Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Feeling fear—whether real or imagined— initiates a variety of chemical responses in the body that support the needed physical response, either fight, flight, freeze, or focus. It is a natural response to specific or immediate danger to our physical well-being. But why do we feel paralyzing fear when there is no imminent danger? More importantly how do we work with fear, whether brought on by specific danger, a perceived psychological threat, or flashing back out of time in a PTSD induced response to life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the terrain of contemporary fears and how we can use our shamanic skills to address fear, to discern what the true source of a fear is, and to transform the patterns of fear that allow illusions to run our lives.

This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares case studies of shamanic healing with people who found a path to health and freedom by engaging their four wisdom bodies. Shamanic skills allow us to develop and to work in all four wisdom bodies: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body simultaneously. When one wisdom body is out of balance, deficient, or dominant it can throw our whole experience of life out of alignment with our power and greater truth. Join us as we explore what it feels like to trap your processes in the dominance of one wisdom body, the distortion that creates, and how real people have used their shamanic skills to open to new wisdom and cut a direct path to health and well-being.

The Mental Wisdom Body is largely locked away in our inability to distinguish our self from our mind. We are more than our mind and until we can tap the “more” we cannot refine our mental wisdom body. Our guide to access the wisdom of the mental body is the Seer, or Visionary Self, who teaches us how to get out of our own way and allow the innate expression of our unique genius to rise to our awareness and unfold. The wisdom of the mental body teaches us the right use of the past, the discipline of non-judgment and the practice of self-reflection without blame or shame. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to refine the mental wisdom body and train our brains to release the chokehold it has on our hearts and our deepest, most passionate vision for why we are here.

You have a vision that you love and the wisdom to live it, but where does the power come from to make it real? The power comes from the Teacher Self’s ability to see through his/her own stories to awaken the vast, complex, and intricately interconnected wisdom of Spiritual Body. The strong heart of the Teacher gives us access to our power to step into our own self-mastery and sovereignty. And the Trickster trips up our mind, slips us a heart mickey, and wakes us up on the real road to our authenticity and purpose. When we live far from our heart’s true longing the voice of our spiritual wisdom body becomes hard to hear. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we awaken the spiritual wisdom body and engage it in creating the world our hearts know is possible.

The Emotional Wisdom Body is a world unto itself. It is every bit is vast, complex, and intricately interconnected as the mental wisdom body but functioning on an entirely different logic. Our guides in engaging this logic are Crazy Woman and the Warrior Self. The true code of the Warrior Self is to feel your feelings, honestly and courageously, to refuse the seduction to deny emotions or indulge them, and to learn to discern what is really going on. While the true code of Crazy Woman is to recognize when we are in a moment of crazy logic and to follow its path without out needing to know, getting an explanation, or securing a guarantee. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to access the emotional wisdom body and express the courage of the heart.

When we live far from our true nature the voice of our physical wisdom body becomes hard to hear. The guidance that could bring us to robust well-being gets replaced by the long suffering voice of the Martyr, who can always work one more hour, and the seduction of the Addict, who convinces us that there is a good reason to do it one more time, again. With shamanic skills and the guidance of the Healer and Death we can find our passion, to say no to our old stories, and recover the courage to love. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to access the physical wisdom body and use its guidance to carve a path back to our true nature and the vital well-being that is our body’s deepest knowing.

Shamanic skills allow us to engage with the world around us, each other, and ourselves in a nonordinary way that integrates intelligence and intimacy, vision and practicality. Shamanic skills are unique in that to use them is to engage all of our four wisdom bodies: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body simultaneously. There are many diverse and powerful modalities to practice and most don’t allow you access to all four wisdom bodies, except at the highest levels of mastery. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores not only how we can access all the wisdom available to us, but why it is so important to see ourselves, our world, and our shamanism through something more than our mind’s eye. As one of our greatest minds said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”

Whose life do you want to be living? And how do you live the life that is an expression of your unique genius? To have the energy to live authentically we need to cultivate a vital and robust energy body. To do that we need to attend to both the energy that we are, the energy bucket, and the energy we bring into the bucket. Qi gong, time in nature, and naps can fill the bucket, while a day that requires you ignore your body, work beyond your ability to think, and drink caffeine to survive the day usually empties the bucket. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how cultivate the different dynamics of good energy body hygiene, part four of our series. Shamanic skills and awareness can help us to focus our energy on practices that are efficient and effective in cultivating good energy body hygiene.

Conserving and protecting your energy resources are essential to live well. Healthy energetic boundaries are necessary to respond flexibly to what the day offers while staying focused on your vision in the face of multiple distractions. When you choose to ignore your boundaries or to shield and over-fortify, you lose or waste energy throughout the day and experience miscommunication and dissatisfaction in relationships. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we create healthy boundaries, part three of our energy body hygiene series. Shamanic peoples understand the energetics of relationship with the physical and the invisible worlds. Healthy boundaries with both worlds allow focus and resources to flow into you, your relationships and your path to your destiny.

Grounding is a choice. It isn’t something you heal, its something you do. Good healthy, daily grounding can change the patterns of both stagnant, depressed energies as well as scattered, fragmented energies. To ground is to show up and be present in your body, which is the first step to everything else that really matters. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how to ground, part two of our energy body hygiene series. Energy body hygiene is the foundation of living well in today’s world. Without solid grounding not matter where we are, what is going on, or what altered state we are in, we are unable to discern the truth, which is a dangerous place to find yourself in your shamanic work.

To live well in your human body you must think of it as an energy body and a physical body. The world looks physical and solid, but in reality it’s all energy and it’s all connected and so are you. Whether you are engaged in religion, spirituality, shamanism or just plain living life you are still an energy being living in an energy world. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores energy body hygiene and the interface with physical life that makes up the basics of living well. Energy body hygiene is the foundation of the ability to accurately discern multiple energies in a rigorous shamanic practice, to clarify reasons you may feel like an empath when you are not, and to cultivate the energy that you need to live your true, authentic life.

We need shamanism now for the same reason we needed it in the beginning. The “first shaman” came in many forms to many different peoples around the world, but they all came for the same reason: to teach us to be better humans. The humans couldn’t figure out how to live here in a good way with the environment and they couldn’t figure out how to live together without killing each other. Sounds pretty much like humans today. “This is why shamanism matters today,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “because it answers the question how? It gives us ways to transform.” With all of the great people doing really good work today we have to remember that nothing will change until we all become different people. Join us this week as we explore how we can change ourselves to become the change needed in the world now.

We are spirit incarnate. The first decision that we make in life, when we are very smart and still part of the Oneness, is to take a body. This body exists in an illusion of space and time, but a convincing illusion that we call life. We experience space and time and fear and love and we make up stories. Some of these stories become masks that we wear; the good mother, the best husband, the start-up billionaire, the disinterested in your world ‘cuz I already know everything ayahuasca raver, the person you believe you should be, or the person you are afraid that you are. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to engage more deeply in our shamanic practice to shed these masks that we hide behind, step up to the calling of our true self, and respond as the medicine needed for the ills of our time.

“We all suffer. We are all sacred. We are all bound together. We are all fallible. We are all capable of redemption.” And we are all capable of making peace. In his excellent new book, Talking Stick: Peacemaking as a Spiritual Path, author, educator, and peacemaker, Stephan Beyer gives us the guidance and practices necessary to use our shamanic skills to embody peace. Join us this week as Stephan and host, Christina Pratt, explore how our own hierarchical and transactional thinking propagates non-peace in our relationships day by day. Stephan explains that to become peacemakers, “We must learn to have a listening heart; we must learn to have an undefended heart; we must disarm ourselves. And then we can begin to disarm others.”

In this time of profound ignorance justified as American politics, escalating racial violence, homicidal cyber bullying, and ever-present aggression against women, it is easy to forget that ritual matters. It is easy to forget, in the face of humanity’s collective madness, that love matters and that ritual can bring our love to bear on the world. “Humans carry the triple fires of passion, truth, and clarity,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “They are all required in equal parts to muster the fierce love necessary to be the medicine for the people and for our time.” We go to the fire in ritual to renew our own fires, to release the things we carry that block our flames, and to let go of the things we do that put our fires out. Join us this week as we explore the approach and embrace of our winter solstice fire in ritual.