How I Got Here
I have not always called myself a shaman. For a good half of my adult life I did not really know or even think about what a shaman was. It was simply not on my radar. After a brief flirtation in my twenties with what can be described as the spiritual realms, I settled down to a much more standard path of marriage, kids, house, job and career.
I was a lawyer then. To become a lawyer I went through an initiation ritual by swearing an oath before a person in an elevated position wearing a wig and a cloak, a judge. I guess because of having been initiated in this way, I am still a lawyer. I do not consider myself to be a lawyer and I certainly do not practice as one. I think this is funny because I have not been initiated into becoming a shaman. There were no wigs, robes or incantations like there were for becoming a lawyer.
Looking back I can see that I have always been a shaman. It is my identity. It explains the visionary dreams I had as a teenager. It explains my diversion into the spiritual world in my early twenties. All that was needed was for me to develop a few skills that I had not acquired and, indeed, did not know I needed.
What skills? Well, one skill really. The skill of being myself. Spontaneously and unconditionally being myself. It is a bit of a shame that it took me until my forties to learn this skill. It also raises the question of who the hell was I before I learned to be myself? I will not answer that question here as it is simply too tedious to contemplate. It is also pointless to look back with regret.
I could say something spiritual and fatalistic here along the lines that I needed all that time in my life before coming into my full self to prepare me for what was ahead. Except I don't believe that. We can step into our true nature at any moment. Until we do we can still lead productive, useful, loving lives but there will always be something missing. Another irony is that we probably will not really know what is missing until we find it. This is a reasonable explanation for why it took me some forty years to find my true calling. After all, it is pretty hard to find something if you do not know what it is and you are not looking for it. What you need instead are some useful accidents.
My first useful accident was some difficulty in my marriage. Like I said, I was a lawyer and the idea of seeking professional help for any personal problem seemed potentially humiliating and shameful to me. My wife was braver. With her I started to attend counselling. It just so happened that the counsellor practiced the psychotherapeutic modality called psychodrama. It turned out, I loved psychodrama. As I got over the fear of being found out for having emotional or relationship difficulties - quelle horreur! - I leaned into the practice of psychodrama.
Psychodrama is an active and dynamic form of therapy. The therapist is called a director and the client is the protagonist. They are not alone, as with most therapies. In addition to the therapist and the client there are others in the room. They are called auxiliaries. Now that is different from most therapies where what goes on in therapy stays between you and your therapist.
The role of the director is to tell everyone what to do. The role of the protagonist and the auxiliaries is to do what they are told. What do we do together? A drama, of course. At some point the director / therapist will seize on something the protagonist / client has said or, perhaps, not said. Then the therapy room becomes a stage and the drama begins to unfold in a series of role plays where the protagonist and the auxiliaries take on various and changing roles, acting out fictitious or actual events that relate to whatever is up with the protagonist.
I found this an effective form of therapy. It was often excruciating, confronting my emotions and insecurities, but over time it melted the solid seal between my head and my heart and allowed me to begin to flow in the world as a more complete human being. Not only did I find the therapy useful but, like I said, I loved it. I loved the process. So much so that when I had melted my own resistance enough I began to act as an auxiliary in other people's dramas. I loved that even more. I can remember one occasion where the therapist, her client, me and a few other auxiliaries were seated in the standard semi-circle wating to begin the process. I had a sudden insight that I was at home. I felt completely comfortable and alive. Feeling like this was a pretty good clue that I had been missing something and I just might be finding it but, as I said, I was still naively not looking for anything else and so I did not kow it could lead anywhere.
The next accident was my therapist beginning to publically explore the world of energy healing. My encounter with this came about on a ten day psychodrama retreat by the shores of Lake Taupo. I had been on a similar retreat before which had comprised ten days of semi-circles and psychodrama after useful psychodrama. All familiar territory.
This time, however, things headed in a different direction. Instead of the usual role play and unfolding drama the approach was more direct with the person who would normally have been the protagonist just lying there while others moved around her and made sounds, waved their hands and arms and all manner of other strange, at least to me, actions. I had not experienced anything like this before and did not know what to make of it and I certainly did not know what to do. Wanting to stay connected, and I trusted my therapist enormously, but not knowing how to get involved I moved down to the back of the large practice room where this was all happening.
I cannot recall what caused it, what changed in me or why it occurred, but I suddenly started having visions of animals and other aspects of nature. Then the sounds started coming out of my mouth. The best I can describe is that I was singing the songs of the animals that were in my visons. Each vision came with a certain feeling, for want of a better word, and the feeling matched the expression of the sound which flowed effortlessly from my mouth.
This was entirely new to me. Sometime later that I realised that the surprising thing was that when this occurred it was not surprising. It seemed natural. Although, if I think about it objectively, perhaps I should have been shocked or frightened by this occurrence. After all, control of my mind and my voice had been taken over by something that was not me in the usual sense. I had no intention or knowledge of what I was doing. No purpose. I just knew that it was right and by 'watching' the visions unfold in my mind the voice naturally flowed.
I was not shocked or surprised at all. The opposite occurred. On reflection I realised that I had never felt so natural, so myself. It occurred to me afterwards that this is what people meant when they talked about being themselves. It was new to me and I had not been looking for it as I hadn't consciously known I was missing it or that such a feeling existed. The closest I had come was in the psychodrama semi-circle and even that had not made me wonder if there was more to come; a deeper knowing of myself.
The next step was equally as effortless as my visions and song. I started to join the group with the energy healing work and I found by the same process of just letting things unfold, I knew exactly where to place my hands; what sounds to make; where to stand; what part of my body to use; what part of the subject's body to focus on. It all just flowed. Naturally.
Over the coming months, years perhaps, I explored this new aspect of myself, this new capacity. Then at some point I began to notice that there were people who were called shaman and when I watched them on TV (this was before YouTube) they acted in ways very similar to me. I also began to collect items of a shamanic nature. Not deliberately or with intention or mimicry, but naturally, accidentally even. I made myself a drum out of an old lightshade and a piece of leather. I gathered candles and rocks and crystals and other gems. All these things just felt right. I would sit, meditate and then let the visions flow. I would beat the drum and chant my songs, all without obvious or apparent meaning but deeply relevant and meaningful to me.
With those I knew and trusted I explored healing in this way. I felt a deep sense of identity with what I was doing, a pride in having found myself. Like a teenager who is discovering who they are I wanted the world to know. I started to call myself a shaman. It seemed to be the word that fit the best. I was happy to declare who I was. Being a shaman was the most natural thing in the world to me and so I give only a little thought to what others might think of this lawyer who now made funny sounds and beat a drum.
This was not bravery, courage or fierce independence. It was simply inevitable. I carried on being a lawyer all the while looking for a way to be more and more my shaman self. With hindsight I see that because I did not care that others knew my true identity, people who knew me, as far as I could tell, also seemed to not care and continued to see me in the context they found me.
Lawyers saw me as a lawyer. Some, occasionally, broke role and enquired after my spiritual life. This occurred almost always because they wanted to talk of their own spiritual, their own ‘weird’, experiences. Many never mentioned it and it only occurred to me later that they must have known. I learned that I could quietly chant or tap out a rhythm in public and, other than the occasional glance, I did not attract attention. People see and hear what they expect to see and hear. So long as I was not trying to attract attention, by being deliberately obvious or deliberately secret, I could proceed unnoticed.
Eventually I began to work with the public. I established a work place in the main street of the small town near where I lived. In the front I carried out law work and the people who came for that noticed the law things and saw me as a lawyer. In the back room I practiced as a shaman and the people who came for that saw me as a shaman.
So, answering the question: What do I know about shamanism and who am I trying to tell or teach anyone else about it? My answer is that everything I know about shamanism and what I talk about has come from my own experience; what I have 'seen' (perceived is perhaps a better word), felt, heard and generally experienced as my path has unfolded in a way I could never have predicted or expected. Like all our paths, it is perhaps only looking back that we can see them as a systematic chain of events leading somewhere. Along the way the expereince is much more chaotic and the path ahead is obscured by the possibilities of choice and so many unknowns.
TLDR;
Find yourself. Be yourself. Then the magic happens 😊
Back