Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Sleep is profoundly peaceful. In this time of escalating racial violence, cyber bullying, and aggression against women, we have no frame of reference for the serene, peaceful, and ineffable nature of sleep. Half of the adults in America struggle with sleeplessness and the related health risks while children stay up all night online, unlearning their natural ability to surrender into sleep. As a whole, our culture has lost the art of sleep and with it, our access to our deep dreaming and yin restoration. Our guest, Dr. Rubin Naiman, explains “our challenge is to appreciate the physiological mechanisms of sleep without sacrificing its essential transcendent qualities. … we must learn to be comfortable with its mystery.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest this week as they explore finding, befriending, and entering again into deep intimacy with sleep and dreaming.

Appropriation is theft; it is to take something without the owner’s permission. Cultural appropriation almost always involves members of the dominant culture taking from cultures of minority groups. This includes taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts and the unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, stories, cuisine, traditional medicine, rituals, and ceremonies. Spiritual appropriation involves assuming the right to work with helping sprits, deities, and religious symbols from another culture. This week host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, explore appropriation in contemporary shamanism, why it is harmful, and unnecessary. Through education and awareness of history, respect, and the willingness to take to steps to create right relationship, contemporary practitioners can create depth and authenticity in their practices.

Everyday fear-based thinking is fertile soil for the seeds of evil to germinate and take root. Chronic fear and anxiety nourish the roots of the current cultural collusion and disrupt our natural ability to heal, transform, and simply ask for help. Yet the constancy of the earth below and the radiant energies above never fails us. They are ever-present, supplying the Greater Source energy any human can use to release fear and purge the evil grows like weeks contaminating what should be the beautiful garden of imagination and vision of the mind. Earth rituals and blessings, from the every simple to the wonderfully complex draw Beauty into the foundation of any life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores shamanic ways to revision the concepts of good and evil and to move us body and soul into the next paradigm of the right use of power, creativity, and connection.

We feel natural shame when we fall short of our own inner standards, especially when others get hurt. It is a natural response of the heart to draw us inward to the source of that pain, to renew our own inner integrity, and to assess what we must do differently to rise to that inner integrity in the future. But when we have internalized standards from friends, family, culture, and religions that do not resonate with our heart’s inner integrity and truth, we can feel a kind of toxic shame that debilitates or paralyzes us. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the “pool of true reflection” and other shamanic practices that assist us in discerning the difference between natural shame and toxic shame and how to use either to restore the inner integrity of your own heart.

Grief itself offers us great compassion. It comes and goes, tailoring itself to each heart that is experiencing loss and bereavement. It takes its time, never forcing us to do it all now, for if it did we would surely not survive. Grief has profound importance in the health of the heart. It shows us where we have made a heart connection, even when we didn’t mean to. It shows us where we gave too much and where we regret not really showing up. To grieve fully is to grieve enough for the heart to cleanse, renew, and return to the serious business of intimacy with life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores grief as a part of the fall season, as a process that touches each of our lives, and as a ritual to cleanse and restore the greater capacity of the heart to love, connect, and make meaning in our lives.

Abandonment by a caretaker breaks the heart of the child who is ignored, dismissed, or truly left behind. The desire to assuage this once-broken heart leads many adults into escapism, distraction, and unhealthy relationships. This desire can be refocused to lead us to the first step onto the spiral path. At its heart the spiral path brings us to understanding presence and our own inner embrace. This week, host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues this exploration of how we can use shamanic skills to cultivate presence in body, mind, heart and soul. When we succeed in cultivating presence where there was only fear, we emerge from the spiral path able to intimately connect and joyfully engage with friends, family, lovers and our self.

Fear of abandonment is often at the root of the poor quality decisions made by otherwise mentally healthy people. The cycle of abandonment, betrayal, and heartbreak is often learned in childhood and repeated in adulthood. For the adult with helping spirits and shamanic skills, abandonment is actually the first step on the spiral path that brings us to understanding presence in the way that only a heart, once-broken, can embrace. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to use shamanic skills to engage the spiral path, gain the allies that lie at wait in your discomfort, and discover the pleasure of pure presence at the heart of it all.

Learning to cut and clear the energetic cords that are commonly created in relationships is a fundamental skill for living well. For the most part working with cords is a skill people can learn with relative ease, even without psychic skills. But what happens when cords don’t clear so easily? Some cords remain, some regrow, and some never really clear, leaving the issues unresolved even after extensive work. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, healer Mary Mueller Shutan, as they discuss Shutan’s new book The Complete Cord Course: Working with Cords through Energy Work and Shamanic Healing. Join us as we explore the relationships through which we generate cords, basic skills for clearing them, and practices we can all do to create and maintain energetic health.

A cult is a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. The practice of this devotion can be beneficial or harmful. What makes the difference between a cult that benefits its followers and one that betrays and causes harm? Is there a different between a shamanic community and a cult? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores what are the fundamental differences between cults that facilitate well being and those that are ultimately dangerous to the mental and spiritual health of their devotees. Most importantly, what do we learn from the damage harmful cults do about what humans truly need for the well-being of their heart and mind and how can we use shamanic healing and practices to repair the soul once that damage is done?

The shamanic healing form, soul retrieval, can result in the direct and immediate return of our personal power and our sense of purpose in life. This sudden and literal change in personal power requires a sudden change in our boundaries throughout the relationships we have cultivated in life. This change is rarely welcome and often met with resistance, derision, or out right anger from the people in our lives, both personal and professional. And often the greatest resistance to this change comes from within, fueled by our fear that we will be abandoned or excommunicated by those we thought loved or respected us. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the tender territory of relations we find ourselves in after reclaiming our personal power through direct repair of the soul. This territory requires new life skills, a new attitude, and deep devotion to the spirit of your own heart.

Many questions arise as humans open their awareness to the possibility of a world larger than the here and now. “How do I know I’m not making this up?” is usually the first question. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she draws on decades of experience and the wisdom of many colleagues to address listener questions about intuition, working with spirit guides, and how we make sure that we aren’t just making this up. The deeper truth of working with spirit is that at times we do make things up, we can lie to ourselves, and then at times we are open and brilliant in our communication with the invisible world. The difference between delusion and inspiration is your willingness to learn new skills, to devote yourself to practice and discipline, and to sacrifice the self you have out grown for the person you could become.

The strength of the earth element is seen in our relationships with our selves, our intimate partners, and our community. It speaks to what it means to truly live in our bodies and not in our heads. Where the earth element is weak and uncultivated within, we are uncertain and ungrounded, creating false structures to stabilize our lives. The more we lie to ourselves about our lack of true foundation, the larger and more complex the false life we are crafting becomes for the person we are not. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week for the final episode of our five part series about engaging with the seasonal spirits. The seasons draw the unique richness from each stage of the cycle of a year on earth. The earth element speaks to the quality of our center and stability of our relationships. This week we complete the cycle of how to work with the seasons openly and skillfully to bring a simple elegance, rich blessings, and a refinement of presence to the core of our lives.

“God lives in the heart while trickster dwells in the mind,” is a teaching of the Kalahari Bushmen. When trickster is in the head it oversees the heart and leaves us feeling mixed up and frustrated. The remedy is to lift the heart through the heat of the dance so that it holds the mind, allowing the thoughts and feelings to work together in a good, clear way. This week we explore how the Bushmen investment in community life creates the context to truly lift the heart and bring the mind into alignment with right action. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she continues to explore the Way of the Bushman, clearly rendered in Bradford and Hillary Keeney new book, and how we can use these teachings today. We can learn to step away from our alienation and disconnection when we know we need the community to be “fully cooked” the community knows it needs each individual in the dance to bring in the energy needed for healing.

The teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen or San are the oldest spiritual, shamanic, and healing practices in our world. The San do not believe that "words" can change the world. They give little importance to written words or fixed oral tradition, but emphasize the way n/om (the vital force or spiritual power or shaking medicine) touches us. Bradford Keeney’s fieldwork with the Kalahari Bushmen (San) in Namibia and Botswana started over two decades ago. Today he is recognized as a Bushman healer or n/om-kxao and is able to participate in and have access to the world’s oldest living religion and healing tradition. Bradford and his wife Hillary join host, Christina Pratt, this week to share their new book Way of the Bushman as Told by the Tribal Elders: Spiritual Teachings and Practices of the Kalahari Ju’/hoansi. Join us to explore the power and inspiration in the ancient wisdom of a people who have never declared war on other people nor harmed the planet.

There are many ways to look at the symptoms that the dominant, contemporary culture diagnoses as mental illness. Illnesses of the spirit or the soul can be more clearly seen through the lens of a culture that values both. When we look at schizophrenia through the lens of a shamanic culture we can see something entirely different than a sever mental illness. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, award-winning author and environmental journalist Dick Russell as they discuss his new book, My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism. In this book Dick shares his journey with is son, Frank, beyond the Western medical model that diagnosed Frank as schizophrenic and into the realms of shamanism. Dick shares their experience together forging a healing relationship with the renowned West African shaman, Malidoma Patrice Somé.