ourselves in line. The greater the gap between it and our real-self, the more the real-self becomes
suppressed and forgotten about. Many people in the modern world, even most people, lose sight of their real-self altogether.
Now, of course people in hunter-gather tribes had middle-world personas too. The persona is a necessary part of fitting into a tribe. The crucial thing though is the extent to which the real-self and the persona are different. Hunter-gathers lived a more natural life. In the wild, bears live and do what they were evolved to do, and wolves live and do what they were evolved to do too. In the same way, huntergatherer humans lived and did what they were evolved to do. By contrast, modern humans spend over a dozen years in school being told to sit down and shut up, supressing the natural instincts of being a child. Many modern humans then spend the next forty years doing jobs that they do not really like. Being a modern human means doing things according to what time of day a clock says it is, rather than being responsive to our own moods and wishes and doing what feels right when it feels right. It often means leading a largely sedentary and indoor life, spending the bulk of the day driving a car, sitting at a desk or watching television, which is not what our bodies are evolved to do. For many people, it means eating food that they have no real, living connection with, and which is slowly making them ill. It means living a life that is often largely disconnected to the time of year, and from nature as a whole.
Remember, our real-self, our authentic soul, is of the lower-world. It is part of nature. It is the wild and free human being that we were born to be. Our middleworld self, the persona, is our interface with other people and society. As such, ideally the persona would be the medium through which we express our real-self in the world. It would be a role in society, and a way of life, that is in harmony with our authentic soul. It would not be at odds with our soul. For hunter-gathers, the lives they were leading were as nature and Mother Earth intended. They were living in nature, as part of nature, doing what they were evolved to do. The culture of a tribe - its traditions, customs, rules and mores - would reflect and express this natural life. The gap between the real-self and the persona would not have needed to be large. The way a hunter-gatherer lived could be authentic, and a reflection of their true soul.
This is rarely the case for modern-day, ’civilised’ and domesticated humans. The lives most people live today are a long way from being an expression of their real-self, their lower-world soul. The truth is that most people have little if any idea who
they really are, as their real-self is buried deep underneath introjects, wonky stories, wonky beliefs, and middle-world thought-forms from things like religions, advertising and the newspapers and other media. Their real-self is like a seed that has never had a chance to grow; a potential that was never realised. The desperately sad truth is that most people in our ’civilised’ world will live and die never knowing who they really are, or what they could have blossomed into.
So, we have created a culture where most people are cut off from their lower-world, authentic souls. A culture where we have largely lost connection with the natural world; one where we have massively lost connection with Mother Earth. In our leftbrain dominated lives, we have largely lost contact with Spirit. We are suffering from massive soul-loss and power-loss, leaving holes in us that have become filled with middle-world thought-forms and other intrusions. We live in a culture of rampant ego and consumption; a Taker culture. A culture suffering from a wetiko epidemic.
We are indeed not at all what we once were.
The unconscious and the Shadow.
To fit in to our complex, crowded and busy modern lives we repress our feelings, thoughts, desires and urges to a far greater degree than our hunter-gatherer ancestors ever needed to. In psychotherapeutic terms, the material that we repress as an individual becomes what is known as the ’personal unconscious’. The material that we repress collectively, as a society as a whole, becomes the ’collective unconscious’.
What is important to understand is that, in pushing stuff into the unconscious, we lose consciousness of it. We no longer know that it exists. Or, if we are aware of it to some degree, we no longer own it and recognise it for what it truly is - a part of us. However, our denial and repression of it does not mean that it has gone away, or that it is no longer troublesome. Far from it.
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, referred to this repressed material as the Shadow. The more we disown and repress parts of our self, the stronger they become, and the more they seem to take on a life of their own. And like our own shadow, we cannot get away from them, or shake them off. The Shadow is a part (or parts) of us that
we are afraid to acknowledge and take ownership of. We are frightened of it, and so to us it appears to be a monstrous thing. In disowning things in ourselves, we often then project them out onto other people, and then find those people intolerable or disturbing. For example, if we disown our own vulnerability, then we may despise other people who we perceive as ’weak’, and may bully them for it. If we disown our own anger, then we may live our lives in fear of other people who we perceive as ’angry people’. Men who deny and repress their own feminine side often are misogynistic. Men with homosexual feelings that they repress often are homophobic. Narcissistic behaviour is often covering up a deep sense of inadequacy. Whole communities that feel marginalised or despised often in turn then despise other marginalised communities, in an effort to make themselves feel better and ’special’. So too, the repressed parts of us may become inner ’demons’ that we struggle to contain. If we repress our own sexuality, for instance, we may create an inner demon that every so often takes us over. This is why sexual abuse is often high in religious institutions that try to repress sexuality (the high levels of sexual abuse that have been committed by some priests in the Catholic church, for example).
In reality of course, the things that we are trying to repress are not demons at all. They may become ’demons’, but that is a consequence of repressing them, not anything to do with their true nature. Things that are neglected and rejected may often then grow in ways that are stunted and deformed. The only way to heal Shadow wounds is to face and embrace the repressed and disowned parts of self. The world over, there are versions of stories that seek to tell us this. The gist of such stories is that a hero or heroine spends their life pursued or haunted by some kind of a monster. Like their own shadow, they cannot get free of it. In the end, the hero or heroine has to stop trying to get away from the monster. Instead, they must face it, accept it, love it even. In doing that the monster is transformed, and all is well.
However, healing Shadow wounds and facing one’s ’demons’ is very much a minority sport, as it takes great courage. It is indeed ’the road less travelled’. In modern culture, due to the levels of repression needed to fit in to ’civilisation’, the ’demons’ are everywhere. Violence and aggressive behaviour, misogyny, racism, homophobia, sexism, internet trolling, bigotry, narcissism, and religious intolerance, all are ’demons’ created by repression of parts of the psyche.
On ’gods’ and ’goddesses’.
Hunter-gatherer cultures generally have little interest in gods and goddesses. They acknowledged the existence of such beings, but understood that such huge beings would have little interest in the lives of something as small as humans. So, it is interesting to notice that almost as soon as the Fall happens, and the first city-state cultures emerge, we see an enormous growth in stories about gods and goddesses, as the first organised religions evolve. However, these beings are nothing like the gods and goddesses that hunter-gatherer people knew. Instead, these new ’gods’ and ’goddesses’ are beings who constantly meddle in human affairs. In the stories about them, with very few exceptions, they are depicted as being violent, murderous, wrathful, capricious, and consumed with lust and greed. They are beings who do things like kill their father and marry their mother, or seduce their sister and go to war with their brother. They demand to be worshipped and obeyed, and punish anybody who does not do so. They are beings who demand that enormous buildings be built in their honour, and that the buildings be filled with great riches. Like monstrous addicts, they demand endless tributes to keep them happy. They demand that animals, and even people sometimes, be sacrificed in their honour. Now, these are clearly not really upper-world beings. They are not in fact Gods and Goddesses at all. What they are in reality are our collective ’demons’; repressed energies from the human collective unconscious.
The creation of the under-world.
It is, of course, no coincidence that things like misogyny, homophobia and religious intolerance are characteristic of city-state cultures and ’civilisation’. Remember that the Fall was characterised by the left hemisphere of the brain and the ego seizing control, and suppressing the emotional and sensitive right side of the brain. The Fall was an act of the mass suppression of the human psyche. I said earlier that repressed material can take on a life of its own. The psyche is a powerful energy. If parts of it are repressed, they do not lose energy, but simply become out of control. In shamanic terms, they do literally take on a life of their own.
Hunter-gatherer peoples would undoubtedly have had some degree of unconscious material, both personal and collective. As I have been saying though, because of the more natural way in which they lived, their middle-world persona could be more in tune with their lower-world soul. So, there would be less need to repress parts of themselves in order to fit in, compared to us modern humans. This being the case, it would then follow that they would have had less unconscious material than us
modern humans. On top of this, they were also people who paid close attention to things like their dreams, to the sensations and symptoms in their bodies, and to signs and signals in the world around them. These are all ways in which the unconscious ’speaks’ to us and reveals its presence. They are ways in which we can bring things from the unconscious, and into conscious awareness. Our shamanic ancestors paid attention to these things, and understood them and how to work with them. Given this, it seems highly likely that the amount of unresolved unconscious material in the hunter-gatherer psyche would probably have been very small in comparison to most modern-day humans. We will never know this for sure, but the good mental health that they seemed to enjoy, and the lack of ’demons’ in their societies, things like misogyny and homophobia, would seem to back it up.
With the Fall and domestication, we create vast amounts of unconscious material, both personal and collective. The energies that we push down into these areas then take on lives of their own. We create, in effect, a whole new part of the middleworld, the under-world (as opposed to the lower-world). The under-world is the realm of our repressed and unconscious middle-world psychic energies. It is a realm full of ’demons’ and ’monsters’, both personal and collective. The existence of this new under-world, and the sheer scale of it, is an enormously significant difference between us and hunter-gatherers. It has huge implications for shamanism, if we are to practice shamanism in a way that is going to be useful and truly healing in the modern world. So, it is an issue I will return to in the next chapter, in outlining what a modern shamanic practice needs to address and look like.
The old practices do not work like they used to.
It is, of course, no coincidence that the growth of the under-world, and its attendant ’demons’, has happened since we turned our backs on shamanism. Indeed, its emergence has happened precisely because we have turned away from shamanism. So, the obvious solution would seem to be to bring shamanism back. However, the way our ancestors practiced shamanism was appropriate to the times in which they lived. The techniques and practices that they used were ones that were suited for dealing with the issues they faced in hunter-gatherer times. If we are going to bring shamanism back in a way that is going to be useful for the times that we now live in, then we are going to have to adapt it. Because many of the old techniques and practices will simply no longer work in the way that they once did.
Let me give you an example of this. In hunter-gatherer tribes, the principal causes of soul loss usually would have been things like bereavement (or other causes of broken heartedness), illness, or shock and trauma. To heal this, traditional methods of soul retrieval would have involved some version of the shaman finding the lost soul part, or calling it back, and then placing it back into the person it belongs to. After a short period of time, the returned soul part would be integrated back into the person, and the matter would be resolved. However, as I have been discussing, the principal cause of soul loss in modern times is usually that we send part of our own soul away, to ’fit in’. We variously send away our own playfulness, creativity, spontaneity, joy, passion, wildness, sensitivity, vulnerability, confidence, assertiveness, care-freeness, cleverness, sadness, tears, anger, and so on. However, if all our soul (or souls) had left, then we would have died. The fact that we did not die means that part of us stayed behind and carried on, ’holding the fort’ so to speak. In childhood, this is the part of us that learns to bite our lip or hold our tongue; to always be ready for a fight; to not show weakness; to not speak out; to swallow our sadness; to sell ourselves out in order to fit in or survive; and countless other strategies we may have adopted to get through childhood. This part of us then, the fort-holder, may be ambivalent or even outright opposed to the ’lost’ soul part returning. Because it is the fort-holder who sent the lost soul-part away in the first place, to try and protect us, and help us to survive.
The fact that we send part of our own self away, and that another part of us may not actually want it back, makes modern-day soul retrieval a much more complex issue than it once was. These days, it is often not enough to retrieve the lost soul part for a person and to blow it back into them. Part of the person may want the lost soul part back (if not, then they probably would not be asking for a soul retrieval!). However, the fort-holder part of them is likely to be opposed, as it is likely to be nervous about the changes that doing a soul retrieval could (and would) bring. In some ways, the fort-holder is like the soldiers who were found years after the Second World War had ended, surviving alone on remote islands. Many had not realised that the war was over, and were still loyally fighting on. The fort-holder in us does not realise that the war of childhood is over. They are ever on guard like the loyal soldier, ever ready to step in and protect us (albeit in ways that may now no longer be appropriate, or serving us anymore).
The necessity of listening to the fort-holder.
The fort-holder is both a part developed in our childhood (to fit in with family, school, religion, peers etc.), and it is a present-day part that is still running our everyday life. For most people, the extent to which their fort-holder is still present and running their lives (in terms of their thoughts, habits, choices, perceptions, behaviour, beliefs and strategies) is often entirely unknown and unconscious to them. Because of this, the old method of simply bringing the soul part back is far less likely to work these days. It certainly can do, if the person really is fully ready to have the part back. With most people who I have worked with though, there is an ambivalence in them about having the soul part back; an ambivalence that they are usually not consciously aware of. They say they want a soul retrieval, as they are consciously identifying with the part of them that does. However, if you take the time to work with them before leaping into doing a soul retrieval, and observe carefully, the parts that do not want the soul part back will reveal themselves. If you pay attention, then parts of self that someone is unconscious of will reveal themselves in things like body-language, tone of voice, unconscious choice of words, contradictions in what they are saying, and so forth.
The psychotherapist Arnold Mindell refers to what the client is consciously aware of, and identifies with, as being the ’primary process’. The parts of the client that they are not consciously aware of are referred to as the ’secondary process’. For example, a client may go to a complementary medical practitioner, asking to be healed of a particular symptom. This is their primary process, the one that the client is aware of. Whilst there may indeed be part of the client that wants to be healed, there may be another part of them, the part they are unaware of, that actually has an investment in the illness. The illness may serve them in some way, such as by getting them sympathy, or avoiding facing their fear of going out and getting a job, or so on. If the client is not aware of the part of them that does not want to get better, then that part will only reveal itself in unconscious ways. For instance, the client may say they want to get better, but the tone of voice or choice of words may indicate otherwise. Or they may engage in the treatment, but unconsciously sabotage it by mislaying their medicine or forgetting to take it, or forgetting about appointments, for example. In this case, until and unless the secondary process is made conscious, and its concerns and issues are addressed and resolved, then any attempts at treatment are likely to fail.
In the same way, somebody's primary process may be that they want a soul retrieval. However, their secondary process (of which they are not conscious) may have an
investment in things staying the same, or have a fear of the soul part actually coming back. If the shamanic practitioner simply buys into what the client's primary process is saying, and is oblivious to any resistance, then any soul retrieval is likely only to be partially effective. The shamanic practitioner may not be aware of this themselves, because they can see some changes and benefits that have happened after they have done soul retrieval for a client, and so they think that it was effective. The thing is though, that if the resistance had been acknowledged and addressed, the soul retrieval could have been much more effective still, and much longer and deeper acting.
As a shamanic practitioner, I want to do the very best I can for any client who comes to see me. And one thing I have learnt, with absolute certainty, is that no deep or permanent change happens without the fort-holder's consent. If a fort-holder part is resistant, then they are implacable. It does not matter if they are 80% on board, or even 95%. If there is any resistance and reluctance at all, then they simply will not let change happen. In the decades of my working with people, I have come to have the utmost respect and admiration for the fort-holder. They are there to protect us. And they are brilliant, powerful, inventive, clever and creative in doing so. It is, after all, what they exist to do. The extent to which healing is effective is entirely dependent on the extent to which the fort-holder is on board with it happening. So, as a practitioner, I know that I need to look out for signs of the fort-holder’s presence (and they are almost always there). And when I see them, I then need to greet and acknowledge them, listen compassionately and respectfully to their concerns, and see if their concerns can be addressed so that the healing can go forward.
So, because of the presence of the fort-holder, for soul retrieval to be fully effective and long-lasting these days, there is usually a process of negotiating with the fortholder that needs to happen first. And once the soul retrieval has been done, there is also a time of integration to be managed, as the fort-holder adjusts to the soul part being back, and the changes this involves. Doing this means that the work will be much deeper and longer-lasting than it would otherwise have been.
These processes of negotiation and of integration need to be skilfully handled. They mean talking and really listening to the fort-holder. They often involve asking our guides for healing not just for the returned soul part, butfor the fort-holder part too. This can involve journeying back to meet the fort-holder in childhood. When there,
we then ask our guides to give the (child) fort-holder love, healing, and support, to help them cope with the situation that they are in. In effect, in doing this we become the child’s ’guardian angel’, watching over them from (what to them) is the future. The effects of this fort-holder healing can be profound.
We can also thank the present-day fort-holder part, and persuade them that the war is over and that they can now ’stand at ease’. For whilst the fort-holder is a loyal protector, the truth is they are also a child part, and still acting out childhood conditioning if left to their own devices. We can give them healing too, and a new, more appropriate role in our adult life. Doing this involves a process of our stepping into being more adult and taking charge. It involves the fort-holder stepping back and becoming the ’body-guard’ of the adult person in charge, rather than them being the person in charge (as is the case for most people); kind of like the sergeant handing control over to a commanding officer, once (or, if!) a commanding officer actually turns up.
Now, this all may sound very psychotherapeutic rather than shamanic, but that would be a misunderstanding. For one thing, the soul retrieval itself can generally not be done by psychotherapy alone. I have occasionally seen soul retrieval happen spontaneously in a psychotherapy session. However, it is very rare, for reasons that I will come to later. Soul retrieval is a specialism of shamanism. It is one of the things that shamanism is brilliant at doing. The process of identifying the fortholder, of listening to them and reassuring them, is indeed more a psychotherapylike approach than traditional shamanism. However, I hope that I have been persuasive about both the usefulness and necessity of doing this. As both a psychotherapist and a shamanic practitioner though, I also know how much more quickly this process of negotiation with the fort-holder can happen if we also bring shamanism into the equation. Once we have met the fort-holder and know who they are and what their concerns are, then we can journey for them. We can hollow-out and surrender to our guides, letting our guides lead the healing journey for the fort-holder. This can be one-hundred percent shamanic and Spirit-led. For the truth is, in my experience (and the experience of hundreds of people I have worked with, students and clients) bringing psychotherapy and shamanism together in this way works far more effectively than practising either one on its own.
These are not the times that we once lived in.
Knowing about the existence of the fort-holder, and understanding how to work with it, is just one example of the way in which shamanism can be (and needs to be) brought up to date and made appropriate to modern-day humans. There are many other ways though in which shamanism needs to be adapted to be relevant to the times we now find ourselves in. For instance, as I have discussed earlier, our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived with the left and right hemispheres of the brain in balance. Remember that the right hemisphere of the brain is the bit that is hardwired to shamanism, and to empathy and the sense of interconnectedness. That part of our brain is heavily suppressed in modern humans. This is not a problem that traditional shamans ever had to face. It does mean that an enormous amount of shamanic practice now needs to be devoted to waking up the right hemisphere and restoring the balance in the brain. For if we cannot do this, then practicing shamanism is a nonstarter.
Now, it is certainly true that shamanic cultures did have powerful ways of shocking people into a deep, right-brain, shamanic state. These included things like ceremonies that may have gone on for days, prolonged fasting or dancing, using hallucinogenic plants, vision quests, sweat lodges, and all sorts of other things. So why do we not just do those things? Because, similarly to traditional soul retrieval techniques, these days they do not always work (or at least, not in the way that they once used to). They certainly can work dramatically in the short term. Through my 20s and 30s, I did them all, and plenty more besides. They certainly had their place in waking me up and getting me to the place where I am now. So, I am not in any way decrying them, and they definitely can be powerful and useful (if done in the right way). What I began to notice though was that when I spent time doing these things, although I felt great afterwards, gradually the positive effects of them would wear off, and I would more or less be back to square one before long. A few weeks or months back in ordinary, day-to-day modern life is usually all it took. It was not just in myself that I noticed this either, but in friends and students of mine too.
Again, the problem here is our domestication and ’civilisation’. Vision quests, sweat lodges and the like are wild practices. They connect us to our wild soul, and to the undomesticated, more-than-human. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, doing this was not a problem, because there was no conflict between the changes that the practices brought, and how people were living already. People were already living in a wild way, with an alive connectedness to nature and to Spirit. For us though, if we experience this alive connection through doing something like a vision quest out in
the wilds, then how do we integrate those experiences into our daily life? How do we sustain them once we are back in our domesticated, ’civilised’ lives? One answer may be to simply go and do them regularly. And for many years of my life this is what I did. However, for me, in the end this became unsatisfying. It felt as if my spiritual life was something semi-detached from my day-to-day life; something I did at weekends or holidays, to keep me going during the rest of the time. I know this is a common feeling and experience too. I regularly get emails from people who have done things like taken ayahuasca in Peru, or a vision quest in the wilderness somewhere. They have had an amazing and powerful experience. They feel that it is potentially a life-changing experience. The problem is that it is not changing their life (or not to the degree that they sense that it potentially could). Because now they are back in ’civilisation’, they are struggling with how to integrate that experience, and at a loss as to how to do so.
In the end, for me personally, something had to change. I did not want my spirituality to be something divorced from my day-to-day life. I wanted it to be part of my daily life. In fact, I wanted it to be the basis of my daily life. I wanted my life to be shamanic.
Finding the wild in the tamed.
A modern, relevant shamanism will, of course, include practices that reconnect us back to nature and the more-than-human. However, it will also need to include a whole new set of practices that help us maintain that connection in our largely urban, domesticated, day-to-day lives, and practices that help us find the wild in the tamed. For we cannot all go back to living in the countryside. Apart from anything, given modern population numbers, it would be a disaster for the countryside if we were all to do so! Besides, a lot of what passes as countryside these days is itself now managed and tamed, and scarcely wild any more. So, somehow, we will have to develop shamanic practices that enable us to reach beneath the dull and deadening veneer of the domesticated lands that we live in (whether they are urban or rural). Practices that connect us back to the wild source of life that feeds our true souls, and help us regain our healthy relationship with nature.
Thought-forms, mobile phones, and robots - our ’children’ are growing up.
As well as developing practices that help us maintain a connection with nature, we
will also need to develop practices to help us deal more healthily with other aspects of modern life. This includes practices to deal with the complex thought-forms that have emerged in modern society - thought-forms that have evolved into powerful beings with lives of their own, and which now shape our lives. Religions, political ideologies, ideas spread through advertising, prejudices, false truths, fake news, conspiracy theories, corporations, the economy, social media — we may have given birth to these things, but now they have grown and are largely out of our control. If we are going to learn to live with them in a more harmonious way, then we need to realise what they are — living thought-forms — and work with them in a shamanic way.
Similarly, we are also going to need methods of working shamanically with modern technology so that we can develop a more conscious and healthy relationship with it too. Remember, everything is alive and conscious. So, from the perspective of shamanism, our mobile phones, cars, the internet — all are already alive and conscious beings, affecting and shaping our lives as humans. In our human-centric way, we generally think of them as just ’things’ with no life. And we think that, because we created them, that means that we are in control of them. However, the truth is that they are already sentient beings (albeit in a way that is sentient in a different way from us, just as plants are, for example). They are beings that we are already only partially in control of, and beings that are affecting us in ways that we did not see or envisage when we created them. Unless we wake up to this, then our problems are only going to get bigger still. There has been much discussion over the last few years, in the media and elsewhere, about us needing to wake up to the potential dangers (and advantages too) of things like A.I. (artificial intelligence). If we invent intelligent computers and robots, will they have any need for us humans any more, and if not, will they wipe us out? And it is not just intelligent computers and robots that we are going to need to think about either. We are on the brink of developing a whole host of new life forms, from genetically-modified species, through to self-replicating nanotechnology, and cyber technologies that will blur the boundaries between human and machine. If (as seems likely) we do indeed give birth to these new beings, then we are going to need to learn to live in rightrelationship with them too.
We do indeed live in interesting times.
Chapter Ten
Therapeutic Shamanism: a shamanism for today.
Shamanism for the modern-day.
In this chapter, I will be outlining some of the principles of Therapeutic Shamanism. Before I do that though, I want to reiterate something that I said right at the beginning of this book. What I am outlining here is a combination of my own experiences, what my shamanic guides and teachers have taught me, and what I have found to work in practice (both with my students and clients, and in my personal life). What I offer in Therapeutic Shamanism I offer only as suggestions though, based on my own experiences. As always, your own guide should be your own experience. Also, in no way do I wish to give the impression that what I am proposing in Therapeutic Shamanism is the only answer, or the ’one and true way'. As we slowly recover from the Fall, there will be many ways forward. However, I do believe that shamanism will play a crucial role in our healing. I also believe that there will be many different versions of shamanism that play a constructive part, and that is entirely how it should be. In terms of shamanic practice, there will be ’horses for courses'. All I can offer is my (and my guides’) version. If it sits well with you and makes sense to you, then great. And if it does not, then if you can take something useful from it, that is great too.
On ’plastic’ shamanism.
For the many reasons that I have discussed, we need human society to become more shamanic again. This is not only for our own sake as humans, but for the sake of many, many other species too, both animal and plant. Now, if this is going to happen, then we need to take core shamanism and adapt it. It needs to be made relevant to the times and environment that we live in now. Our ancestors always did the same - they adapted shamanism to make it relevant to the times and environment that they lived in. To me, true shamanism is never a static thing. It is never a finished product. It is always evolving and changing. It is always ’work in progress’. It is not bogged down
by traditions and old ways of doing things. Instead, it is practical, adaptable, responsive and dynamic.
Too often in shamanic circles I hear people denigrating any attempt to develop a modern shamanic way of working. They say that any such attempts are not ’authentic’ shamanism. The word ’plastic’ shamanism is often used as a derogatory term for modern shamanism, because it does not come from an unbroken ’tradition’ or lineage. However, I think doing so is to confuse ’traditional’ with ’authentic’. Tradition just means doing things in the same way that people have always done them. The Oxford English dictionary defines tradition as ’the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation’. The people who decry modern shamanism as being ’plastic’ are also usually the people who say that shamanism must be Spirit-led. Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either shamanism is something that can only be learned from other humans, and passed down generation to generation in an unbroken line. In which case, anything that is not ’traditional’ or from a ’lineage’ is not shamanism. Or, shamanism is something that is Spirit-led, and so can be learned directly from Spirit. For me personally, Spirit-led and Spirit-taught always wins hands-down over human tradition. And in fact, people being directly Spirit-taught is a well-known and respected thing in many shamanic cultures. It is why shamanism is sometimes referred to as the path of ’direct revelation’ — something that is revealed to someone directly from Spirit.
People who argue for shamanic traditions often do so by saying that because something is traditional means that it has stood the test of time. Well, that is not necessarily so. For one thing, often what people think of as ’traditions’ are sometimes nothing like as old as people like to think that they are. And in any case, in the timescale of the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, a tradition that is a few generations old (or even one that is a couple of thousand years old), is still a very recent thing. Also, the fact that something has worked in the past does not necessarily mean that it will work (or be relevant) now. Clinging onto things because they are the ’traditional’ way of doing it is not necessarily going to work or be helpful.
For me, the test of whether a shamanic practice is authentic has nothing to do with human notions of tradition. The shamanism that I am interested in is shamanism that is adaptable, un-stuffy, flexible and practical. The only valid test as to whether it is authentic that I apply is, quite simply, ’does it work?’. If it works, then that is
good enough for me. So, in that spirit, I am going to outline Therapeutic Shamanism - one version of a relevant and contemporary shamanic practice, and one that I know works.
“What gives light must endure burning.”
Bereavement, abuse, divorce, life-threatening illness, trauma, mental breakdown — all can be devastating to go through. They can be the dark nights of the soul. But sometimes we come out of them changed for the better. For as the psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl said, “What gives light must endure burning.”. The difficult times can sometimes be the forge in which we are made; the time when we are fashioned into something that is stronger and greater than what we were before. Whether that re-forging happens for an individual person though, seems to largely come down to how they respond to the event. It depends upon the lessons and meanings they choose to take from it, and whether they choose to let the event make them, or break them.
The Fall has certainly been a long and dark night of the soul for humanity as a whole, and for many of the other species that we share this planet with. And it certainly has changed us. Whether we emerge from it changed for the better is still far too early to tell. Whether we choose to let the experience of the Fall make us, or break us, will be up to us as a whole. For there are certainly positive things that we can learn from it and choose to take from it; ways in which we can let it re-forge us for the better.
Earlier on I was talking about us being in a period of recovery from the Fall. I talked about how this process of healing started a few hundred years ago, and how it has been speeding up. A crucial part of this recovery has been the emergence of psychotherapy. The Fall has been characterised by the expansion and inflation of the ego; ’egomania’ as Steve Taylor calls it. As I have said, the ego is a middle-world self-construct. It is a necessary ’interface’ between us and the world. Unless we withdraw from the world, we cannot interact and fully participate in it without an ego — a sense of self and a way of being. The problem is that, since the Fall, the ego of modern humans is full of wonky thoughts, delusions and introjects, and haunted by disowned and distorted parts of self. Psychotherapy is a set of tools that we have discovered and developed that are specifically designed to deal with these problems.
Sometimes ’spiritual’ people are dismissive about psychotherapy. Pointing to spiritual techniques and practices drawn from the sky-religions, such people say that all one needs to do with the ego is to ’transcend’ it. However, the sky-religions, with their various practices for transcending the ego, have been around for thousands of years. They are nearly as old as the Fall itself. So, in terms of them being a cure for the Fall, well, they do not seem to have been working too well. In fact, if anything, the start of our recovery from the Fall also coincides with many people beginning to turn away from practicing sky-religions.
This is not to say that sky-religion techniques and practices do not have their place and uses. That is absolutely not at all what I am saying. What I am saying is that, whilst such practices may help and have a role, the real antidote to the Fall lies elsewhere. Let us look at this from a shamanic perspective. Remember, in shamanism there are different parts of us that correspond to the different shamanic realms. What shamanism teaches us is about balance and harmony. No one realm has dominance or superiority over the others. Contrary to what sky-religions say, the upper-world is not ’better’ than the lower-world. To overemphasise or inflate the upper-world just leads to a top-heavy, imbalanced and ungrounded spirituality. A healthy spirituality is grounded and rooted; ’ascending with both feet on the ground’ as the spiritual teacher and psychotherapist Jeff Brown describes it. Likewise, a healthy human is someone whose different parts are in balance, and where no one part dominates any other part. Shamanism teaches that each part of us has its place, and its healthy contribution to the whole. As such, each part is honoured and its needs are tended to. The lower-world part of us needs to be part of nature and of Mother Earth. It is our authenticity and our full aliveness. It teaches us how to be a healthy part of the world, living in right relationship with the other Peoples that we share this Earth with. The upper-world part of us needs to live with a connection to Spirit. Amongst other things, it brings us ethics, spiritual perspective, and a healthy detachment. The middle-world part of us is our interface with day-to-day reality. When healthy and in balance, it enables us to express our self in the world, and be in the world, in a way that is healthy and positive both for us and for those around us.
Each of the different parts of us need to be worked with in a different way. So, in working on the different parts, we need to use tools that are appropriate to the job that needs doing. Generally, the sky-religion practices are tools for developing and strengthening our connection with the upper-world. But when it comes to
developing the healthy ego that we need for the middle-world, they are usually not the best set of tools for that job. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, has precisely and exactly the right set of tools for that job. Unless we are to withdraw from the middle-world and become a hermit living in a cave, we need a middle-world self; a healthy ego - a sense of ’self’ - that is our way of interacting with the world. The dismantling of a wonky middle-world self and replacing it with a healthier one -that is what psychotherapy is made for.
Spiritual bypassing.
Sometimes ’spiritual’ people really do not want to hear any of this. In 1984, the psychologist John Wellwood coined the term ’spiritual bypassing’. It describes using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings and unresolved psychological wounds. The reason people engage in spiritual bypassing is simple. Generally, we have little desire or tolerance for facing our pain, much less for entering it to engage with it and work with it. On top of this, remember, the parts of us that we are avoiding are also parts that we fear, and which we have disowned and see as ’monsters’ - all the more reason to avoid them. And so, when in pain, rather than dealing with the pain, we reach for ’pain-killers’ instead. So, when a spiritual teacher or religion tells us that we do not need to feel our pain at all, but that we can just ’transcend’ it, then we jump at it. We want to believe that we do not have to face our demons, and that we do not have to do the brave and hard work that facing them would require. So, we swallow the spiritual pain-killer instead.
The problem is that, like all pain-killers, the numbing that spiritual bypassing brings comes with a cost. These costs are both personal and collective. On a personal level, these costs can include things like:
-
• An unhealthy degree of ungroundedness and detachment.
-
• Emotional numbing and repression. Becoming cut off from feelings (and a resultant numbness and lack of aliveness).
-
• Delusions of spiritual superiority; a ’holier-than-thou’ attitude. Thinking that one is full of compassion, whereas, in fact, one is full of judgements.
-
• Overemphasis on the ’positive’, and an avoidance of facing things as they really are.
A phobia of anger. Dis-owning one’s own anger and instead projecting it onto others.
-
• Poor personal boundaries, and problems with being assertive when needed.
-
• Difficulty functioning in day-to-day life and society.
There are social costs too. An over-emphasis on the ’spiritual’, to the point of saying that the middle-world just needs to be transcended, involves turning one’s back on the world. It leads to playing no actual, real, part in helping alleviate the suffering in this world. For the world, this is a disaster. As the statesman Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Turning one’s back on the world to concentrate on being ’spiritual’ is little more than a kind of spiritual egotism and self-centeredness. It is not compassionate (however it is dressed up), but a bypassing of compassion. It is the essence of the Fall. It is certainly not the cure for it.
Trying to ignore and transcend the middle-world ego simply contributes to the Fall and to the mess that we are in. And on a personal level, in the end, it simply does not work. In over thirty years as a therapist I have worked with thousands of people. During that time, I have worked with many spiritual people, some deeply spiritual people with a strongly-developed connection to the upper-world. I have worked with dedicated Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, Christians, and non-religious spiritual people — all sorts of people. And it has been my observation that pretty much every single one of them turns out to be just as psychologically and emotionally screwed up as the next person. All of them have needed good psychotherapy too. Just like everyone else.
Hence the term ’Therapeutic’ Shamanism.
In terms of addressing mental and emotional wounds, there are ways in which the disciplines of shamanism and psychotherapy seem to overlap. Even some of the methods employed by each discipline may appear to be similar. The guided visualisations and imagery employed by some psychotherapists may, on the surface, appear to be similar to shamanic journeying, for example. In the past, these areas of apparent similarity and overlap have created some misunderstandings and problems. It led some psychotherapists to assume that shamanism was merely a kind of early,
primitive form of psychotherapy. They assumed that everything shamanic could now be explained, and improved upon, by psychotherapy. In doing so they made the mistake that humans often make, of reducing everything to the human. To these psychotherapists, the spirits were not ’real’, but instead just ’imagination’ and parts of the psyche. Some shamans and shamanic practitioners were, understandably, offended by this. Shamans are very clear that the spirits are real; that they are beings independent of us and not just parts of our own, human, psyche. So, some shamans sought to distance shamanism from psychotherapy, in order to emphasise shamanism’s difference and its validity.
To this day, I still meet psychotherapists who try to reduce shamanism in this way and explain it all in psychotherapeutic terms. I also meet shamanic practitioners who bristle at the idea that shamanism has anything at all in common with psychotherapy. It makes me sad. I wish both sides could pause, take a deep breath, and come back together to listen to each other. For the reality is that, whilst there are hugely significant and important differences between the two disciplines, there are also hugely significant and important areas of overlap as well. I believe that psychotherapy has an enormous amount that it could learn and gain from shamanism. And that it is equally the case that shamanism has an enormous amount that it could learn and gain from psychotherapy.
If we are to save ourselves and recover from the Fall, then things like activism, legislation, campaigning and lobbying will be crucial. However, in the end, these are simply holding mechanisms. Any lasting and permanent change will only happen if these measures are accompanied by changes on a personal, psychological and spiritual level too. To change at this level, we need to bring aspects of shamanism and psychotherapy together. Traditional shamanism on its own will not be enough to save us, as it is not designed or equipped to deal with the psychological and other middle-world changes that the Fall has brought. Likewise, psychotherapy on its own will not be enough, if it continues to reduce everything to the human and sees everything through its own lens. It is by bringing shamanism and psychotherapy together, and forging them into something new, that we can begin to find the antidote to the Fall.
Doing this is going to be an epic journey and undertaking. It will also be an exciting, enriching and fascinating one. For my part, I plan to spend the rest of my life dedicated to teaching and writing about this. I have a series of books mapped
out exploring different areas of this. For now though, I will finish by just briefly outlining a few of the things that Therapeutic Shamanism is based upon.
This is a Spirit-led practice - absolutely, and unequivocally.
The first thing I want to be clear about is that Therapeutic Shamanism is a Spirit-led practice. There are certainly psychotherapy practitioners who do practice a watered-down version of shamanism. But that is categorically not what Therapeutic Shamanism is about. For a long time, I practiced psychotherapy and shamanism side-by-side, but as separate practices. I have a deep love and respect for each of them, and as such, I have no desire to water down or impoverish either one of them. At the same time, I also had a sense that they could potentially enhance each other; that the sum could be even greater than the parts. But it was only after many, many years that I began to see how this could work, and how to do it. Bringing a psychotherapeutic awareness to shamanic work does not have to weaken the link with Spirit. If it did, then I would not be doing it, and Therapeutic Shamanism (and this book) would not exist.
Some things psychotherapy needs to learn from shamanism.
If we are to bring a psychotherapeutic awareness to shamanism, then the psychotherapy that we bring needs to learn from what shamanism can teach us. From a shamanic point of view, the problem with much psychotherapy is its tendency to reduce everything down to the human level. Recently, there are some branches of therapy, such as eco-therapy, that do understand the importance of the more-than-human in psychotherapeutic work. But, at the moment, these only represent a very small part of psychotherapy as a whole. The reality is that most psychotherapy is done indoors, with no connection or awareness of nature. And the focus of it is usually almost entirely about human relationships, and internal human processes. Aside from a few therapies that do include an awareness of the spiritual, most psychotherapy is entirely focused on the middle-world and middleworld concerns. Awareness of the upper-world tends to be rare, and awareness of the lower-world usually non-existent. Even when the upper-world or lower-world try to make their presence known, in the therapy room this is often reinterpreted and reframed as a middle-world issue or event. So, whilst psychotherapy is a key part of our recovery from the Fall, as long as it is practised in this way, then it is still showing some of the symptoms of the Fall. In its placing of humans at the centre of
the universe, and seeing everything else as simply metaphors for human problems, psychotherapy is still infected with the human narcissism that is characteristic of the Fall. As such, it cannot ever be fully part of the cure.
In reducing everything to the human, the default position of psychotherapy is usually to think that the spirits are not real. Rather than perceiving spirits as real, independent, and living beings, psychotherapy usually sees them as parts of the human psyche. So, they might be referred to by some psychotherapists as being ’sub-personalities’ — parts of a person’s psychic whole. In a similar vein, rather than seeing shamanic journeys as descriptions of real places and events, journeys may be seen as simply ’imagination’. And it follows that, if the spirits are not real, then shamanic journeys are not Spirit-led, but instead merely human, self-guided imagery. In perceiving shamanism in this way, psychotherapy misses the true scope, validity, and power of the shamanic experience and practice.
For shamanic practitioners, to diminish shamanism in this way is clearly unacceptable. However, I do urge any shamanic practitioners reading this to realise that whilst some psychotherapists do this, not all psychotherapists make this mistake. For there is absolutely nothing about being a psychotherapist that is incompatible with also accepting that spirits are real. As both a psychotherapist and a shamanic practitioner, I know that my spirit guides are real, alive, independent beings. They lead and guide my work.
In my work, I am also alert to the presence of the upper and lower worlds. I do not reinterpret them and diminish them by humanising them. I do not mistake them as merely being the human unconscious. The unconscious (the under-world) and the shamanic upper and lower worlds, are not the same thing. I work with and in them all, as appropriate. But a large part of my work is focused on re-connecting people to the more-than-human, to nature, and Spirit — back to the shamanic upper and lower worlds.
Sigmund Freud once famously said that “The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.”. Practised in this way though, psychotherapy is little more than a painkiller to numb us from some of the symptoms of domestication and the Fall. What shamanism shows us is that much of the pain that we feel is, in fact, caused by our disconnection from the more-than-human, and from nature. Any psychotherapeutic approach that
does not recognise this and embrace it, in effect becomes simply another ’opium of the people’ (as Karl Marx once described religion); another pain-killer, and not a cure for the cause of the pain.
Some things shamanism needs to learn from psychotherapy.
I say again, Therapeutic Shamanism is a Spirit-led practice. Having that clear and firmly in mind, there are also things that shamanism can learn from psychotherapy — things that have emerged as a consequence of the Fall.
In the last section, I was saying that the default position of psychotherapists is often that the spirits are not real (and that they need to learn that that the spirits are real). The default position of shamans is usually the opposite. Shamans tend to assume that the spirits are real. In hunter-gatherer times, before the creation of the under-world with its disowned and distorted parts of self, this would have been a safe-enough thing to assume. The problem these days though is that sometimes the ’spirits’ are not always real. These days, what people think are spirits are sometimes not real spirits at all.
There are demons, and then there are ’demons’.
In earlier sections of this book I have discussed how the emergence of the underworld (the personal and collective unconscious) created inner ’demons’, both personal and collective, and how these ’demons’ then get projected out onto the world, and appear to have a life of their own. I discussed how this was not something that traditional shamanic cultures had to face or deal with, but how these days it is endemic. So, someone may feel that they are possessed by demons, and hear the demon’s voices in their head. If this person goes to a shaman or shamanic practitioner, the default position of the practitioner will usually be to assume that the demons are real. If the same person goes to a psychotherapist, the default position of the therapist will usually be to assume that the demons are not ’real’, but rather that they are disowned and unintegrated parts of the psyche. The problem these days is that either could be the case. The demons could be objectively real, independent beings who are possessing the client. Or they might not be objectively real, but instead only subjectively ’real’ inner ’demons’; fragments of the psyche that have been repressed and need integrating.
So, these days, sometimes the spirits are real, and sometimes they are not. The important thing is:
-
• To be fully aware of both possibilities.
-
• To not make assumptions either way (this means watching and ’stalking’ one's own belief systems, and not letting them distort or colour your perception of what is really going on).
-
• To know how to work appropriately, depending on whether the spirits are, in fact, real or not.
Failure to do this as a practitioner or therapist can potentially have catastrophic consequences for the client. Let us say that, in a particular case, the client’s demons are in fact real. The demons are independent, intelligent beings that are indeed possessing and tormenting them. In that case, for a psychotherapist to not realise this, and instead, mistakenly see the demons as just disowned parts of the self, could be disastrous for the client. For in doing so, the therapist would usually be seeking to help the client dialogue with and integrate the ’parts of self’ (that are, in fact, actual real demons). In doing so, the therapist would unwittingly be helping the demons possess the client further.
However, what if, in another client, the demons are not real (in the sense of being independent beings), but in fact are simply disowned and repressed parts of the psyche; parts of their psyche that the client has disowned because the client is frightened of them. In this case, for a shamanic practitioner to say: ’yes these are indeed real demons that need banishing’, would be to greatly compound the client's mental health issues.
It is, of course, also possible with any given client that some of the demons are real, and that some of them are not. The act of sending parts of our self away both creates inner imaginary ’demons’, and leaves holes in us that real demons can sometimes get into. To really be able to help someone, and not make matters worse, means being able to discern whether someone’s demons are real or not, or which one’s are real, and which ones are not. The old-style traditional shamanic assumption that the demons are always real no longer holds true, and is no longer a safe assumption. Acting as if it is true can cause great harm. This is a vitally important thing that modern-day shamanic practitioners need to take on board.
Ethics and power.
Another major thing that shamanism can learn from psychotherapy is the existence and nature of the fort-holder. Having already discussed the importance of modern shamanism taking this on board, and the implications for shamanic soul retrieval work, I will not go over that again here. Instead, another important thing I want to mention (in terms of what shamanism can learn from psychotherapy) is the issue of ethics and ethical practice. A major characteristic of the Fall has been the abuse of power. In handing our power over to psychopaths, we created a society largely characterised by some people having power over others; relationships of power-over and powerlessness, rather than relationships of equality and power-sharing. In the early days of psychotherapy, the relationship between the therapist and the client reflected this. The therapist was the ’expert’ and had power over the client. Many of the early pioneers of psychotherapy (usually men) used their position of power over clients (often women) to sleep with them. Carl Jung even tried to justify it as being a useful part of the client’s healing process! To its credit though, psychotherapy did not take long to get its house in order. Modern psychotherapy is very aware of issues concerning the power dynamics between therapists and clients. It has evolved sophisticated and complex codes of ethics and practice to deal with these issues. Other professions too, of course, have also taken this on board, and so there are now codes of conduct in many professions such as teaching, social work, and so on. Modern shamanism needs to wake up and do the same. There are certainly ethical shamanic practitioners out there. However, I am sorry to say that I still regularly come across examples of dubious ethical practice in the shamanic community, and occasionally truly appalling practice. There is really no excuse for this these days. Good ethics should be at the heart of any modern shamanic practice.
As well as obviously unethical things, such as seducing clients, psychotherapy has shown us that abuse of power can be subtle too. Since the Fall, we are used to living in a society characterised by imbalances of power. We live in a hierarchical society, surrounded by examples of relationships where one person or group often has power over another (teacher-pupil, boss-worker, priest-parishioner, politicianpublic, and on). So, it is no surprise that early psychotherapy (psychoanalysis) reflected this imbalance too, with the therapist being the expert, analysing the client and telling the client what was wrong with them. About fifty years after the birth of
psychoanalysis, the humanistic psychotherapy approach emerged. One of the pioneers of this was Carl Rogers. He founded what became known as person-centred therapy. Rather than the therapist directing the therapy by using interpretative methods, Rogers believed that the therapist and the client should meet as equals. In person-centred therapy, the therapist follows the client’s lead, and helps the client to uncover their own solutions.
Rogers believed that all living things have in them what he called the ’actualising tendency’. This is a life-force, and a drive in all creatures to make the very best of their existence and reach their full potential. However, this drive can become blocked or distorted by environmental conditions. Nonetheless, things will still do the best that they can, given the circumstances they are in — think of how a plant grows in the cracks of a pavement. In the same way, as humans, as we grow up in childhood we struggle to do the best we can, given the environment in which we find ourselves. But the environment in which we are raised is not necessarily one that will help us achieve our full potential (and life since domestication and the Fall allows few people to reach their full potential as authentic, wild, free human beings).
The job of the person-centred therapist is to create the conditions for people to grow. Rogers (who was raised on a farm), pointed out that a potato in a cellar will sprout and try to grow as best it can, but if you take the potato and put it into good growing conditions, then it will flourish. The potato is innately its own expert at being the healthy potato plant that it was meant to be. All it needs is the right environment to grow in. Likewise, the job of the person-centred therapist is to create the right environment in which the client’s own actualising tendency can become unblocked and begin to flow again. The client is the expert at growing and blossoming into who they were meant to be. So, the therapist does not analyse the client, and tries not to interpret what the client is saying. The therapist does not offer advice, or tell the client what to do. For to do so would be to perpetuate the ’power-over’ dynamic that blocked the client’s actualising tendency in the first place (and would be a continuation of the damage of the Fall). Rather, the therapist and the client are equals, each having their different areas of expertise. The therapist is the expert in creating an environment for the client to grow in. But the client is the expert in terms of what they want to grow into.
Good owls, bad owls.
When I was starting my psychotherapy training in my early 20s, I did a short course with somebody who called themselves a psychotherapist. On the first evening of the course, myself and the other students were sitting on cushions on the floor, gathered around the feet of the ’psychotherapist’, who was sitting on a chair above us all. The ’psychotherapist’ told us that she said she was going to tell us a story that illustrated her idea of what psychotherapy is about. What she said was this:
“Once there was a young sparrow sitting on the edge of a cliff, wondering whether it was ready to fly for the first time. As it was sitting there, along came a wise old owl (the psychotherapist). The owl asked the sparrow what the problem was, and the sparrow said that it didn't know whether it was strong enough or ready yet.
The owl said it knew what to do, but that it needed to go get something. So, the owl flew off. The next thing the sparrow knew was that the owl had swooped down behind it and thrown it off the cliff. So, that is the job of a psychotherapist, to be the expert over the client; to tell the client what to do and when to do it.”
When she had finished the story, once I got over my shock, I realised that I had problems with her story. For one thing, how many dead sparrows are there at the bottom of this cliff ? Because some of them will not have been ready to fly. So, what is an acceptable attrition rate here? Ten percent? Twenty? Thirty? And, even if the owl does this with good intention, and even if this time the owl gets it right and the sparrow flies, there is still a major problem. Because, if a psychotherapist acts this way, then they take away the client’s power. Acting in that way does not help the client to learn to trust and listen to their own inner wisdom. Quite the opposite in fact. Instead, the message to the client is: ’you can't trust yourself, you need to hand over your power to an expert.’. Acting in this way keeps clients dependent on ’experts’ and authority figures (and helps to prolong the Fall and delay our recovery).
Unfortunately, in my 20s I saw many examples of shamanic practitioners disempowering people. It was often done with good intention (although not always). But no matter how good the intention, the result is the same. As I have said earlier, it put me off shamanism for many years, and I only came back to it once I had learnt how to practice it in a more person-centred and empowering way. A truly wise owl is one who sits and listens to the sparrow, and helps the sparrow to find its own inner voice and authority, and make its own decisions.
If modern shamanism is to play a role in helping us recover from the Fall, then it cannot do so by continuing to work with people in a power-over way. Tempting though it may be to be the ’expert’, and tell people what to do, and how they should be living their lives, doing that is just more Fall! It keeps people in a disempowered place. As modern shamanic practitioners, we need to work in ways that create the conditions to help people find their own power. We cannot do this by holding power over them. The person-centred approach has much it can teach modern shamanism about how to work in ways that seek to empower people (and so truly help with our recovery from the Fall). So, that is why the principles of the person-centred approach are also at the heart of my work and of Therapeutic Shamanism.
Some final things...
There are a few other things that that are key to the practice of Therapeutic Shamanism. This being an introductory book, I will just mention them briefly here. They are central to the practice though, and are things I will return to and explore in more detail in later books.
Gratitude practice.
Practising shamanism is often described as a process of ’waking up’. The problem is that waking up to the true nature of the middle-world can be a harrowing experience. It is a process that needs to be gone through, for the shaman is someone who unflinchingly is prepared to see things as they are. However, it can be easy to fall into despair when you start to realise the full extent of the mess we are in these days. Moreover, the more that you regain your empathy, and regain your sense of interconnectedness, the more you also open yourself to feeling the pain in the world. This is why true shamanism is not a light and fluffy path, and is indeed ’the road less travelled’. True shamanism is not spiritual bypassing, or emotional numbing, or avoiding being in the world. It means being in and of the world. It means seeing things as they are, and feeling things as they are. The Buddhist and Bonn teacher Chogyam Trungpa described this as the path of the ’spiritual warrior’. He said that the spiritual warrior’s path was to be in the world, not avoid it, and that meant learning how to live with a broken heart. Dealing with this pain is part of the process that has to be gone through. It is an inevitable consequence of waking up. The problem is though, that in facing the state the world is in now, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and to sink into crippling despair. So, it is important to learn to
manage the pain and despair, without avoiding it. There are many things that can help with this, but by far the most powerful thing I know of is gratitude practice. At its simplest, gratitude practice involves thinking of things that you feel grateful for, and people that you feel grateful towards. If you have not practised it yourself, it may not sound like much. However, simple though it is, it is usually quick and powerful in alleviating feelings of despair about the world.
So, for its effectiveness in helping deal with the pain that waking up to the middleworld can bring, gratitude practice is another essential part of Therapeutic Shamanism. There are many different gratitude exercises. You can find many online. However, I want to include a few here, and mention how they help deal with some of the wounds of our fall away from shamanism. I have included some basic practices, and some with a more distinctly shamanic flavour.
Exercise seven: gratitude journal.
Get a journal and write down ten things you are grateful for. With each thing, include a brief statement as to why you feel grateful. It only needs to be a short sentence for each thing. For example: ’I am grateful for daffodils because they make me smile and remind me that spring is here’.
The gratitude can be towards yourself, qualities that you have, things that you did, and so on. Practicing self-gratitude can be a powerful way of cultivating selfcompassion and self-acceptance, and reining-in an out-of-control inner-critic.
You can also express gratitude towards other people, animals, plants, the weather, mountains, your car, medicines, your home, your sofa, water, a ball-point pen — anything at all. Doing this is a powerful way of overcoming the sense of disconnection and isolation that characterises the Fall, and helps us to feel connected to the web of life and bounty around us.
You can do this practice each day, or even just once a week. It is not how often you do it that matters, so much as how sincerely and heartfelt it is.
The beauty of this next practice is its portability. You can do it at home, but also whilst sitting on the train or bus, or whilst walking along a street.
Exercise eight: gratitude meditation.
Find a meditation posture that works for you — whether reclining, sitting, standing, lying down, or even walking.
Bring your attention to your breath, and how your body moves when you breathe.
Breathe into your chest and allow your chest to soften. Allow your heart to open and expand.
Think of something you feel gratitude towards. Either speaking out aloud, or silently to yourself, say all the things that you feel grateful to it for.
Simply keep repeating the process with new things that you feel gratitude towards, for as long as you wish to meditate for.
The next practice can help us become more awake to our immediate environment, and again is a powerful practice for overcoming the sense of disconnection we often feel in modern life. It is usually easiest to do when out walking in nature. However, doing it in an urban environment can be powerful too.
Exercise nine: gratitude walk.
When out walking, slow down and become aware of your body and how it is moving. Become aware of the feel of the ground under your feet.
Become aware of your surroundings.
Notice things around you that you feel gratitude towards. In your mind, say ’thank you’ to whatever the thing is, and tell it what it is about it that you are grateful for.
A variation of this practice is to do it whilst sitting or standing somewhere. In a busy urban environment, this can be a lot easier than trying to do it whilst walking along a busy street. By doing it when stationary you can even do it whilst waiting for a bus or sitting on a train, for example.
This next practice can powerfully help you deepen your relationship with your shamanic guides. It also deepens the experience of being loved and cared about, and of having support from the shamanic realms.
Exercise ten: gratitude towards one’s shamanic guides.
Find a meditation posture that works for you — whether reclining, sitting, standing, lying down, or even walking.
Bring your attention to your breath, and how your body moves when you breathe.
Breathe into your chest and allow it to soften. Allow your heart to open and expand.
Think of your Power Animal, or one of your other shamanic guides. Either speaking out aloud, or silently to yourself, tell them all the gratitude that you feel towards them.
Simply keep repeating the process with your other guides. You can also do the same with any animal, plant, stone, or anything else in a shamanic journey that you received help and healing from.
A powerful variation of this practice is to do it within a shamanic journey. To do this, go to your axis mundi and hollow-out, then go to the lower-world as usual. Then, in the lower-world, go to each of your guides (or plants, stones or other things), or simply ask them to appear before you, and then express your heartfelt gratitude towards them.
’The work that reconnects’
My own introduction to gratitude practice came through the work of the environmental activist Joanna Macy. For those of you who may not know of her work, she has developed an extensive set of practices that she calls ’the work that reconnects’. Although she herself is a Buddhist, ’the work that reconnects’ is heavily shamanic in its tone, and many of the practices could be described as shamanic practices. These include things such as: holding a ’Council of all the Beings’, various deep-empathy and shapeshifting practices, and listening to and
honouring other life forms. Essentially, ’’the work that reconnects’ involves practices to help us stop avoiding the pain in the world, and instead, to feel it, and then turn despair into empowerment and action. I was lucky enough to come across her work in my 20s (when it was called ’despair and empowerment work’), and it has become an essential part of my personal practice, and of Therapeutic Shamanism. I feel a deep, heartfelt gratitude towards Joanna Macy and her work, for the many ways in which it has helped me in my personal life and in my teaching, and for the way I have seen it help so many other people over the years. If you do not know of her work, or if you do not know that much about it, then I urge you to check out her website. She is very generous with free videos, articles, and exercises. She has also written a number of books, ’Active Hope’ being the one I usually recommend to people. Her website is www.joannamacy.net
Compassion and Metta.
Another key component of therapeutic shamanism is that it is a compassionate practice, or at least strives hard to be. This may seem like a given for a spiritual practice. Unfortunately though, this is not necessarily the case. There are some shamanic traditions where compassion is lacking, to say the least, and where shamanism is used for personal gain, and to do harm to others. Personally, I call those traditions sorcery and not shamanism. However, the people who practice them are often adamant that they are shamans. Whatever the terminology though, for me, compassion needs to be at the heart of my shamanic practice.
A problem with some spiritual traditions, however, is that they tell you that you should be compassionate, but they do not necessarily help you to actually become more compassionate. This is where metta-practice comes in. Metta is a meditation technique designed to help you cultivate loving kindness within yourself. If people have heard of metta, they usually think of it as being a Buddhist practice. Most often it is thought of as a Tibetan Buddhist practice. Interestingly, Tibetan Buddhism was heavily influenced by the earlier Bon tradition in Tibet. Bon, in turn, evolved out of even earlier Tibetan shamanic practices. So, it is quite possible that metta is originally a shamanic practice. Certainly, that is what my shamanic guides tell me. However, whatever its origins, metta is an easily learnt and highly effective way of developing compassion within oneself. As such it is central to Therapeutic Shamanism.
The heart of the practice is to start with showing yourself loving kindness first. Only once this self-compassion is established do you then move on to other people, starting with the easy people (people that you like). After this, you can then move on to people that you find more challenging, and then to all people and all things.
Exercise eleven: metta practice.
It does not matter whether you do metta practice whilst reclining, sitting, standing or lying down. Just find a posture that works for you.
Settle comfortably and close your eyes. Bring your attention to your breath, and how your body moves when you breathe.
Spend a few minutes relaxing and releasing any tension in your body that you become aware of. With each outbreath, sink further into relaxation.
Breathe into your heart and allow it to soften. Allow your chest to open and expand.
Practice loving kindness to yourself. Choose one of the following phrases (or make up a similar one for yourself)...
-
- May I be safe.
-
- May I be happy.
-
- May I be well.
-
- May I be at ease.
-
- May I be kind towards myself.
Mentally, slowly repeat the phrase over and over, with feeling, wishing it for yourself. Whenever you find your attention has wandered, just gently bring it back again. You may call your Power Animal and other shamanic guides to be around you whilst doing this, feeling their loving kindness towards you.
You can just do metta for yourself initially. However, if in the meditation you feel
ready to move on, then think of someone you care about, and chose a phrase for them...
-
- May you be safe.
-
- May you be happy.
-
- May you be well.
-
- May you be at ease.
-
- May you be kind towards yourself.
Imagine them in front of you, and then lovingly direct the chosen phrase towards them. Repeat it over and over again, feeling the loving energy from your heart flowing towards them.
If you feel able to move on further still in the meditation, then repeat this process with...
-
- Someone you feel neutral about. Again, choosing one of the phrases, and wishing it for them, with heartfelt loving kindness and compassion.
-
- Then again, with someone you find a bit difficult or challenging.
-
- Then a whole family, or other group or community.
-
- Then all people. All of the human race.
-
- Then all animals.
-
- Then all living things.
-
- Then all of creation.
If at any point you get stuck, come back to practising loving kindness towards yourself again.
You can also do meditations like these within a shamanic journey. Doing so can add
a whole other dimension to the experience, and greatly enhance the power of the meditation. If you are going to do a shamanic journey to do metta towards anyone else though, remember about ethics and consent. Without their express consent, you must not do anything shamanic to anyone else in a journey (or visualise anything happening to them). It is, however, fine to wish someone well (in the sense of feeling kindness and compassion towards them) — we have the right to do that, as that is about us and our feelings. But it must be done without any attachment to outcomes, or in any way trying to make something happen. So be clear about your intent. The following exercise is purely about you cultivating an attitude of loving kindness within yourself, not to do anything to anyone else. In that sense, metta is about healing you, and healing the way that you are in the world. It is not about doing a healing on anyone else without their permission. Be clear about that difference, and your intent in doing this journey.
Exercise twelve: metta journey.
Prepare for doing a shamanic journey as usual.
When the journey starts, go to your axis mundi and hollow-out, and then go to the lower-world.
In the lower-world, find a comfortable place to sit and meditate.
Breathe into your heart and allow it to soften. Allow your chest to open and expand.
Sense your Power Animal and guides’ loving presence around you.
Practice loving kindness to yourself. Choose one of the following phrases (or make up a similar one foryoursef)...
-
- May I be safe.
-
- May I be happy.
-
- May I be well.
-
- May I be at ease.
-
- May I be kind towards myself.
Mentally, slowly repeat the phrase over and over, with feeling, wishing it for yourself. Sense your guides joining in, surrounding you and lovingly wishing this for you too. Feel the love and compassion emanatingfrom them towards you.
You can just do Metta for yourself initially. When ready to move on, think of someone you care about, and chose a phrase for them...
-
- May you be safe.
-
- May you be happy.
-
- May you be well.
-
- May you be at ease.
-
- May you be kind towards yourself.
Direct the phrase, and loving kindness, towards them. Feel the loving energy from your heart, andfrom your guides, flowing towards them.
If you feel able to move on, repeat this process with...
-
- Someone you feel neutral about.
-
- Then someone you find a bit difficult or challenging.
-
- Then a family, or larger human group or community.
-
- Then allpeople.
-
- Then all animals.
-
- Then all living things.
-
- Then all creation.
If at any point you get stuck, come back to practising loving kindness towards yourself, surrounded by your loving and compassionate guides.
Last, but by no means least - activism.
We simply cannot ask an Oversoul like Panther or Wolf to teach us and heal us, and then ignore the plight of physical panthers and wolves in the middle-world. That would make no kind of sense, morally, or ethically, and would just be plain wrong. Ethically, if we are to ask for help from the Animal, Plant, and Stone people in the lower-world, then in turn we need to help them in the middle-world too. And these days, they need our help. In any case, hopefully by now I have made it clear that shamanism is not in any way a spiritual path that turns its back on the world. Shamanism is about taking your place both in the world, and as a part of the world. It is about being of service to the world. As I have said earlier, part of the role of the shaman was to be the champion and voice of the other Peoples, and to make sure that the humans lived in right relationship with them. So, activism, right living, and right action, are all at the very heart of Therapeutic Shamanism.
Exercise thirteen: giving something back.
Find an animal charity that helps whatever animal your Power Animal is. Set up a direct debit to donate to them, or support the charity’s work in some other way, with love, and with deep gratitude.
Chapter Eleven
How to Explore Shamanism Further: ’Okay, I’ve got a Power Animal. Now what?’
I hope that you have enjoyed this book, and found it interesting. I hope too that you have found it a practical guide, and managed to follow the exercises and begin learning how to journey. More than anything though, I hope that it has whetted your appetite to explore Therapeutic Shamanism further. If so, what follows are some ideas about how to do that.
Working alone.
Although shamans generally always work for the good of the community, it is usually also quite a solitary path. The shaman is someone who is often at the edge of society and of the tribe. If you pursue shamanism further, then you will find that there is a great deal that can be done, and in fact needs to be done, in a solitary way. This is solitary in the sense of being away from other human beings, but not solitary in the sense that you will always be working with your Power Animal and other spirit guides of course.
One of the main things to do is lots of journeys. When doing journeys...
-
1. You will find that if you go into a journey without a clear purpose or intent, then what happens is that the journey will often be unfocused and a bit of a mess. So, always decide on a clear intent for the journey beforehand, and fix this intent in your mind (there are some ideas for journeys below).
-
2. Make sure the door is locked and that you will not be disturbed. This will help you to relax and let go into it, as well as sparing you a nasty shock if you are disturbed.
-
3. Ideally, put headphones on to cut out background noise. Blindfolds really
help with journeying too.
-
4. Hollow out (spend some time being aware of your breathing, relaxing your body, and deliberately stepping aside from your middle-world stuff).
-
5. Then go to your axis mundi with your Power Animal, tell your Power Animal your intent, and off you go.
In terms of what to journey on to develop your practice, there is a natural sequence of things. Safe, sane shamanic practice needs to come from a rooted and grounded place. From a shamanic point of view, most Westerners have a very poor relationship with Mother Earth, and are ungrounded and top-heavy. To grow a healthy and balanced shamanic practice we start by establishing a strong lower-world connection first, then a strong upper-world connection, and only then do we embark on middle-world journeying. So, start off with lots of lower-world journeying, and most importantly, be ever vigilant about middle-world stuff bleeding in. If you do that, you will gradually develop a strong feel for the ’flavour’ of the different realms. And you will be working with, and learning from, wise and transcendent beings, and in a place of healing and safety.
-
So, in the lower-world...
-
1. Do lots of journeys to strengthen the bond with your power animal - just hanging out with it, becoming it, asking it for healing, exploring the lower-world together etc..
-
2. When you feel ready, then you can do a lower-world journey to find your human shamanic teacher. Ask your Power Animal to take you to meet them. They will be some kind of tribal, indigenous person from the lower-world. As such, they will be living as a hunter-gatherer, using stone-age technology. That, of course, means no metalwork, no farming, no modernfabric clothing etc.. Unlike your Power Animal, which remember, is the whole of its species, your lower-world teacher (known as your ancestral kin) is an individual. Find out their name. Notice what they wear; if they have any tattoos or jewellery; what they like doing; what they can teach you. Once you have found them (or they have found you!), then do lots of journeys with them. Ask them for lots of healing. Like your Power Animal, this person also can become a constant guide, companion, and teacher, in
this physical reality too, when you are not journeying. Practice sensing them around you in everyday reality, and talk to them. Having a strong connection with both a Power Animal and a human guide from the lower-world is the foundation of the rest of the work. When journeying, get in the habit of asking them what to do, until it becomes the default thing you do when puzzled or stuck. Listen to them, and learn to trust them and to pay attention to them.
-
3. Eventually, you will meet other lower-world human teachers too, and possibly even a whole tribe. Again, with everyone you meet who feels significant, find out about them: their name, appearance, skills, relationships, etc.. Fill in their backstory. Start to map out the area where they live, and get to know the places in it. The thing to do is to pay attention to the detail (as if writing a good descriptive novel, with well fleshed-out characters and well-described places).
-
4. Ask for lots of healing, from your Power Animal and lower-world helpers. Sometimes what they are doing will make sense, and sometimes not, but just keep asking them to work on you. The key thing is to watch and learn. If a Plant or Crystal is used, pay attention to what it is, and then research it in this reality (remembering the tips I gave earlier for researching things). This way you start to build up your ’medicine bundle’ of helper Stone, Plant and Animal spirits that you can draw on in journeys when needed.
-
5. Another good thing to do is to go to the lower-world with the intent of learning more about a particular Animal, Plant or Crystal of your choice. With an Animal, you can do a bit of research about them first, and then, fixing your intent, go to the lower-world to find the Animal Oversoul that you want to meet, and experience being it. Ask it for healing too. With Plant, you can go to the lower-world and find the Plant, and experience being it. Ask the Oversoul of the Plant to come forward, and then teach you its healing medicine and how to use it. This way you can develop strong bonds with particular Plants, and knowledge of their healing gifts. With Crystals, go to the lower-world, and then go underground into a cavern of the Crystal, and ask the Oversoul of that Crystal to step forward and heal/teach you.
-
6. Do lots of burial journeys to connect to Mother Earth. Allow yourself to
be buried, rot away, and emerge reformed. You may also sink deep into the earth and meet Mother Earth herself, dissolve back into her, and then come back reborn from her. This is powerful healing, and something to be done repeatedly.
-
7. As discussed earlier, also do regular dismemberment journeys (asking your Power Animal to eat and digest you, and then emerging from them cleansed and re-formed). You can also explore: being burnt to ash, and then rising again from the ashes; being dissolved in water and then reforming; or being taken apart by the wind and then reformed too.
-
8. To strengthen your relationship with your lower-world human guide, you can experience shapeshifting into them and becoming them, experiencing what it is like to be them. You can also let them flow into your body and heal you from the inside-out.
-
9. Become a Tree. Learn and experience the healing medicine of specific Tree species, but also of Tree itself; how rooted it is, how slow and calm, and how it gets the balance between Mother Earth and Father Sun just right. Trees are great teachers of how to live in balance.
-
10. Gradually, alongside connecting to the lower-world, you can start to explore the upper-world too. Again, find a specific upper-world guide and teacher, and then communities you get to know and map out (people and places to go to for upper-world healing, for advice on ethics, alchemists, healers etc.). The upper-world is also a place of no modern technology, but does have metal-work, silk clothing, writing etc. - think of anything up to early mediaeval or ’fairy-tale'. Remember, that the upper-world is also a place of love, wisdom, and healing. So, there are buildings such as temples, monasteries, libraries, hospitals, cathedrals, gardens, fountains etc., but no slums, poverty or injustice.
-
11. Only then do you start exploring the middle-world. Remember the middleworld is this physical world and the energy of it, and so is not necessarily benign or friendly. So (just as you do in real life) be sensible about safety and protection (this will be covered in detail in the volume on middle-world journeying in the Therapeutic Shamanism series of books). Have your wits about you and do not take anything at face value. Always be wary of
anyone offering themselves as a middle-world ’guide'. Always, always have your Power Animal and lower/upper world guides with you, and ask them for advice if you are not sure about anything in the middle-world. Start off journeying in the middle-world to places that feel safe. Do a journey around your home, for example, in the journey going into each room and looking at it with your shamanic eyes, and do a shamanic spring clean (shamanic, free-style ’feng shui'). Then explore other areas you know and like (some woods you know, a favourite tree or waterfall etc.). Stay away from stuff that does not feel safe, until you really feel ready to handle it, and if in doubt always ask your guides and listen to them. Then gradually branch out and explore your street, your town, etc. Build up your confidence slowly in this way.
It is also helpful to experiment with different lengths of drumming recordings. They are usually available in anything from ten to thirty-minute lengths. If you find your mind tends to wander when doing longer journeys, then breaking them into two shorter journeys instead can really help. Sometimes the mind wanders in journeys just because that is what the mind does! But sometimes it wanders because the thing you set out to do did not need much time, and there is time to spare. So, when journeying at home for myself, if I want to journey for twenty-minutes say, I might do one long twenty-minute journey if I feel that what I am asking for might be complicated or involved. Or if I feel it might be short and not need much time, then I do two ten minute journeys instead. The first journey will be focused on whatever my intent for the journey is. After doing the first one, if I feel there is more still to be done on whatever the first journey was about, then the second journey will be to whatever that is. Otherwise, the intent for the second journey can be to do something else entirely. Doing this keeps the journeys focused. This helps you to avoid becoming frustrated or discouraged by having journeys in which you cannot keep your focus and concentration.
It can also help to experiment with getting different recordings done by different people. Different people have different styles, and use different-sounding drums, and you might find you prefer some recordings more than others. As well as recordings done using single drums, there are also ones using double drums, drums with rattles, just rattles, digeridoos, singing bowls, and even drums with rockgrinding! Each tends to add a different flavour and mood to the journeying experience, so it is good to experiment and find what works for you.
As well as doing your own journeys, practising doing healing journeys for other people (but always with their express permission, of course!) is a great way to build confidence in the process. This is because you start to see that what happens in the journeys makes sense to the person you did it for. That way you realise that you are not just ’making this up’!
Working with others.
Whilst there is a huge amount you can do in working alone, it can be hard to build up confidence this way, plus most people find it hard to maintain momentum. What really helps with this is balancing doing solitary work with doing group work. Learning new stuff keeps us interested and engaged. Plus, the experience of working with like-minded people, sharing ideas and experiences, and giving and receiving healings, usually really helps with maintaining enthusiasm, confidence, and momentum. Plus, shamanism is, after all, about re-connecting.
One way of working with others is, of course, to practice doing shamanic healing journeys for other people. This can be a great confidence booster, particularly in the sense of realising that you are not just making all of this up. Other ways of working with other people include joining a local shamanic drumming group, plus doing courses and workshops.
Getting 1-1 healing.
Another way to progress can be to get some shamanic healing from an experienced practitioner. You can do a lot of healing on yourself by doing your own journeys, of course. But we all have our own blind spots, and sometimes need the objectivity of someone else, and the fresh approach of someone else's style and their guides. You can find practitioners that I recommend by looking in the section on ’Finding a Good Shamanic Practitioner’ later in this book.
Reading.
People are sometimes dismissive about books on shamanism as they say that you cannot learn to be a shamanic practitioner from a book. It is true that you learn shamanism primarily from your spirit guides. But it is also true that if you were an apprentice to a shaman in a tribe, the shaman would be teaching you a body of
knowledge, to sit alongside what your spirit guides were teaching you. For there is a body of knowledge to learn. In hunter-gatherer days, this knowledge would be passed on orally and not through writing, purely because hunter-gather cultures had no writing and no books. But in terms of the information itself, it is essentially the same information whether it is written or spoken, and so these days, given the scarcity of shamanic teachers, books can have their useful place. So, in terms of further reading, you will find an extensive bibliography towards the end of this book, plus details about the other volumes in the Therapeutic Shamanism series.
I wish you well in your shamanic journey.
A polite request.
If you have enjoyed this book and wish to help spread the word about Therapeutic Shamanism, then you can really help by writing an online review for the book. Positive reviews help enormously with book sales, and so in turn can help more people discover the shamanic path.
About the Author.
I was born and grew up in the north of England. At the age of eighteen I went to Lancaster University where I studied philosophy and anthropology, primarily studying tribal (shamanic) cultures. After graduating I found there were not many jobs in that field! So, I worked for a few years in a hospital, teaching sign language, and in my spare time studied complementary medicine, various spiritual traditions, and psychotherapy. I set up in private practice as a complementary medical practitioner and psychotherapist in the early 1980s. Apart from a few years heading up a counselling department at a Further Education college, I have been selfemployed as a therapist ever since. As well as one-to-one client work, I have also been a teacher, trainer, and supervisor for nearly thirty years.
I had several intense shamanic experiences in my early life, although at the time I did not know what to call them. At university, I was drawn to studying shamanic cultures, although at the time the word ’shamanism’ was still not used that often in academic circles (at the time they were generally still referred to as ’primitive cultures').
I first consciously came across shamanism in my 20s, attending workshops that various teachers were running at the time. Although I found it interesting, I was also training as a psychotherapist at the same time, and I found the lack of ethics and abuse of power that I saw going on in the shamanic workshops to be disturbing. So, I gave up actively pursuing it (although with hindsight it never actually left me). In my 30s, a series of events completely took me apart mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and literally nearly killed me. It was during the slow process of emerging from that crisis that shamanism burst back into my awareness. Over the next few years of healing, shamanism felt like a very private part of my life; an intensely private practice just between me and my guides, and something I discussed with very few people. Although I was a teacher, the idea of teaching shamanism felt out of the question at that time, as shamanism felt like something that I would always only be a beginner at. Again, with hindsight, I certainly would have been nowhere near capable of teaching it, really teaching it, at the time. It was not until my early-forties that my guides started to nag me about teaching it. I
resisted for years. My guides persisted, and quite reluctantly I began to weave bits of shamanic work into the other teaching that I was comfortable with. What astonished me was the way some people took to it and thirsted for more of it. It did though, take another near-death experience for me to finally give in, and stop being the reluctant teacher. These days I am filled daily with a deep gratitude (and still with some astonishment) that I can devote my life to practising and teaching shamanism, and that people want to learn with me.
Otherwise, I lead a quiet life. A couple of years ago my partner and I were fortunate enough to be able to move to North Wales, to live a life more in contact with nature. I am an introvert, and after teaching I need a lot of solitude and quiet to re-charge. I spend most of my days writing, walking on the beach or in the hills, watching clouds and sunsets, gardening, cooking for my partner, holding her hand, reading, researching on the internet (there is so much I still want to learn and study!), thinking, feeling, occasionally wrestling inner demons, doing nothing in particular, talking to my guides, and gazing adoringly at my cat.
Paul Francis, 2017.
Next Books in the Series.
Most books on shamanism tend to be introductory guides (like this book), with a few others covering specialist areas. To the best of my knowledge though, there has never been a coherent, step-by-step series of books written on shamanism, in terms of books that build on each other, and form a modern-day shamanic apprenticeship. My intention is to try and do just that; to write a series of books that can take people, step-by-step, deep into the practice of Therapeutic Shamanism.
With this in mind, the next book in this series is:
'Rewllding Your Soul: discover the roots of your soul in the shamanic lower-world - Volume 2 in the Therapeutic Shamanism series.
This book includes more detailed information and specific practices for developing a stronger shamanic practice. As well as delving deeper into shamanism and shamanic journeying in general, this is an in-depth guide to exploring the shamanic lower-world in particular. To this end, the book includes guidance and detailed training exercises for things like: enhanced practices for hollowing-out and being able to step aside from the middle-world self; meeting and becoming your lower-world self and cultivating a deep relationship with them; the why and how of doing burial journeys; unravelling journeys — shapeshifting into a place (a whole forest, valley etc.); dismemberments and other transformational journeys; lower-world healings, including shamanic extraction work; meeting lower-world gods and goddesses, and Mother Earth herself; healing the mother-wound, both personal and collective; working with Animals other than your Power Animal, meeting and working with the Oversouls of the Plant People, the Standing People (trees), and the Stone People; meeting shamanic human teachers in the lower-world, including specialist teachers for extraction work, Plant Spirit work and so on; meeting your lower-world tribe (your ’ancestral kin’). And much more besides!
The book is due for release at the end of 2017.
The third book in the series is:
'Beyond the Self: aligning with Spirit in the shamanic upper-world - Volume 3 in the Therapeutic Shamanism series.
Going deeper into shamanic practice still, and focusing on the upper-world in particular, this book covers such things as: understanding the difference between Father Sun and Mother Earth; how the shamanic realms are formed; the nature of the upper-world and how it differs from the other realms; the reasons for doing upper-world work, and its crucial importance; how to explore the upper-world; meeting your upper-world Self; the upper-world as a place of ethics and spiritual perspective; finding your upper-world Spiritual Lineage guides; the Council of the Elders, and putting right unhealthy relationships; working with alchemists, potionmakers, artefact-makers, etc.; upper-world shamanic healings, including convalescence, disentanglements, colour and sound healings; meeting and working with upper-world beings such as Angels, Gods and Goddesses; meeting Father Sun (God).
The book is scheduled for release in spring 2018.
Further volumes (in no decided order at the time of writing this) will include:
-
• 'Soul Loss and the Fort-Holder: a guide to soul retrieval for the modern world'.
-
• 'The Totem Pole: shamanism and the human energy body'.
-
• 'The Medicine Wheel: shamanism, the seasons, and the cycle of life'.
-
• 'How to Live Here: exploring the shamanic middle-world’.
-
• 'Healing Ancestral and Family Wounds'.
-
• 'Recapitulation: disentangling from the past and choosing the future’.
-
• 'Head and Heart, Body and Soul: a shamanic perspective’.
-
• Adulthood: a shamanic guide to properly growing up and becoming an actual adult (and
elder)'.
-
• 'Healing the Mother Wound and the Father Wound'.
-
• 'Heating the Lover Wound: connecting to the healthy masculine andfeminine’.
' 'Death and Dying: a shamanic perspective’.
' 'Shamanic Healing: a Therapeutic Shamanism guide'.
• 'Good Boundaries, Bad Boundaries: a shamanic guide to working with boundaries and protection'.
' 'Critic Taming: a shamanic guide to working with troublesome inner-critics (and other sub-personalities)'.
' 'How to Live Shamanically in the Modern World: hunting and gathering for everyday life'.
-
• Bering a Shamanic Practitioner: ethics, power, andpracticalities’.
-
' 'The Animal People: a guide to working with Power Animals and other animal guides in shamanism'.
-
• 'BirdMedicine: birds as teachers and healers in shamanism’.
-
• 'Plant Spirit Medicine: a guide to working with the plant people in shamanism’.
-
• Thee Standing People: a guide to working with trees in shamanic healing'.
-
• Thee Stone People: a guide to working with crystals in shamanism’.
-
• 'Sea Shamanism: healing and teachingfrom the sea and the shoreline'.
-
' Thee Art of Being: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 1'.
-
• Thee Art of ’Tracking: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 2’.
-
• Thee Art of Mapping: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 3 ’.
-
• 'The Art of Patterning: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 4
-
• 'The Art of Imaging: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 5.
-
• 'The Art of Council: shamanism, counselling andpsychotherapy volume 6.
-
• 'Being a Shamanic Therapist: a practical guide’.
’ ’Shamanic Grokings’ - various books on working in detail and depth with specific plants, animals, and stones.
Courses, Training and Online Resources.
The Three Ravens College.
I founded the college in 2008. Originally it was called the College of Therapeutic Shamanism, but a few years after it started whenever I journeyed to ask for help and guidance with the college, three ravens started to appear in the journeys. I was familiar with the stories of Odin and the two ravens representing (in some versions of the story) Knowledge and Wisdom, but I did not know what the third Raven was about. After a while it became clear to me that the third raven was Compassion. And so, the Three Ravens College was born, with the aim of it being based on the principles of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Compassion.
There are many different colleges of shamanism these days, and obviously different
approaches suit different people. So, the following is a description of some of the things that are central to the Three Ravens approach, to help you decide if the college is for you...
-
1. With the shamanic work, the approach is core-shamanism and neoshamanism. The approach of the college is to take the principles and practice of core-shamanism, and develop a new (neo) shamanism that is applicable to the times that we now live in.
-
2. The courses are not based on any specific native tradition (i.e. they are not Celtic, Native American, Toltec, or any other culture). They are generally aimed at people living in Europe, but otherwise the aim is to keep them as culturally neutral as possible, so that people can add-on any other traditions that appeal to them.
-
3. Some approaches to shamanism are heavily ritual-based. However, ritual generally is just not something that works for me personally. Nor is it something that I do in my personal practice or life. So, ritual work is generally not part of the courses.
-
4. The courses and approach are definitely non-religious and need not be at odds with any (open-minded) religious beliefs and practice. Students are free to practice any religious beliefs they have alongside learning Therapeutic Shamanism.
-
5. The courses are grounded and not at all New-Agey.
-
6. The courses are Therapeutic Shamanism, and as such they do have a heavily psychotherapeutic flavour and orientation. That means that students need to have an interest in the psychological side of the work. It also very much means that students need to be willing to work on their own personal psychological and emotional issues.
-
7. The courses are Spirit-led. On the courses, we do indeed work with our psychological wounds and blocks. But the main purpose of doing this is precisely because those wounds and blocks are what gets in the way of connecting to Spirit. Connecting back to Spirit and the more-than-human is the central aim of the work that we do.
-
8. It is not necessary to sign up for long courses or two-year trainings. The courses offered at the college are modular and flexible. They vary from one-off weekends, through to blocks of up to eight weekends. Students can do whatever modules and courses they want, and in whatever order and pace that they wish.
-
9. I have done my fair share of wilderness work and outdoor work in the past. I do love things like sweat lodges, outdoor vision quests and the like. But I am mainly interested in how we can make shamanism relevant to the urban lives that most people lead. So, in developing Therapeutic Shamanism my interest has been in exploring ways of working shamanically in urban or semi-urban settings. So, the courses are usually held indoors and do not involve wilderness work.
-
10. I try and practice being a Leaver rather than a Taker. In doing so I only want to take what I need to live, and leave the rest. So, I keep the courses as inexpensive as I realistically can.
If you are interested in the courses, then the first step is to do one of the Introductory Days. These are held in various locations in England, Wales, and Scotland. They are run either by myself, or by some of the college’s practitioner graduates. They are the ideal way to see if the Three Ravens approach is the right one for you.
If you want to check out the college further, there are testimonials about the college on the website, plus descriptions of the courses offered, including the shamanic practitioner training. There are also articles and other resources on the website that you can download. Go to www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk to find out more.
Finding a Good Shamanic Practitioner.
The Three Ravens College shamanic practitioner register
If you are looking for a trained and registered practitioner of Therapeutic Shamanism for some one-to-one shamanic healing, then there is a register of the college’s practitioner graduates. I set up the Three Ravens College in 2008 with the intention of offering a shamanic practitioner training, to train up ethical and skilled practitioners. All the people on the register have completed the training, and are people who I know, trust, and recommend. The practitioners on the register can offer all core aspects of shamanic healing and shamanic counselling, including soul retrieval.
You can find the register at www.shamanic-practitioners.co.uk
Code of Ethics for Therapeutic Shamanism Practitioners
The practitioners all strive to work to high standards of ethics and professional responsibility. Below is our Code of Ethics...
Guidance
To strive to be guided by our spirit guides, and not our own ego.
Healing
To always seek to heal when appropriate, and never to use shamanism for harm. To treat everything that we find with respect and compassion.
Safety
To strive to offer a safe and healing environment for clients.
Core conditions
To strive to show grounding, empathy, congruence, unconditional
positive regard, and awareness.
Confidentiality
To respect and protect client confidentiality (within legal and ethical limits).
Integrity
To strive to be aware of our personal limitations, skills, experience and appropriateness. To only work within our competence, and to seek supervision and/or refer on when needed.
Honesty
To be honest and truthful in how we present and represent ourselves personally, in public relations and in advertising.
Permission
Never to do shamanic work without the express and explicit permission of our clients, and our spirit guides.
Inclusivity
To strive to be inclusive, and tolerant and accepting (of race, gender, creed, age, sexuality, disability or any other differences).
Power
To always seek to empower the client whenever and wherever possible. To not abuse our power through manipulation of others, including inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Payment
If charging money for our services, to offer fair and appropriate fees for the work that we do, and be clear about fees and number of sessions.
Words
To strive to be conscious of the power of the words we use. To tell healing stories, and be mindful and careful of the seeds that we sow with our words.
Energy hygiene
To strive to keep our own energy field and that of our work environment as clean and clear as possible. To be mindful of what we may pick up from clients, and what we may pass on to clients.
Fitness
To know when we are not in a fit and proper state to work, and to take time out when needed. To seek help when we need it for ourselves.
Appropriate detachment
To avoid rescuing, and to try and stay out of the drama (victimrescuer-persecutor) triangle.
Boundaries
To maintain good and appropriate boundaries with clients.
Reputation
Not to act in ways that bring shamanism or Therapeutic Shamanism into disrepute.
Community
Not to use shamanism for personal gain if doing so is to the detriment of others, shamanism and Therapeutic Shamanism, and/or the community.
Glossary of Shamanic Terminology.
A guide to frequently-used shamanic terms.
Ordinary Reality.
This world. a.k.a. the Tonal, the Explicate Order, Surface Reality, Consensual Reality, etc.
Shamanic Reality.
The realms behind this ordinary, surface reality. Also known as NOR (NonOrdinary Reality), the Nagual, or the Implicate Order, etc..
SSC.
'Shamanic State of Consciousness’ — the trance state shamanic practitioners enter (as opposed to OSC — ’Ordinary State of Consciousness). Characterised by high levels of theta brainwaves — the brainwaves associated with creativity and spirituality. Can be a very light trance, or very deep. Usually entered through the use of the drum (or rattle) at around 4 beats a second.
Animism.
Shamanism is a branch of animism — the belief that everything is, in some sense, alive and has a soul.
Axis Mundi.
a.k.a. The World Tree. The centre of the worlds. A place where all the worlds connect, and so a place that can be used to travel between the worlds.
Lower-world.
The home of nature. Characterised by animals, plants, geology, and people living close to nature. The realm of Mother Earth.
Middle-world.
The energetic form of this world.
Upper-world.
The ’spiritual’ world. Home of human or humanoid beings — spiritual teachers, angels, etc. The realm of Father Sun.
Under-world.
The realm of repressed and disowned psychic energies and parts of self, both personal and collective (the personal unconscious and collective unconscious). Part of the middle-world.
Great Spirit.
What everything is made of. The aliveness in everything.
Tutelary Spirits
Collective term for one's Lower, Middle and Upper-world helpers.
Spiritual Lineage.
One's group of regular helpers from the Upper-world.
Ancestral Kin.
One's helper-spirits from the lower-world.
Shamanka.
A term sometimes used to describe a female shaman.
The Four Aspects.
Body, ego, authentic soul and spirit. Body and ego (a.k.a. middle-world soul) are aspects of the middle-world, spirit of the upper-world, and authentic soul of the lower-world. Both authentic soul and spirit are transcendent.
Hollowing-ou
The ability to put aside one's middle-world concerns, agendas, perceptions, and identity, and become a hollow vessel for Spirit to work through.
Entity/Intrusion.
Something that becomes attached to someone's energy body. May be an ’inanimate’ thing (i.e. ’a knife in one's back', ’a thorn in one's side'), or a ’living thing'. This can sometimes lead to...
Possession.
When a living entity takes over somebody ('I don't know what came over me'). Some shamanic traditions will deliberately invite possession by a helpful spirit, for instance in healing or for divination.
De-possession
The removal of a living attachment/entity.
Extraction.
The removal of a non-living entity.
Psychopomp.
A shamanic practice to help lost or stuck souls of the dead move on, and return to the light/Spirit.
Terrapomp.
To help lost or stuck nature spirits re-home.
The Peoples/Races.
In shamanism, everything is alive. So, shamans recognise, in the material world...
-
• The Stone People — the living rocks, minerals, crystals and chemical elements. The first of the People. Next came the...
-
• The Plant People. Then came...
-
• The Standing People — the trees. Then ...
-
• The Animal People. Lastly came...
-
• The Human People.
In the energy world...
-
• The Elementals. This includes nature spirits (fairies, elves etc.), archetypal beings (angels, dragons etc.), etc..
Power loss.
Being cut off from nature and from the other ’Peoples’ and from Mother Earth. Symptoms are the same as those of soul loss, but with the addition of a disconnection from nature (urban lifestyle, no connection with other animals, plants etc., spending no time in nature etc.).
Power retrieval.
To reconnect with nature, the other Peoples and Mother Earth. Can take many forms, but in particular involves a ’Power Animal retrieval’ — finding one’s Power Animal and developing a strong relationship with it.
Soul loss.
The idea that we lose a soul, or part of our soul, usually through things such as trauma, abuse, bereavement, co-dependency etc. Symptoms include: depression; fatigue; feeling stuck; lack of enthusiasm; addictions; a sense of something missing.
Soul retrieval.
The act of bringing back a lost soul or soul part.
Recapitulation.
The process of letting go of the past and of gathering back energy that has been left in past events and interactions, and the reclaiming of one’s wholeness and personal power.
Power Objects.
Objects used in shamanic journeying or healing for their properties; crystals, feathers, shields, etc. May be in this reality (corporeal), or not (non-corporeal).
Medicine Wheel
A sacred space to do shamanic work in. Usually aligned to the four directions (north, south, east, and west) and made with an understanding of their significance, affinities, and power.
Convergence points.
At the very top of the Upper-world, and at the very bottom of the lower-world, points where everything merges back into oneness (into light, at the Upper Point, and into ’earth’ at the Lower Point).
Transmutations.
Being taken apart and reformed as a process of cleansing and transformation. May involve: the Lower Convergence Point (Mother Earth and Soul): Upper Convergence (Father Sun and Spirit); being eaten by an Animal in the lower or upper-worlds, and then either regurgitated or defaecated out in a new form; Burial (earth); burning (fire); dissolving (water); dissipating (air).
Shape-shifting.
The ability to shift one's form and appearance in a journey, and experience being something else such as another animal or a tree, for example.
Shaman cf. Shamanic Practitioner.
We are shamanic practitioners. Shaman is a term conferred by one's community, not on one's self.
Bibliography.
There are hundreds of books that have helped me to get to the point of writing this book. Here are a few of them. The influence of some of them may not seem that obvious, but they have all played a part in shaping my shamanic journey. Ones that I have particularly drawn on are underlined. Ones that I especially recommend are in bold type. Ones that I both especially recommend and drew on for this book are in both bold type and underlined. I have left out details of publishers, years etc., as these days with the internet books are so easy to find, and now come in so many different editions and formats.
Abram, David.
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.
Almquist, Imelda.
Natural Born Shamans: a Toolkit for Life.
Andrews, Ted.
Animal-speak.
Animal-wise.
Aron, Elaine N.
The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.
Baumann Brunke, Dawn.
Dreaming with Polar Bears: Spirit Journeys with Animal Guides.
Beyar, Blanca.
Soul Retrieval: Unveiling Your' Wholeness.
Bloom, Dr.. William.
Psychic Protection.
Bohm, David.
Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
Bond, Tim.
Standards and Ethics for Counselling in Action.
Bran, Zoe.
Where Shamans go: Journeys into Extra-ordinary Reality.
Brink, Nicholas.
Trance Journeys of the Hunter-Gatherers: Ecstatic Practices to Connect with the Great Mother and Heal the Earth.
Carson, David.
How to Find Your Spirit Animal: Connect with Your Animal Helper for Guidance, Strength and Healing.
Campbell, Joseph.
The Hero’s Journey.
Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Volume 1: The Way of the Animal Powers.
Historical Atlas of World Mythology Volume 2: Mythologies of the Great Hunt.
Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Volume 3: The Way of the Seeded Earth.
The Power of Myth.
Conway, DeannaJ.
By Oak, Ash, & Thorn: Modern Celtic Shamanism.
Cowan, Eliot.
Plant Spirit Medicine: The Healing Power of Plants.
Cowan, Thomas.
Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit.
Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life.
Crockett, Tom.
Stone Age Wisdom: The Healing Principles of Shamanism.
Day, Kenn.
Post-Tribal Shamanism: A New Look at the Old Ways.
Deatsman, Colleen.
The Hollow Bone: A Field Guide to Shamanism.
Diamond, Julie, and Jones, Lee Spark.
A Path Made by Walking: Process Work in Practice.
Drake, Michael.
The Shamanic Drum: A Guide To Sacred Drumming.
Eisenstein, Charles.
The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self.
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.
Eliade, Mircea.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
Forbes, Jack D.
Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism.
Fries, Jan.
Seidways: Shaking, Swaying and Serpent Mysteries.
Gendlin, Eugine.
Focusing: How To Gain Direct Access To Your Body's Knowledge: How to Open Up Your Deeper Feelings and Intuition.
Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method.
Germer, Christopher and Siegel, Ronald
Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy: Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice.
Goswami, Amit and Reed, Richard.
Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World.
Gredig, Florian.
Finding New Cosmologies: Shamans in Contemporary Europe.
Halifax, Joan.
The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom.
Hanh, Thich Nhat.
Love Letter to the Earth.
Harari, Yuval Noah.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Harding, Stephan.
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia.
Harner, Michael.
Cave and Cosmos.
The Way of the Shaman.
Harrell, S. Kelley.
Gift of the Dreamtime: Awakening to the Divinity of Trauma.
Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism: A Beginner’s Map Charting an Ancient Path.
Hartmann, Thom.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking up to personal and global transformation.
Heaven, Ross.
A Journey To You: A Shaman’s Path To Empowerment.
Hinterkopf, Elfie.
Integrating Spirituality in Counselling.
Horn, Mary Phyllis.
Transforming the Soul: Beyond Soul Retrieval and Integration.
Hughes, Jez,
The Heart of Life: shamanic initiation and healing in the modern world.
Ingerman, Sandra.
Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path o f Direct Revelation.
Mending the Fragmented Self.
Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner’s Guide.
Soul Retrieval.
Walking in Light: the Everyday Empowerment of a Shamanic Life.
Jones, Caroline.
Questions of Ethics in Counselling and Therapy.
Jung, Carl Gustav.
The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung’s Writings on Nature, Technology and Modern Life.
Man and His Symbols.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Kahili King, Serge.
Urban Shaman.
Le Guin, Ursula.
The Dispossessed.
The Wizard of Earthsea.
Levy, Paul.
Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil.
Levy, Robert.
Shamanism for Teenager's, Young Adults, and the Young at Heart.
Lushwala, Arkan.
The Time of the Black Jaguar: An Offering of Indigenous Wisdom for the Continuity of Life on Earth.
Macy, Joanna, and Johnstone, Chris.
Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy.
Macy, Joanna and Young Brown, Molly.
Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World.
Madden, Kristin.
The Book of Shamanic Healing.
Masters, Robert Augustus.
Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really
Matters.
Matthews, Caitlin.
Singing the Soul Back Home.
Matthews, John.
The Celtic Shaman: A Practical Guide.
The Shamanism Bible.
Mindell, Arnold.
Dance of the Ancient One.
Dreambody: The Body S Role In Revealing the Self.
Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming.
Earth-Based Psychology: Path Awareness from the Teachings of Don Juan, Richard Feynman, and Lao Tse.
Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology.
Quantum Mind and Healing: How to Listen and Respond to Your Body's Symptoms.
Riding the Horse Backwards: Process Work in Theory and Practice.
Rivers Way.
The Dreambody in Relationships.
The Dreammaker's Apprentice: Using Heightened States of Consciousness to Interpret Dreams.
The Quantum Mind and Healing: How to Listen and Respond to Your Body's Symptoms.
The Shaman's Body: A New Shamanism for Transforming Health, Relationships, and the Community.
The Year One.
Working on Yourself Alone.
Working with the Dreaming Body.
Narby, Jeremy.
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.
Natiello, Peggy.
The Person-Centred Approach: A passionate presence.
Paver, Michelle.
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Collection - (Spirit Walker, Wolf Brother, Outcast, Soul Eater, Ghost Hunter, Oath Breaker).
Penczak, Christopher.
Spirit Allies: Meet Your Team from the Other Side.
Plotkin, Bill.
Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.
Pratt, Christina.
An Encyclopaedia of Shamanism, Volumes One and Two.
Proctor, Gillian.
Values & Ethics in Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Pullman, Philip.
His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass).
Purton, Dr Campbell.
Person-Centred Therapy: The FousingOriented Approach.
Quinn, Daniel.
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.
My Ishmael.
Story of B.
Rebollot, Paul.
The Call to Adventure: Bringing the Hero's Journey to Daily Life.
Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal.
The True Source of Healing.
Roberts, Llyn.
Shamanic Reiki.
Rogers, Carl.
A Way of Being.
Client-centred Therapy.
On Becoming a Person.
On Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact.
Scott, Gini Graham Ph.D.
Complete Idiot's Guide To Shamanism.
Scott Card, Orson.
Speaker for the Dead.
Xenocide.
Seed,John, Macy,Joanna, and Fleming, Pat.
Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings.
Selby,John.
Kundalini Awakening: Gentle Guide to Chakra Activation and Spiritual Growth.
Sentier, Elen.
Shaman Pathways - Elen of the Ways: British Shamanism - Following the Deer Trods.
Steiger, Brad.
Totems: The Transformative Power of Your Personal Animal Totem.
Stevens, Jose and Stevens, Lena S.
Secrets of Shamanism: Tapping the Spirit Power Within You,.
Talbot, Michael.
The Holographic Universe.
Mysticism and the New Physics.
Taylor, Steve.
The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of a New Era.
Villoldo, Alberto.
Shaman, Healer, Sage.
Mending the Past and Healing the Future.
Williams, Mike.
Follow the Shaman's Call: An Ancient Path for Modern Lives.
Smith, Kenneth.
Awakening The Energy Body: From Shamanism to Bioenergetics.
Tedlock, Barbara.
The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine.
Von Petzinger, Genevieve.
The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols.
Walsh, Roger.
The World of Shamanism: New Views of an Ancient Tradition.
Walter, Mariko and Fridman, Eva.
Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture, Volumes One and Two.
Weatherup, Katie.
Practical Shamanism: a Guide for Walking in Both Worlds.
Webb, Hillary S.
Traveling Between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans.
Weiser Cornell, Ann.
The Radical Acceptance of Everything: Living a Focusing Life.
Wilber, Ken.
Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life o f T'reya Killam Wilber'.