Beginner's Guide

How I came to call myself a shaman

I didn’t mean to become a shaman. I didn’t really even know what a shaman was. But then it happened. It was a ten-day residential retreat with the focus on psychodrama, something I had done before. Focus can change and here it began to shift to something a little more out there. I was not sure what it was, and it was definitely a little weird. Now I would call it energy healing, but I did not know what to call it then.

There were sounds and hand waving. People moving around the person who was receiving the healing who sat in a chair or lay on the floor. They, these people doing the healing, people whom I knew well, seemed to know what they were doing, but I certainly did not. I had no idea what to do and so I moved down to the back of the large hall. I wasn’t escaping, but I wasn’t really joining in either. I trusted this group and felt that I could contribute just by standing there, on the edge, but not across the border.

I focussed on what was going on and stayed open to it. I closed my eyes. Then the visions began. Visions of animals, of plants, coming vividly to mind without invitation. I didn’t know how, didn’t know why, but I knew they were connected to the group healing that was going on at the other end of the hall. Then the sounds began to come. Not into my mind, but out of my mouth.

As I stood there, I sang the songs of the animals and plants that were coming into my visual field. They were the songs of the natural world, sounding like chanting or wailing, and they came naturally. Before long I drew closer to the healing group and began to join in. My hands knew what to do, my body knew where to be and my voice knew what to sing, to sound.

This was my sudden introduction to the world of the shaman. I still did not have a name for it. The most surprising thing was that it was not surprising even though I was feeling, sounding and acting in a way I had never acted before. In a way that was beyond reason or thought. I had reached weird and just kept going, so far out into left field that I had left the stadium.

Not surprising at all. In fact, I had never felt more myself. I remember, later, realising that this was what people meant when they talked about ‘being themselves’. I hadn’t known that it was possible to feel this much at home, this compete.

Time passed and I explored what had turned up that day in the hall. I explored it on the retreat with the other participants. I explored it at home with people I trusted. Over time I began to encounter, mainly through television in a world where YouTube did not exist, others who seemed to act in a similar way. They called themselves shaman and at last I had a label to go with this thing I had been in no position to describe or characterise. I was a shaman. The label was good enough for now and as time has passed it has continued to fit. The more I have learned about and experienced the shamanic world as practiced by others, from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds, the more similarities I have noticed with my natural way of being and the more the label has continued to fit. So, for want of a better word, I call myself a shaman.

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Reclaiming the Unseen

When did we become so consumed with the material and the individual? Who convinced us that shunning the immaterial, the spiritual and the unseen, was progress? When did separation from each other and all that is become the new normal?

All cultures, all peoples, have recognized the importance of connecting with the unseen and paying homage to it. They have recognised that the world consists of more than they can touch, taste, smell, hear, see or think. We have long known, but now forgotten, that we are made up of more than this, a concept so basic that once we could expect a child to understand it just as well as the wise elder.

Just because we learned to build mechanical devices; learned to harness the power of the elements themselves to move us further and faster, to manufacture things we didn’t know we needed or wanted; just because we learned to make ourselves more comfortable by shaping the world to suit us rather than shaping ourselves to suit the world; just because we achieved these things, was it really necessary to blind ourselves to everything else? Sadly, it would seem so.

Modern life is a cult steeped in the dogmatism of material progress and consumption. Like all cults it is founded on a false belief. The belief that the world has unlimited material resources and that we can find our place in the world by always wanting more. For ourself. The false belief that it is these material resources that will set us free when, in fact, this is not the case and never has it been.

Like all cults, the penalty for doubting or investigating the founding belief, for challenging or abandoning it, is ostracism. The ultimate penalty. We have deep in our DNA the wisdom that we cannot survive alone. We need others. We are social beings not just for shits and giggles, but for survival. So, if I dare believe in spirits, devas, guiding entities, auric energies, or any other manifestation of the unseen unknown, I am a flake, a purveyor of woo woo, unscientific, superstitious, and I don’t belong at the table with the rest of the tribe. Until I renounce my apostasy I can starve.

In twenty first century western culture the shamanic paradigm is a means of reclaiming our true relationship with the world and finding our real tribe. Just as we have guides in the spiritual realm, we can also encounter guides in our physical reality. Our society is peppered with those of us who are drawn to mediate between the seen and the unseen. Everywhere there are small communities, often made up of those who come together only occasionally, where our deeper spiritual, immaterial nature is at the centre. We can replenish ourselves here, connect with the divine aspect of our being that we know we have but so often feel distanced from. Acknowledging our depths in this way, even if it is only now and then, is an essential part of being truly human.

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Shamanism - Not Knowing

For understandable reasons we live in a paradigm of needing to learn to progress. We go to pre-school, school and higher education to gain skills and knowledge that, once acquired, enable us to achieve more. In the shamanic world this seemingly natural progression is reversed.

To practice as a shaman I have learned to know less, to know nothing in fact. I was a lawyer for many years thriving on the ability to acquire knowledge and to analyse what I learned, a skill that is completely useless in the shamanic world. Before I could become a shaman I had to go through a process of learning not to know. The art of spontaneity.

I often hear from people that they feel inhibited in acting in a shamanic way because they do not think they know enough or have not learned enough. This is a completely understandable point of view, and it is a useful one as it can lead us to pursue our interest in the unseen. It can lead us to seek out those with some experience and knowledge of the shamanic realm. But that is where its usefulness stops. Then it is time to let go this paradigm of study – learn – practice – master, and to let that process collapse into a state of contemporaneous being and acting.

Does this mean that anyone can be a shaman or carry out a shamanic healing without any learning or qualifications? This is a question that I cannot really answer, as who am I to say who can be what and when? However, from my experience I would say that the ability to be a shaman or act shamanically is not a learned behaviour or a skill, but rather an inherent capacity. One that you either have or you don’t.

If you have a yearning to work in this world, or even an interest or a curiosity that is more than just an intellectual fancy, it may well be that you have that innate capacity that is the foundation for shamanic work. Then, really, the only thing you need to learn is to not be the person that isn’t a shaman.

This may sound like word play and semantics, but it houses a fundamental approach that is different from our day-to-day experience. The practice of shamanism, at least in my experience and from what I have seen of the experience of others, is a practice of getting out of the way of your own personality. Of having the intention to not act out of your ego mind, to let go of control of your body, speech and your mindscape sufficiently that the unseen can be made manifest through you.