Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Living with chronic illness is a challenge, a challenge more and more people are being required to navigate daily in an already busy life. How can we use our shamanic practice most effectively and efficiently to respond to chronic illness, whether our own, a client’s, or with a loved one? How do we cultivate good energy hygiene or even go for a walk daily when chronic pain is robbing us of the energy we do have? What is reasonable to expect or responsible to promise from shamanic healing as a resource for the chronically ill? This week author, teacher, and shaman, Kelley Harrell, joins host, Christina Pratt, to explore how we can apply shamanic practice to address chronic illness and how to avoid the fantasy, illusion—no matter how well meaning, and the false claims that arise from our pain and fear of the Unknown.

A mythical beast is a beast that we believe never existed in physical form, like dragons, the basilisk, and the phoenix in the Harry Potter novels. But never is a long time. If they never existed, then why do similar mythical beasts appear in different stories the mythology of peoples who never spoke or met? Whether you believe they were real or are imaginary, mythical beasts are very special helping spirits to work with in shamanic altered states. “You need to pay attention,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “There is a quality of being not of this world when we engage the mythical beasts. But we work with them because they remind us that our souls are not limited to this world either. Mostly we engage the mythical beasts to grow up and stop acting like our silly, violent, consumerist culture has anything to do with the real reality and why we are here.

Elemental Spirits are often ignored as we reach for helping spirits in the vast range of land spirits, from the smallest garden sprite to the great mountain spirits and all the many manifestations between. And yet the spirits of the elements are constant teachers of balance and flow, the two fundamental energetic principles for physical health and mental well-being. Join us this week as geomancer, Daniel Abney, joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to explore our health and its relationship with the plant and elemental spirits. In our addictive rush to the altered states offered by the plants like ayahuasca, San Pedro, and peyote, we miss the powerful medicinal force of plants as helping spirits and the exceptionally direct and wise restorative force of the elemental spirits.

“Nature communicates through energy, not words. It communicates with us through signs, symbols, omens, and feelings,” explains our guest Ana Larramendi of thehollowbone.com. Ana joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to share her wisdom and experience in communicating with the vast range of spirits of the land, from the smallest garden sprite to the great apu spirits of the volcanic mountains of the ring of fire. Ana cautions that our human tendency to approach all experience from an anthropocentric perspective is our greatest hurdle in communicating with our most abundant and ever present helping spirits. We need to slow down, be silent, visit regularly, and always engage with gratitude and respect. When we help the spirits of the environment around us they are able to help us live more vital, vibrant, and interconnected lives.

Deities have a long history of engaging as helping spirits with people in shamanic altered states. What does it mean when a deity enters your journey scape? How do we navigate cultivating right relationship with a being who has a living tradition and long history with humans, expects certain protocol we may not know or understand, and has their own agency? And how do we know the difference between big, intense energies like deities and archetypes and why should we bother with them? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest Langston Kahn of Occupy-Your-Heart.com, as they discuss how to navigate right relationship with deities and archetypes, the distinction, the cautions, and ultimately, the gifts that they offer to those who are willing to step out of the safe constructs of the mind and enter the deep waters and intense currents of a nonordinary life.

Why would I want a working relationship with my ancestors when I can’t stand my own relations? Fair question when so much addiction, depression, social pressure, and sexual dysfunction gets handed down generation to generation. What we fail to understand is that our break with our Ancestral Helping Spirits is in large part why we experience such illness and abuse of power in our family lines. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we cultivate a strong working relationship with true ancestral helping spirits, avoid ghosts, use our relationship with our ancestors to mend our feelings of alienation, isolation, and loneliness. As we learn from those who have gone before us we can properly reach to the descendants to learn to ask for more from life and more from our selves.

Direct communication with our helping spirits is one of the greatest gifts in the reintroduction of shamanism into contemporary life. Yet in this age of social media and everyday twitter fights, people have all but lost the art of honorable, sincere, and heart-felt communication. Your helping spirits can’t hear your whining, don’t care how many people are following you, and see dishonor in the entitlement you take for granted. How do we cultivate a strong working relationship with our helping spirits when we don’t even know how to communicate with each other without our Smart phones. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the simplicity of working with our helping spirits, ways to cultivate a strong working relationship with spirit in everyday, “normal” life, and how learning to discern with your helping spirits can restore your trust in the path of your heart.

Contemporary shamanic practice looks different depending on the tradition, cosmology, or beliefs that guide your practice. The variations in authentic shamanic practice are a rich and complex field of good work being done today. At the same time there is a line for most practitioners when their early experimentation and uncertain dabbling became a way of living that they could not back out of. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she responds to multiple questions from listeners about what contemporary shamanic practice can look like. How do we hold space at work or in our unwieldy extended families? How do we practice without community? How do we practice in a community that doesn’t? How do we maintain balance sufficient to practice when contemporary life seems determined to distract, deny, and disillusion? How do we deepen our practice with all the demands on our time to become the practitioners needed by our time?

We need initiation into adulthood desperately, as individuals and as a culture. At this time the lack of initiation is at the root of much of what ails people on this planet, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Initiation is a bit of a mystery for children raised on tales of knights who slay the Dragon and are given the princess as a prize, a tale that further perpetuates the patterns of abuse of power in the Old Story that so deeply characterize any male-dominated, mentally-fixated culture. Yet, shamanic cultures, still alive today, share a different story of our path to power that is deeply rooted in the initiatory process. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores a deeper understanding of the function of initiation into adulthood and how returning to this practice creates a new foundation for the health and well-being of the young, the old and the elders.

Initiation is not graduation. Initiation is not the formal certification of the successful completion of a course of shamanic training, nor is it the ritual or ceremony that celebrates that completion publically. Initiation is a function; it is the enduring transformation of the collective energy of a person into a state of being that did not previously exist. Thus one can experience an initiation process without being initiated. One can experience change and transform without being initiated. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the functional transformation at the heart of initiation. When we dispel our misinformation, myths, and wishful thinking we will be better able to co-create the rituals needed to heal our hearts, broken and betrayed by the culture that did not initiate us, and then begin anew to initiate our young into the power and responsibility of true spiritual adulthood.

Right relationship with the elements allows their energy to flow into our lives, creating well-being by balancing our own excesses and deficiencies. Learning to work effectively with the elements through shrines, songs, ritual, and ceremony allows these essential energies to nourish the essence of our own souls. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores what it means to enter into right relationship with the elements, creative ways cultivate relationship that fit into our contemporary lives, and how to know when you need an elemental ritual to deal with what life has given you. Through right relationship with the elements we gain courage, presence, the ability to change as life demands without losing our true essence, and the ability to release and begin a new, no matter how improbable change seems.

The outer world reflects our inner world. Pollution reflects the ways we pollute our bodies, bloody conflicts reflect our inner struggle in immature, self-centered times, and our waste of the earth’s resources reflects the many ways we waste the energy and essence of our lives in feeling lost and addicted. Yet the answers for who we are and how to live well are right here, waiting for us to learn again to pay attention. The Earth is the great teacher of our True Nature with its flowing harmony of ecosystems and the wild beauty of nature. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the is great power in our True Nature and the fundamental healing in letting go of all that no longer resonates with it. When we allow our True Nature to flow through our lives and out through our words and actions, we come into a natural alignment with our essential selves. Living in that alignment we focus inward to energize our deepest core purpose and outward to work in a way that is good for all living things.

It is particularly important today —given the vast changes moving in the earth and across environments— that we learn again to work with the Spirits of the Land. We have passed the possibility of going back and must now go forward. Will we go forward with consciousness and skill or continue consuming, deaf, dumb, and blind to our affect on the world around us? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, revisits “Working with the Spirits of the Land” in the context of learning about the structures and spirits and energies that are part of the vast practice of working with land. Whether you are a practitioner or an everyday human, your flourishing is tied to the flourishing of the land. To flourish in the coming changes we must live and work with the Spirits of the Land today.

What can we do to address climate change and other big challenges to the balance of life on earth? We can do a lot when we remember that our shamanic skills allow us to engage effectively in issues that feel overwhelming and out of our reach. Whether our shamanic skills are just budding and basic or advanced and in full bloom, we can bring our shamanic skills to bear on a larger scale to address the needs right now on earth. This week, shaman and earth healer, Ana Larramendi, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her work with the earth in clearing, restoration, and deep facilitation of a return to right relationship with the earth. Ana’s Earth Tenders Apprenticeship is unparalleled in the training it offers practitioners in developing awareness and skills that are applicable to a broad range of situations requiring earth-healing interventions in our modern times.

Hatred is a luxury we do not have. It costs too much, eventually destroying all that truly matters and leaving the soul lost as collateral damage. What can we do to reverse the rising tide of hatred in the United States? Using our shamanic skills we can draw on our helping spirits to support us in small, everyday acts to shift the story playing out around us. For the more experienced practitioner we can engage in large acts of ritual, healing, and ceremony that reach the very source of the hatred and focus the power of transformation there. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the small, subversive daily acts that allow each of us to engage hatred where we meet it and the larger shamanic acts needed to disengage today’s hatred from the historic roots that nourish it. Large and small, it is work we must all engage in or we have learned nothing from history. Hatred ultimately costs us our souls.