Shamanic Spirituality in a Place Called Home

Reprinted rom the Spring 2009 Journal of Shamanic Practice

Many Western people deeply desire to learn from indigenous shamans; like­wise, indigenous shamans desire to teach North Americans and Europeans. Fredy “Puma” Quispe Singona, a Peruvian paqo,¹told me that he is drawn to North America because he fears that shamanic wisdom is being lost in his own home country. He tearfully described how the ancient practice of making offerings to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, is being forgotten as farmers no longer go into the fields with reverence, praying, and asking permission to enter Mother Earth’s sacred body before breaking into her surface with their plows. He pointed out that they have begun to use chemical fertilizers on their crops, which reduces the fertility of the land, while many North Americans are returning to organic farming. Also, since Western culture is a power center that the rest of the world emulates, he believes that if people in the West begin to live a more connected, spiritually aware, and heart-centered existence, it might change the world for the better.

North Americans have roots that extend all around the globe. We come from Scandinavia, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific Islands, to name just a few. Yet in spite of our varied origins, we share an important trait – whether our ancestors came here by free choice, because of famine, to find new lands, at the hands of enslavers, as refugees from war, or as outcasts – each of us is either a dislocated person or the descendent of a dis­located person. Perhaps the root of our angst is that we are longing for Home. This Home, however, is not in our nations of origin, but rather in the living Earth and all her creatures.

Shamanic Reality

Shamans can travel beyond the ordinary reality of the five senses into spiritual realms and back again. Hence, they are called “Those who walk between the worlds.” The experience of traversing the realms beyond ordinary perception alters a shamanic practitioner’s sense of reality not only during the shamanic journey but afterwards. Practitioners begin to see, hear, and experience ordinary reality in a different way. Michael Harner observed that even after just a few shamanic journeys people who were not ecologically focused begin to express new views about the interconnectedness of all species. He attributes this to the fact that once people begin to see them­selves as a part of the larger cosmos, develop a more compassionate orientation toward the rest of creation. He suggests that shamanic journeys produce experiences of the self and world that are more in alignment with those of indigenous people and children everywhere. For very young children, connectedness is an intrinsic experience of childhood and they retain a sense of magic and communicate with invisible friends, perceive that their favorite toys are alive, and have conversations with the ants in the garden until they go to kindergarten. Feelings of being connected with non­-human companions can linger well into school age.

There is an intrinsic human desire for magic: the sense of awe and mystery about the world that is deeply embedded in our consciousness. Maybe that is what has driven us to exhaustive explorations of our planet and beyond; we long for wonder and once it loses its ap­peal, we search out another. I believe this longing is actually an expression of a hunger for the ancient ways of perceiving the world and her creatures: a hunger for what I call Home. That ex­plains the fascination that many hundreds of thousands of people feel about Earth-centered spirituality and for the healing rituals of cultures that retain this awareness. Many people are also deeply involved with environmental causes and movements for social change. Their passions are fueled by the understanding of our interconnection and interdependence on one another and on other species. And the more deeply they explore these interconnections, the more awestruck and humble they become before the magic that creates the fabric of life on Earth. Our ultimate survival as a species hangs on these slender threads which may yet weave us a splendid future.

We are sacred beings born into a sacred world. As, Stephen Jay Gould once said, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between our­ selves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love” If we want to heal the ecosystem, perhaps we need to become lovingly reacquainted with our larger family in nature and find our sense of Home there.

The Role Shamanic Healing Plays

Ervin Staub, in Roots of Evil (1992), argued that trauma often makes people fulfill their needs in a destructive manner.² The traumatized person becomes disconnected from others in an effort to save themselves. If this is the case, then supporting patients to resolve and heal their displacement or disconnection trauma, by giving them a sense of home, would be an excellent way to begin moving North America closer to its role as a beneficial global leader. The Textbook of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (2001) reports that shamanic healing is beneficial in treating cases of physical trauma (past or present) as well as emotional or mental trauma.³

Implicit in the shamanic understanding of the world is the belief that everything is alive, or spirit-filled. Spirit is the framework on which physical existence is created and sustained; when this foundation suffers imbalance, illness may ensue. By treating the patient through the doorway of Spirit, tribal shamans and Western shamanic practitioners alike address the underlying, nonphysical imbalance and mend the places where one is disconnected. Whether a person arrives at a healer’s doorstep due to physical, mental or emotional illness, they are suffering from disconnection. They may have perceptual disconnections within the self – in the body, mind and well as with the larger social or natural world.

In my own healing practice, I see individuals who experience isolation; others may have rewarding human relationships but cannot see themselves as a part of the natural world; yet others do not perceive their connection to the Divine; still others see their spirits as separate from their bodies, or feel that their bodies are somehow less important. All of them have inadvertently become victims of the dislocated, hierarchical, and compartmentalized Western worldview.

Shamanic practitioners and shamans alike work in partnership with their spirits to reclaim patients’ health and spiritual balance. Upon completion, some of the essence of that spiritual­ healing partnership is transferred to the patient. However, for the healing to have the most power and depth, it is necessary to cement that relationship. In most traditional cultures, patients are expected to perform certain actions that reinforce the healing that occurs on their behalf.

An Clchi shaman I know refers to this phase as part of the”fastening of the healing.”⁴ In other words, through rituals patients experience a transfer of energy and become more fully empowered. This gives them opportunities to reclaim their health and balance and take personal responsibility for their continued wellbeing. In my conversations with allopathic, osteopathic, and naturopathic physicians it became clear that their traditions also recognize more effective results when patients assume a partnership role in their health. This transference of power from the practitioner to the patient is a key component of continued health and wellbeing should not be underestimated.

Using Shamanic Spirituality for Reconnection

While shamanic journeying produces a sense of connectedness, it is also possible through focused intention to support individuals in reconnecting with one another and the environment. Intention can be enhanced by taking experiences from journeying and implementing them in ordinary reality. In bridging the two realities one parallels, magnifies, and strengthens the experience and makes it part of everyday awareness.

Interior Journeys

Journeying to experience ourselves on a cellular level can be profound. Our physical bodies are composed of approximately 50 trillion cells with minute biochemical mechanisms that mirror those of our bodily organs. Our cells breathe, eat, excrete, and in concert with each other, perform a myriad of other functions that keep us alive. When we bring our consciousness into our body we can get a tangible sense of the power of cellular interconnection. Journeys to meet individual blood cells, muscle, tissue cells, skin cells, heart cells, and brain cells produce a different view of the community of the Self which is a reflection of the wider Whole.

Another remarkable interior experience awaits those who journey along the DNA to meet the other beings whose codes have been preserved in­side their genetic material. Like insects preserved in amber, the life forms who contributed their chapters to the evolutionary story of human beings still exist in our DNA. Journeying to meet them is like looking deep into our family tree.

Practicing Gratitude
The World Health Organization defines environmental health as “human health, including quality of life determined by physical, chemical, biological, social, and psychosocial factors in the environment.” While it was once thought that our biological destiny was written in our DNA, we now know that our lives unfold as a result of the cellular molecules interacting with inner and outer environments.⁶ The environment impacts the regulatory proteins that control what part of the DNA script is avail­able to be read, which in turn determines what portion of the material is duplicated to write the program for the proteins that make cellular function and regeneration possible. Basically, it is how well these proteins are made, de­pending on the template provided from the body’s response to the environment – not our genetics-which determines how well and how long our bodies work. Epigenetics, the new science that studies this phenomenon, reveals that this process is not linear but holographic, in that there is a feedback loop by which all elements impact each other. This tells us that we have the ability to change the environment which influences how the Book of Life is written.

Studies by Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty of the Institute of Heart Math have demonstrated that the emotions of love, gratitude, and compassion support the DNA’s ability to accomplish its tasks of sustaining life while emotions of fear, anger, and rage distort DNA conformations and hamper its abilities.⁷ They have shown that our feelings affect the DNA not only within our body but also the genetic material that is all around us. Our feeling energies radiate from our bodies as a non-Hertzian field be­yond the range of standard electromagnetic measurement. This nonlocal capability means that our feelings exist both in a point of time and space in our body and beyond the limits of time and space outside our body. Shamans describe this region beyond time and space as the realm of Spirit.

Journeying to experience how ordinary reality is transformed by our feelings can be extraordinary. When we become conscious of our feeling states we can begin to take more responsibility for what we are projecting into the inner and outer environments. We can spend more time generating life-affirming energies instead of disruptive ones. As physicist and mathematician Mark Comings suggested, feelings of gratitude provide a direct way to align our­ selves with the multidimensional “sea of radiance” which unites All. In other words, the practice of gratitude provides a way of becoming more seamlessly harmonious with creation while feeling the kind of connectedness we experience during shamanic journeying.

The Square Yard

A thorough study of our planet’s many ecosystems can be a lifelong quest due to the remarkable diversity and complexity. Consequently, the thought of learning about Nature can seem rather daunting. We need a simple way to approach the natural world to begin our sacred relationship. One method is by creating a square yard of space. Begin by choosing a place that borders on different zones-such as a garden and lawn or a meadow around a tree – that won’t be disturbed by mowing or pedestrian traffic. Push sticks into the ground in the cardinal directions to form the corners of an area that is roughly a yard square, and then run a string around the sticks to create an area separated from the ad­joining property. The resulting square yard becomes an area in which to observe nature, a portal for shamanic journeying, and a sacred space.

Leave the square yard set up for at least a year so there is time enough to get to know the changing seasonal dynamics. Depending on the time of year and in which the yard is located, one may find signs of many different life forms. If a square yard is located in a tidal estuary, it might contain as many as 100 clams, 2000 worms and 30,000 amphipods. Even a suburban lawn holds a wide life if one refrains from synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides. and herbicides.¹⁰

After getting some sense of the creatures that live within or regularly visit your square yard, you can journey to meet with them in the spirit world. Rather than relying on general ideas about a given species, we become acquainted with individuals in that species with whom we can enter into relation­ship. Each tree, stone, bird, or animal in the square yard has a story to share if we are willing to listen.

Backyard Sanctuary

The World Wildlife Federation has developed the Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program as an incentive for individuals who are searching for ways to improve their local ecosystems. They offer certification for people who become conscious about the choices they make in maintaining their yards¹¹To create a healthy, wildlife friendly yard, one needs to provide food, water, cover, and places to raise young.

When my partner and I certified our yard, we began cataloging the species that visited or made their homes around us. We bought a large three-ring binder, filled it with blank sheets of card stock, and browsed through field guides looking for the species we knew lived in our backyard. We photocopied each one and pasted it on its own page. Every season we updated the pages with new inhabitants and got reacquainted with old friends. We kept notes whenever a bird arrived in the spring or a wildflower bloomed, as well as notes about the journeys we have taken to meet with these creatures. By now we have over 60 species of birds, 12 of wild mammals, several amphibians, reptiles, innumerable insects, and many native plants. Our home-and-garden are a form of Earth stewardship and an important part of our shamanic spirituality. 

Conclusions

Shamanic spirituality offers many ways to re-enter into relationship with beings with whom we share our world. We can communicate with the spirits of trees, rivers and ants in a way the both our ancient ancestors did and that we ourselves once did as children. Through the shaman’s journey, our perceptions of reality shift, expanding our awareness of the larger world and our place within it. Once the lines of communication and relationship are re-established, we prodigal sons and daughters of the Earth have opportunities to heal our disconnection traumas and regain our place as compassionate stewards of our Home.

References

1. This is a Quechua word used to describe a man or woman who communicates with the spirits of the Earth filling the role of “shaman” among their people.
2. Staub E. The roots of evil: the origins of genocide and other group violence. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1992, 35-45.
3. Section on shamanic healing con­ tributed by Harner S., Harner M., Jonas W, Blevin J.F. In Textbook of complementary and alternative medicine. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Wilkins and Williams; 2001
4. Conversations with Grandfather Mikhail Duvan during his 1995 visit to California.
5. World Health Organization web site: https://www.who.int
6. Lipton B. The biology of belief. Santa Rosa, CA: Mountain of Love; 2005, 67-73.
7. McCraty R, Rein, G. Local and non­ local effects of coherent heart frequencies on conformational changes of DNA. Talk presented at the Joint USPA/IAPR Psychotronics Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1993.
8. Mark C. The new physics of space time and light. Lecture presentation at True North Annual Medical Conference, The complex patient: biology, relationships, and healing; 2005.
9. Where the river meets the sound: an educators guide to the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge; 2004. Available at https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/nisqually-national-wildlife-refuge-educators-guide/7879306
10. If the square yard is located in the suburbs, I recommend reading Suburban safari: a year on the lawn (2005) by Han­nah Holmes. The author, armed with her insatiable curiosity and a notebook, dis­ covers the rich and varied life in and around her yard.
11. nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat/createhabitat.com
12. nwf.org/backyard