Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Those who engage in life and live it to its fullest, die many, many small deaths. When we live fully, learning, healing, and expressing who we truly are then the person we have been is regularly outmoded by our growth. Death is necessary if we are to move authentically in the world. Nowhere is this more important than in our shamanic practice and our choice of shamans to help us. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores our misconceptions of what makes shamanism “real.” Authenticity in shamanism requires the sacrifice of contemporary sense of entitlement. Authenticity requires sacrifice of the old mind and ideas of individuality and separation for the greater awareness of the interconnectivity of all things. Authenticity requires sacrifice of the old heart and feelings of selfish, need-based love for selfless surrender to the calling to serve the people and the planet and the times we live in.

Are your visions just illusions? Are your dreams really just fantasies? How do we know that our connection with spirit is authentic? Regardless of type of altered state, whether waking or dreaming, light or deep, induced by rhythm or sacred plants, ultimately it will have to be made intelligible through the mind. And the contemporary mind is filled to over-flowing with many things, mostly all entirely not shamanic. The contemporary, Western-trained mind is not prepared for authentic shamanic experience. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what makes shamanism of any kind “authentic” and how we cultivate the connection with the invisible world necessary for the accurate interpretation of the information found there. Authenticity in shamanism is more than a set of skills with an academic pedigree or a bloodline or being one of the chosen messengers of Aya. Authenticity in shamanism requires sacrifice of self.

“Our times call for the transformation of rallies, protests, and marches into massive, intentional sacred healing rituals, in which we ally ourselves with all humans, the compassionate spirits, the ancestors, and the spirit of the earth and stars.” This is the vision of our guest, Lenore Norrgard, shamanic healer and social alchemist. Lenore will discuss her journey from revolutionary social activist to profound social healer. She joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her experiences leading social healing rituals from the White House to inner north Portland. Lenore explains that, “Through ritual we remember our oneness with all things, even our opponents, and find our way past oppositional stances to a place where we create collective healing for all and profound social change.”

Shamanic practitioners could direct our current wave of energy for change into actual manifest changes in our everyday lives, if they would work together. To do so shamanic practitioners would have to use their specific skill set in ways that are more creative, collective, and honest about the underlying causes of the challenges and opportunities in our time. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues to explore the shaman as activist, a conversation begun with Kelley Harrell and Evelyn Rysdyk over the past weeks. As contemporary practitioners it is our role and our responsibility to take action to manifest needed changes for the good of all living things. And we must begin to do this now, in new and more courageous ways.

Literally millions of women around the world of all ages, with children, men and other loved ones, marched peacefully for an awe inspiring, record breaking, historic show of force, love, and dignity on Sunday, January 22 to cry out for change. How could we direct this wave of energy for change into actual manifest changes in our every day lives? In ancient times we would go the shaman, and through her, we would ask the spirits how. Join us this week as contemporary shamanic practitioners and teachers, Evelyn Rysdyk and Christina Pratt explore the fact that shamans have always been activists and shamanic work is the work of transformation. As contemporary practitioners it is our role and our responsibility to take action to manifest needed changes for the good of all living things. How do we do that now?

The fixed and constant idea of the invisible world ordered in upper, middle, and lower worlds is a fundamental assumption of neoshamanism. However, if the relationship between humans and helping spirits is truly a working relationship, then it is possible that humans are changing the spirits even as the spirits are help us to change ourselves? Join us this week and contemporary shamanic practitioners and teachers, Kelley Harrell and Christina Pratt explore the signs that humans are changing the dynamics of not only the physical world, but also the invisible world of energy and spirit. Are there spirit world parallels between our affects on the physical world, climate change and polluting our elemental resources, and the spirit world? And most importantly, if there are, what shall we do about it?

One of the great challenges and ongoing questions in contemporary shamanic practice is “what is initiation?” or more accurately “am I initiated?” It is messy because hundreds of years of colonization and genocide across our globe have deeply damaged, if not destroyed, traditional shamanic cultures. The current dominant religions and governments have changed how traditional practices work and don’t work. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the fact that the invisible world could care less about religions, governments, and broken traditions. It just keeps reaching into the pool of humanity, grabbing us by the scruff of our soul, and trying to initiate the shamans needed in this time. This week we explore listener questions about initiation. First and foremost, initiation is not a specific ritual, it’s not time spent, it’s not the fact that you paid for it; it is a function. If that function does not occur, initiation hasn’t happened.

The shaman’s working relationship with spirit defines the practice or the healing as “shamanic”. It is the basic working relationship of shamanism and it is built on four even more fundamental relationships. The first fundamental is your relationship with the invisible world as a whole. The second is your relationship with ordinary reality and how you understand your place in the world around you. The third fundamental is your relationship with your personal energy in larger energetic reality around you. And finally your shamanic practice is guided by your relationship with your humanity and the quality of the choices that shape your path to your destiny. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how you cultivate health, well-being and efficacy in your practice and the fundamentals that are absolutely essential if you feel you are called to take that next step from shamanic practice into shamanic healing.

The ability to face the impossible and do it anyway is at the core of what it means to be human. At their best humans have the ability to think outside the box, to take action guided by values that truly matter, to take risks, to be vulnerable, and to take action in connection with others, both physical and spiritual. In 2016 we lost so many luminaries who truly inspired us and gained people of gargantuan egos and questionable mental health who model for us our own deepest untouched Shadow and some of the worst humanity has to offer. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores learning from those who inspire us to do the impossible and become the person we never dreamed of. By knowing we are not enough and doing it anyway we become the person who is enough. When faced with things that are unjust, inhumane, and just plain wrong, doing the impossible is required if we are to be humane.

The solstice of 2016 gives us the opportunity to step off the wheel of the Old World whether we are enjoying winter or summer. A solstice fire ritual is an opportunity to work with our most ancient ancestor, Fire, to release our deep habits of “life as we have known it” and step into the space between stories. To move toward the New World we must explore our unconscious collusion with the dominant paradigm that drives the old, familiar reality through us into manifest reality. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, offers us a ritual for both hemispheres to release the Old Story. Regardless of our conscious position in the world we are all playing roles of one kind or another in the old script. And we have shamanic skills that allow us to explore our unconscious collusion with the Old Story and expose the ways that we deceive, mislead, and otherwise excuse ourselves from stepping fully into our authenticity and the unknown.

The Psychedelic Marine is a vivid portrait of both the anguish of war and the power of entheogens and shamanic ritual to help combat veterans complete the inner journey combat begins, and heal from PTSD and the deep, traumatic loss from war. Author, Alex Seymour, enlisted as a teen in the Royal Marines Commandos and served for six years, completing two tours of duty, only to re-enlist 20 years later. Alex served another tour of duty in Afghanistan where he suffered severe losses. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, speaks with Alex about the relationship between our fears, beliefs, traumas, and PTSD and the depth at which we can let go when faced with our own direct experience of The Sacred. Join us this week as we explore how ayahuasca in shamanic ceremony can offer a way to help soldiers prepare for war and help combat veterans heal from it.

Shadow work is the sacred ground of decades of men’s work and women’s work pioneered by early visionaries like Jean Houston and Robert Bly and those that followed. If all of the decades of shadow work was actually all shadow work we would not have the ugly reality of the United States’ collective shadow staring us in the face right now, waiting to be manipulated in the debacle of our 2016 presidential election. “Shadow work isn’t psychological work, its heart work,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “As soon as the ego shoved that aspect of self into the Shadow, that aspect of self was moved out of the realm of the mind into the realm of the heart.” While insight and understanding are helpful and they satisfy the mind, true shadow transformation occurs in the darkest realms of the heart. It begins with nothing less than a daring rescue mission to free the falsely accused, imprisoned and forgotten self. And that is just the beginning.

Advertising seduces through free-floating anxiety. Hatred seduces through cowardice of the heart and the fear of risking acceptance of the Other. Greed seduces through the illusion of the easier, cheaper, or more profitable path. It is your choice to be seduced or to become immune to seduction. To become unseducible is to say “yes” to the dignity of your soul and “no” to the invitation to live life beneath the nobility of your human spirit. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the first steps on the path to becoming unseducible and looks ahead to how we must walk during the collapse of the Old Story. We are better than this and we must become unseducible to prove it.

How do we find the eye in an intensifying storm of disorder, unrest, and fear? Shamanic people, traditional and contemporary, know that Trickster had a hand in making this world and it is that hand we need to grasp to pull ourselves up into the possibility inherent in this chaos. At the same time we need to look within and track the unconscious energies that want to recreate the old world as it has been. Indigenous people have been tracking this unconscious psychic virus for many centuries calling it by many names, like e’epa and wetiko. Wetiko is a true illness of the soul and is at the root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we can use our shamanic skills to become immune to the wetiko virus and learn to paradoxically ground in the chaos and co-create a New World.

Many in shamanic practice seek to deepen their relationship with their own ancestral lines and, in this, to reconnect with the shamanic roots in their own bloodline. Contemporary people seek an authentic practice in a time of broken lineages, appropriation, and deep histories of abuse, dominance and pain. Shaman teacher/healer, speaker, artist and author, Evelyn Rysdyk, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new book, The Norse Shaman: Ancient Spiritual Practices of the Northern Tradition and the vision it offers us in our own time. While we face a life-ending Ragnorok of our own creation in climate change and ecological destruction, we can choose to learn from our ancient ancestors to sacrifice what must die, to transform ourselves, and to work together with the Earth, each other and spirit to “bring forth a verdant new world”.