Reweaving The Web

Chapter 1

What is a Shaman

You are reading this because you have become interested in the concept of Shamanism, just as I did many years ago. So many people are searching out this ancient practice in the 21st century, looking for themselves. Looking for solutions. Rightly so, for here many of them are found. Shamanism is the oldest form of spiritual practice. I was going to say ‘philosophy’ but it is not that. That implies ‘thoughts’ on the subject. You wouldn’t call sculpting a philosophy because it is a set of practical skills that produces a finished product. There are many analogies between the two. Just as a sculptor goes into a different aspect of the clay and brings that shape into being, so the Shaman goes into other realities and ‘brings’ them into this actuality. It is more akin to a set of skills than a cluster of ideas. Shamans are and were tradespeople.

The term we use finds its origins in Siberia: male Shaman and female Shamanka, but their ilk is found in every racial group. Other words we have used are witch and witchdoctor. These derogatory terms were devised to discredit the practice and were largely successful. But was all the energy to malign something really needed, if indeed it was fraudulent as claimed? The ‘new’ doctors of the Western philosophy of science and politics put a great deal of energy into discrediting old ways. They had huge investments in closing the door between the worlds of reality: investments such as money, power and social control. Now the more of a mess those things make of the world, the more we go searching through our roots to find ways that worked for previous millennia. The name we chose to call the searcher that discovered the entrances between the worlds in the past is ‘Shaman’, and s/he is still the hope of the world today. Maybe it’s only hope.

All indigenous groups hold the remnants of Shamanic practices within their cultures. Some are stronger than others, according to how much they have become vulnerable to Western influence. These Shamanic traditions, alongside the Siberian, include the Native American, Inuit, Australian Aboriginal, and African. As well, there are the Pacific Islander Tohunga and Hawaiian Kahuna. We probably don’t realise that many world religions are based on earlier Shamanic practice. The Tibetan Bonn, Japanese Shinto, Chinese Taoism, Hinduism, Druidism, and Wicca are all Shamanic at their core though some have moved more into the realm of philosophy than practice, over the years. As this occurs, religions are formed. Shamans become priests and the rot sets in as standardised rules are created for all. Let me explain. Shamanism seems to have been an outgrowth of need. Just as children develop skills to meet their physical needs, they become more and more proficient over time. It appears that certain people in tribal and family groups discovered their ability to enter different reality ‘places’. At these times, they were able to communicate with the animals that the tribe lived among, forming symbiotic relationships that allowed survival of both species. These people later found they were able to ‘journey’ into some of these realities, finding cures from the plant and animal worlds.

 Out of this, most of our early medicine originated. Even more recently, Dr Edward Bach communicated directly with plants to find their curative properties when forming his Bach Flower Essences. All herbal cures began in this way. The people of the Amazon are still leading Western scientists into cures from the jungles that they themselves have discovered through entering trance and contacting the spirit of the plant itself. Earlier peoples had amazingly intricate scientific knowledge. We are astounded, as our only way of discovery is to inflict pain on laboratory animals, until we see the effect it has on them. Shamans were the first psychologists. They were able to use their skill to go into the deepest parts of their clients’ souls, finding what ailed them, then bring it to the surface to be healed, in exactly the same way as any good therapist would today, though most would not realise that this is what they are actually doing.

Gradually these gifted Shamans found out what enabled them to perform these miracles. They began training others so that they could carry on the practice for their communities. Their skills had become invaluable to community survival. A tradition was born that began to shape the culture of the people of the land. Through the work of the Shaman, the people could be connected to all that surrounded them. They became brothers and sisters to their food, medicine, land and clothing. They wore the skins of their animal companions, had their flesh in their bellies, and their energy coursing through their veins. They took on the life force of these beings and learned from them. Even the average villager understood this connection, although they themselves did not visit the other realities, except on special occasions, and in ways their Shaman orchestrated. This was often through the use of plants acting as doorways between the worlds: plants we have turned into recreational distractions. The Shaman became a doorway between the worlds: a bridge through which others could be connected to realities other than their own, and so actively grow and evolve.

Culture was born: rituals and seasonal celebrations honoured the symbiotic relationship with all the beings that depended on each other for their survival. Cultural clothing was formed from that which was available to be used in the areas where the people lived. None of it was merely a ‘resource’. The Shaman’s work had connected the people to these beings and the community realised the need to acknowledge this relationship for the health of the whole. So it was an honour to wear the plant fibres and animal skins that were freely offered as part of the relationship with other species. Plants and animals teach us lessons about right living that we have long since forgotten.

As a result we are experiencing the consequences, and there is more to come. As populations grew, so did problems. It is inevitable that populations do grow when contraception is not desired, even if available. As well as this, the advent of agricultural practices created greater safety and therefore less population loss to misadventure. One or two Shamans were unable to journey enough for all. Methods of controlling people’s behaviour appeared necessary. Rules and laws came into being with the priest/ess who administered those laws in the false name of spirit. It was essential in order to gain validity for themselves. Spirit was what people respected at that time. This was the birth of politics! Spirit became institutionalised and the connection between the worlds diminished. It is essentially an individual experience. Once objectified and standardised, spirit becomes lost among the trappings of office.

Institutions of all natures are such soulless places.The institution of science was the final blow. It became the world’s greatest religion, paying homage to human supremacy over all things natural. Based on theories that were propagated as fact, it seemed that we had found the answer to all questions. We destroyed the unknown through which all change flows. We had conquered the mystery. There were no other worlds. There were no possibilities! And the world went into a tailspin, from which we have never recovered as species stopped communicating with species. And will not recover from until we once again open the doorway to the unknown, admitting that we are teachable and so regain our humility.

The Web of Life was broken. Humans had turned away from Nature, and begun to control and take from her, rather than dance with her. Survival is enabled due to the strands of spirit that connect us, one kind to another, creating balance and ultimately abundance. Without that connection, we have been burning the furniture in the boiler of human greed. Now we are in the final death throes of a world at war. A wasteland of commerce threatens to destroy what little remains. We need to connect back up to the Web of Life and regain that symbiotic relationship with the rest of existence before it’s too late to rebuild it. Before we become an extinct species, eradicated by our own actions. The people that can take us there once more are still the Shamans. We must discover yet again what they discovered millions of years ago, that we have so carelessly discarded. And we have to do it fast!

What makes a Shaman? How does it happen? In every group of people there are those who have had experiences for which our rational world has no place. Usually, they have learned to keep these experiences quiet, to avoid ridicule. Some people seem to have many experiences, others a few. For some they come at the onset of a rite of passage: puberty, menopause, or childbirth. Others seem to have always had them. For most however, they come as a result of some unfulfilled need or hardship, often sickness or abuse.

In my practice I have noted that many women who have been sexually abused in childhood become psychically attuned, due to the damage that they have sustained to their sense of self and personal boundaries. The violation of their personal space results in a sense of powerlessness to stop their psychic space from being intercepted. This leads to a poor sense of where they begin and others end. These weakened boundaries, while damaging in interpersonal relationships, can mean that these people develop the creative ability to contact and be contacted by other realities simply because their boundaries do not keep them out.

Men can gain experience of altered realities as a result of the extreme hardships of war and the stress that causes to them. Today, more often than not, these experiences are treated as psychosis rather than what they are: an opening of the boundaries between the worlds. In the 60s, many LSD-taking experimenters found themselves in places they never dreamed possible. Some became enlightened. Others became psychotic. But they were all changed deeply. As a result, our culture changed with them, as it always does when few open up ways for many. We had forgotten the connection to other species; how to visit their realities and the ways needed to ground us back in our own reality. This was a beginning of rediscovering those doorways. But a disconnected traveller in a strange land can be more scared than sanctified, no matter the reason for the disconnection. It’s not an experience for the faint hearted. We need the rituals that provide an itinerary for the journey, as our forebears had. The tradition of the ‘wounded healer’ developed, as Shamans became aware of the conditions that made it right for travel to those strange lands of other realities. Often, even today, we find ourselves on a journey of self-discovery because we ‘had’ to, in order to solve our own problems, more than something we desperately wanted to do. The ‘reluctant Shaman’ is almost a joke in the Shamanic world. We do it because we must, not through desire. But in so doing, we heal ourselves and find that which can heal others. This is as true today as it ever was.

Everyone who is born into this modern world has their own wound. It’s not possible to live with this degree of social dysfunction without becoming wounded. Because of this, and at this stage in the cultural demise, we are probably all capable of becoming Shamans if we are willing to take the journey. However, there are more ways of avoiding that healing journey, especially today, than ever there were maps of the territory. We are a world of the walking wounded. We need some people who are willing to take their wounds and learn from them: to travel down inside and use them as a doorway that can lead back to connection with all things. We need them to help us find a way out of a construction of reality that has manifested into a prison. Not as escapism, but as a passageway to a new world. We desperately need people who are willing to become weavers to reweave the Web of connection, mending its many strands, and opening up the passageways between our non-human relations and us. Only then will we be able to follow them out of our own mess.

What Shamanism does One concept that has created the current dysfunction is the belief that humans alone are conscious beings. This permits us to abuse the rest of creation without fear of backlash. We have become myopic. It’s similar to someone standing in a room with a white elephant saying “Hey, look at the white elephant.” We say: “What white elephant? There is no such thing.” Such is our denial. We use it because we don’t want to clean up the shit on the carpet of our lives! We deny because we fear the truth, and are unwilling to accept the responsibility for what we have done. Another analogy might be a droplet of water in a flowing river that chooses to believe it is the only droplet there is. It wants to believe that the river somehow goes where it determines, when in reality it takes many droplets to decide the course of a river. The illusion does not change the reality. We have become disconnected and disconnection is leading to our demise. Shamans are those who have discovered this connection by opening their own inner, journeying eyes wide to that which is already in existence, within and around our constructed reality. This requires the boundaries of our identity to disperse, allowing us to blend with those other realities. Psychosis occurs when we cannot reconstruct the boundaries to our personal self and ‘come home’ again. So this is a journey best done by those who are willing to look intensely at their dysfunction, learning their own energetic ‘shape’ before embarkation. It must also be an ongoing process, continuing throughout the voyage. It is as much a journey of discovery of ‘self ’ as it is the discovery of ‘other’. Without that commitment, it is dangerous play. It carries a health warning.

If you are not prepared to undertake the necessary self- and soul-searching that accompanies the accumulation of skills in entering other realities, put this book down! Give it to the local library and go back to doing whatever it was you were doing before. This is not a toy, but a skill of great potential for you and the world, but like all powerful tools, it requires respect. It is just that lack of respect that has turned our other powerful tools like cars and chemicals into killers, instead of the friends they were intended to become. So connecting to our personal selves is the first step to connecting to all else. That’s what it’s all about. Joining the psychic dots to see the whole picture, not just the section that we are currently focused on. It’s akin to a climber who goes up the mountain free-form, carrying a rope. Once s/he is up there, they tie the rope to a tree in the new landscape, throw it over the cliff for the waiting would-be mountaineers to grasp onto, so that they can be assisted up the rock-face by those that have gone before. The rope connects the climber to the mountaineer, but it also connects them to the top of the mountain and the world that can be seen from there. It connects to the experience they had on the way up: their own fear of falling, their excitement at having made it. They are no longer the same person that they were on the ground. They can now go again, where they have just been, for they have found a previously hidden dimension in themselves. Once found, it can be claimed. Shamans go where others believe they cannot, for the purpose of helping others to do so. They help them change their belief by showing them how. They don’t do it for them. We can always refuse to grab hold of the rope and stay put at the base of the mountain. But the opportunity is created by the willingness of the Shaman to go before, frightening as that might be, the first time s/he scales the heights. And the more people that arrive in the new land on top of the mountain, the more others know that they can also climb. The belief becomes a mass reality, and the view of the whole changes. The culture changes! The world changes!

What about me? Well, yes. What about you? You have inside of you a wound that you gained at some time in your life that can be the source of your dysfunction, or a doorway to your entrance into the Shamanic world. It depends what you are willing to do with it. Think carefully. Feel it out, for it will change your life, and you can’t go back. If you wish to stay in the comfort of where you are, that’s fine. That’s OK. We don’t all have to be heroes and there is nothing wrong with that. But don’t do what is offered in this book if that is the case. If you are willing, though, to put your foot on the roadway to freedom, you have to keep going. You will journey alone inside you, because as others come up behind you, you will already be halfway up the next mountain. No one can really accompany anyone on a journey inside herself. But if you go, you will be the first one to see the new land. You will become a witness to the possibilities of the species, and that’s an exciting and tortuous feeling. You fear for those that have yet to scale that particular cliff. But you keep going, because your community depends on people like you to be brave enough to look and find. And you have to live with your community. You are connected to them. You do it for yourself, because you, like them, cannot thrive in the culture as it currently is. You search first within your self, then within the connection between all things. You keep going because you have seen the vision and have become fascinated by the possibilities.

What next? In the subsequent chapters, you will be guided through how to do this, but I recommend that you find a person to work with you, if you can’t do this in a group. At the very least, find a like-minded friend. Better still, a therapist that is well versed in altered states to help you understand what you will find coming up within you. Keep a journal. Write, draw, dance your experiences, and keep going. Do not take mind-altering drugs off the street or the medically prescribed variety if you can avoid it. This could be disastrous, as you cannot control how fast they take you to places, or even if you are ready to go there at all, for that matter. This can make the difference between becoming a Shaman or a patient. Is it safe? Like electricity, it is, if you use it wisely, but that’s true for everything. Will it heal you? YES: over time. Will it heal the world? YES! If we have the time, and choose to take it, it will. Humans must, and can, be reconnected to the Web of Life. But as in the beginning, it is the Shamans that must take them there. Are you willing to become one?