The first thing to say is that I am not a shaman. This takes a calling, full-time commitment and involves a long, rigorous apprenticeship, near death experiences and dangerous initiations. It is therefore hardly surprising that most potential shamans resist this call.
I would say that I work as a counsellor and shamanic practitioner, occasionally incorporating and integrating certain of the common shamanic techniques into the counselling work with my clients.
My personal journey into shamanism started several years ago. After 18 years in social work and family therapy, I had started working from home as a counsellor. I knew that I needed this space to breathe who I was into life but there was still something missing. I had just finished a year's psychosynthesis therapy training which continually emphasised that what we exclude, controls. I started to realise that there was much of my shadow that I had not integrated: I was approaching 40 and I began to realise that what my soul yearned for was to "go down" and stop pretending I was in control. I had been working as a healer and I just couldn't channel any more "light" without first getting my feet really dirty. I felt like a fraud.
Two things happened at once to help the shift - I joined a Shamanic Practitioners' training course and the following week found myself (through Wild Dance Events) at a residential men's weekend. The facilitators at this weekend were Robert Bly and a Mayan shaman, Martin Prechtel, two powerful and graceful men. We spent four days immersed in stories, poems, and beautiful rituals working with the earth. I understood that the ache I had felt, for as long as I could remember, was just the way it had to be - part of the soul's journey growing towards who I was, remembering, coming home. For the first time in my life, I cried freely and uncontrollably while being held lovingly by another man (in a roomful of 150 others doing the same thing!) I realised this was the "going down" I had needed: this little death, the bitter sweetness of grief and the healing it brought.
Over the next year, I learned more about shamanism and whether in its Siberian, Mexican, Celtic or other forms, just how similar the various world views and techniques are. All talk of three worlds, all just as real as eachother - the one we live in most of the time being the "middle world". There is also an upper world and a lower world which, in some ways, can be likened to the higher and lower consciousness in psychosynthesis. All three worlds offer a different variety of experience. The shaman is someone who can travel to other worlds and find their way back - someone who lives and works between the worlds. In this sense, the shaman is a hunter, a tracker and a healer. In indigenous cultures where, for the community, ritual (and the initiations that go alongside it) is part of everyone's daily life, the spirits are remembered in an ongoing, preventative sort of way. The shaman is needed when something goes wrong or needs fixing. People can still forget that they are created in order to give back in beauty and the shaman may act on their behalf. In the shamanic world view, everything is alive and connected as part of the web of life. Through practice s/he can communicate with ancestors, animals, plants, trees, rocks, the elements, bodily organs, spirits of the place, individual or group to ask what is needed, and through heartfelt language, prayer and ritual, help to rebalance what is out of balance.
In my psychosynthesis training, I had been shown how to see from an observer place, to watch my performance and to take more responsibility for somehow creating what was happening in my life. I knew to trust that the pain of my difficulties was necessary for me to "wake up" to know I was creating them. I was also taught the importance of honouring this distress and allowing it to be present in all its truth. After my own experience of showing and being seen in my grief, I found this a lot easier to do. So, in my personal life I now started working more with my own shamanic journeys, and with animals, rocks and trees. I practised watching my body, feelings, thoughts and the world around me that reflected everything inside. I practised seeing with a broader perspective, looking and calling for signs. Ritual and prayer became more a part of my day and I now carry a little bag of offerings, some sage and rosemary for burning and a candle along with my diary.
As a counsellor, the shamanic work has helped me to feel more grounded and earthed, to slow down and to be more aware of what my heart is saying. I feel as if I am being held, not just in my experience, knowledge, role or context of work with my client, but in my "not knowing", in my surrender to Spirit. When I feel stuck, I now sometimes remember to ask of Spirit what to do, and I always get an answer. Whether this answer comes from within or without is not so important to me. By "not knowing", I am more able to be with my clients and to travel alongside them. I am not so afraid of "going down" with them to their (and my) dark places. I have more of a sense of sacredness, of space and how a simple thing like lighting and working with a candle (fire and air) can help in sessions.
The more I trust in Spirit to hold me, the more it will in all its forms. The more I allow it to hold and guide me, the more I have to honour this help through prayer and through the attempt to create as much beauty in my life as I can in all that I do. In this way, the spirits are fed and so am I. If I step out of this cycle of giving and receiving, I certainly notice it. I often feel as if I am working as part of a team, working in the service of Spirit.
Most of my clients I see for counselling only. With others, I will use more direct shamanic techniques, for example enabling them to journey to the lower world for themselves using a repetitive drum beat, to meet a part of their power (perhaps in the form of an animal) which, when ready, the can bring back and integrate through therapy. There are other practices such as "soul retrieval" which I may use if a client, pehaps after years of work, still feels somehow separate from themselves.
My role as a shamanic guide is very different here. Rather than facilitating the client's journey, I journey for the client. I may find one or more soul parts that "left" at certain times in their life to avoid being destroyed. These parts, often in child forms, need to be talked to and encouraged to return. If they are willing, they return with me and are blown back into the client's body. The client will often describe to me following my journey the events in their lives that led up to the "soul loss" and these frequently correspond with what I saw.
Because I am journeying for the client and the issue of power in this, I rarely use this technique with ongoing counselling clients, yet more in my role as shamanic practitioner. Soul Retrieval can have dramatic effects as the client may feel "more themselves" in a way they often find difficult to describe. Work needs to then be carried out to more consciously integrate this part of themselves back into their personality and daily life and we may need to do some more work with them, clearing space inside themselves for this to happen.
Shamanic techniques have connections to the inner child, cutting ties, visualisation and imagery work, two chair and sub-personality work, and this is how many counsellors are better able to understand them. For me, the main difference is that the more I trust that I am actually present when I travel to other worlds or levels of consciousness, the more Spirit reveals to me about these other worlds and to effect change. In this sense, "reality" as I knew it, changes with my level of trust to include more and more. In my own way I am therefore more able to live through my work and everyday life "between the worlds".
The more I can contain what I am shown there, the more I can have access to it in conscious awareness of my responsibility as part of the web of life.
01773 852491 (UK)