SHAMANISM

 

As an adult my first understanding of altered phenomena came from an experience I had one day while eating lunch on a park bench at a university campus.  Most of the campus buildings were made of brick or a rough gray stone that I think was granite.  I loved to look at them with their dove tailed corner joints and clinging carpets of green or red ivy, depending upon the season.  My mind was  preoccupied with internal chatter, when the wall of one of these buildings began to telescope outward from its normal, reliable, everyday position.  In my body I experienced a sensation of expansion and lifting upward and outward that was euphoric and frightening at the same time. 

 

My fingers grabbed the wooden slats of the bench while I successfully allowed more euphoria than fear to define this experience.  The stones talked to me, not in words but in knowings that felt deep, timeless and loving.  Sometimes one rough hewn block would come forward more than others, and then another would take its place as the first receded.  It was joyful, it was playful, it was profound.  It changed me forever.

 

According to the Foundation for Shamanic Studies:  "Over tens of thousands of years, our ancient ancestors all over the world discovered how to maximize human abilities of mind and spirit for healing and problem-solving.  The remarkable system of methods they developed is today known as 'shamanism' (pronounced SHAH-mahn).  Shamans are a type of medicine man or woman especially distinguished by the use of journeys to hidden worlds otherwise mainly known through myth, dream, and near-death experience." 

                                                                                                        

 

Shamanic practices are typically associated with indigenous cultures, and these practices are utilized by the community's healer/s to enter altered consciousness states in order to facilitate healing.  Some of the basic tenets of what Michael Harner* refers to as "core shamanism" are paraphrased below:

 

v       all life forms on Earth are of equal value         

 

v       forms encountered in altered consciousness states are just as real as those in ordinary- everyday-reality states, and are referred to as "spirits" 

v       all life forms on Earth have souls; "souls" meaning the spiritual essence of the life form required for that form to be alive.  "Thus it [the soul] is present from conception or birth until death, although the degree to which it is present may vary.  Upon death, the soul continues to exist, as it did before birth, but the length of time it does so as an identifiable entity varies." [1]

 

Hank Wesselman** comments that "Today, there is increasing interest among Westerners in learning how to systematically alter consciousness so that we too can personally connect with this other world, and many in the modern mystical movement have learned and practiced the ancient, time-tested technology of transcendence, pioneered by the shamans of the traditional peoples."[2]

 

Years after my "moving stones" experience, a friend and mentor introduced the term shamanism to me.  Once I opened to the notion, many experiences began to occur that I now conceptualize as a period of shamanic training and remembering, gifted to me from the world of spirit.  This happened over the course of several years and I kept it quite private.  At some point I felt the need to attend some Earth-plane trainings so that I could be more credentialed, but the most potent of the teachings, rememberings and initiations was from the spirit plane.

 

At this point in my SshWay practice I consistently utilize key healing methods I learned during those years, and I am eternally grateful for the awakening these learnings brought into my life. 

 

*   Michael Harner, PhD, anthropologist, past professor at Columbia, Yale, UC Berkeley,

     founder of the Foundation for Shamanic studies.

**Hank Wesselman, PhD, anthropologist with fieldwork work in the Rift Valley of east Africa,

    author, workshop leader, shamanic practitioner.

 

 [1] Science, Spirits, and Core Shamanism by Michael Harner, Shamanism, Spring/Summer 1999, vol. 12, No.1

 [2] Modern Mystical Movement by Hank Wesselman, as published on his website