Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Humans are messy. And love is one of the messiest bits of human life. So what do we really mean when we strive to rise to shamanic principles for living, like loving all life or mediating our power through the heart? What does love mean from the fundamental perspective of Oneness, not separation? How do we need to understand love to become truly new people crafting a new world story? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the ways shamanic practice can change our understanding of love from one of pop song, emotional drama or the intellectual labeling of distinct kinds into the current of life itself. True shamanic practice requires a level of intimacy in action that contemporary people find offensive to their sense of individuality and ego. Yet climbing over that offense and stepping into the fear it is hiding is necessary if we are ever to allow our soul to truly love.

Rebuilding a new life from the rubble of your old one is at once an exciting and a scary prospect. Whether you tore your life apart on purpose or your life self-destructed for you, you are still faced with the same challenge: How to create a new life of greater alignment, abundance, physical health, and soul-nourishing meaning? Nothing will send you down the rabbit hole of popular culture’s myths about living the life you want than googling “how do I live my soul’s purpose?” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she looks at the most common myths about what it takes to create a life that is aligned with your soul’s calling and shares the wisdom gained in two and a half decades assisting people in using their shamanic skills to be clever and courageous in creating a life of meaning a purpose that is better then they imagined.

There are many different types of spiritual awakenings, from kundalini rising to shamanic initiations and everything in between. This often misunderstood range of human experience is explored beautifully and thoroughly by spiritual healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, in her new book The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and The Conditioned Layers of Reality from Findhorn Press. This guide is unique in helping the reader to understand what experience they are in the middle of and how to shape the experience into a meaningful transformation. Drawing from her extensive training in multiple healing forms, Mary joins host, Christina Pratt, to share the different layers of going to sleep, the many ways we wake up, and how to free your awakening process to become the direct revelatory path it is meant to be.

How do you rise up when you have lost more than you thought you had to lose? How do you avoid the contemporary pitfalls of falling into a deeper pit of depression, grasping for anything to make it look better than it is, or recreating a shiny new version of the same life you had before? We have to find an ignored inner self who stands between the Lost One who doesn’t know how to go forward and the Blissed One who just wants to stay in the flow. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to go forward and cultivate a truly new life from the rubble of our old one. By co-creating with spirit through our shamanic skills we can use the dynamics of physical life to ground our visions in reality and the patterns of our emotional life to expose false beliefs. Then the mind can balance the discipline and imagination necessary to rise up anew.

Gender is a charged issue in the contemporary world and will continue to be as long as we think we understand gender when we don’t and believe that others “should” be like us when they are in reality unique. For many bringing shamanic skills to bear on the issue only confuses things. It is important to remember that from an understanding of reality based on Oneness like the understanding shamanism offers, gender is a non-issue. Gender variance is expected and accepted in ancient shamanic cultures without pause. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we can use shamanic skills to work with the four wisdoms to understand and align our own gender expression with our deepest truth and find the deep damage that is always at the root of our intolerance.

Personal transformation efforts often fail because all that is really needed is change. And often our personal efforts to change fail because what is required is actually to transform. What is the difference between change and transformation? And more importantly how can you accurately discern what you need to do to bring balance and health to the different aspects of your life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores techniques for using shamanic skills to clarify the changes or transformations we desire and a viable path forward to manifesting them. The key to both to accepting your reality as it actually is, trusting your power to change, and risking the Unknown to transform.

Not all who die leave the realm of the living easily and these souls need help. From the beginning of people the shaman has served this role, the “psychopomp,” and transported the souls of the dead home, assuring their safe and complete journey through the death process. Each traditional culture defines the psychopomp’s work in its own way, influenced by that culture’s beliefs about the soul, death, and the process of dying. However shamanic people hold the universal belief that the souls of the dead need to move on to the Land of the Dead or they become a source of stress, physical illness, and mental distress for the living. As our world continues to amplify the conditions that cause a soul to need help crossing—violent death, unlived lives, despair, addiction, and spiritual ignorance—those who are able to escort the soul are needed even more. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and her guest, David Kowalewski, Ph.D., psychopomp, university professor, shamanic healer, speaker and author.

How can we use our shamanic skills to respond to suicide? From a shamanic perspective there is tending needed for the soul of the dead and healing needed for the community left behind. No matter how alone you feel there will always community left behind. How do we clean up the energetic mess than is so often left behind by violent death? Perhaps even more important, how can you use shamanic skills to respond to your own suicidal thoughts and impulses? This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the shamanic perspective that not all suicides are the same. Some, for example, are the ultimate refusal to participate in the world as it is, while others are the choice to die on one’s own terms at the end of a life well lived. Many begin with soul loss and they all end with the loss of a unique genius and its gifts from the world.

There are times that we simply need to fall apart. …not having a bad day, call in sick, fall apart, but losing more than you thought you had to lose falling apart. There are these moments when we realize that the construct of life we have created to survive and to thrive is in and of itself the problem. Sometimes life will conspire with us and take, piece by devastating piece, everything from us. But some have survived such trauma in life and keep it together like a vice because they have no one to fall back. They cannot let it go, even when they need to to get at what they want the most. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we can use shamanic skills and the wisdom of the Trickster to crack open the already wounded heart and transform, even when we are sure that is the transformation that will kill us.

Shamanic possession is not actually possession at all, but the intentional embodiment of spirit help with whom the shaman has already developed a working relationship. Unlike possession, or the unintentional intrusion of some type of foreign spirit into a person’s energy body, which is considered an energetic illness or unhealthy state in shamanism, embodiment is an effective, working, altered state the shaman is able to begin and end at will. To truly understand shamanic practice we must recognize the equal importance of journeying and embodiment without carrying forward the bias of decades of academic research into shamanism. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores embodiment from the n|om of the African Ju|’hoansi to vitu of Finnish women to the embodiment dances of the helping spirits of shamanic peoples around the world. Simply put, there are gifts embodiment offers us as contemporary practitioners that our journey states cannot. And there is joy and the sacred to be found the intimacy of embodiment.

Summer is the season of joy, enthusiasm, purpose, and radiance. Ancient peoples around the world have used the Summer Solstice Fire to focus this innate energy in the summer season into clarifying the actions necessary to fully manifest their soul’s calling. This work begins in gratitude and celebration of life itself. For those who were prepared and chose to act skillfully, last winter solstice provided a unique opportunity for sudden realignment with your path. This week we will revisit this arc and explore how to work skillfully with the Summer Solstice, which is a fire of heart and action, to more fully manifest your calling and its power in your life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, will add part five to the four part series in the archives on using shamanic skills to find your calling and—more importantly—to live it.

Do you find yourself in mid-summer grumpy about the weather, bored, and facing a life empty of joy, purpose, and the radiance of your true calling? If so, the skillful person looks to the heart. Imbalance in the heart is indemic in our contemporary world that rewards arrogance and disdains heartfelt devotion. Through shamanic skills we can engage with the spirit of summer to determine the path necessary for balance and wholeness in the heart. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week for part four 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. Summer is the season of joy, enthusiasm, and creativity. This week we explore working with the season openly and skillfully to bring a simple elegance, rich blessings, and a refinement of presence to the core of our lives.

Where people gather in community there is Shadow, even in spiritual communities. Where there is unacknowledged Shadow there is sex, often good and exciting, and usually inappropriate. At its worst this Shadow driven sex moves hand in hand with great abuse of trust and misuse of power and it tears spiritual communities apart. Author Marsha Scarbrough shares her passionate, sexual, painful journey in her new book Honey in the River: Shadow, Sex and West African Spirituality. Marsha explores this all too common experience with honesty, vulnerability, and maturity so that we can get past our overly simplified victim/perpetrator stance and see the movement of spirit, shadow, love, and the Trickster in the mix. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest Marsha Scarbrough this week as they discuss shadow, sex and the Trickster and their movement in our lives.

In shamanic cultures around the world it is the Trickster who made the world as we actually find it; not a perfect Eden, but complex, messy, beautiful, and painful. It is the crazy logic of the Trickster, life saving and sacrifice demanding, that can help us to navigate where our blindness, deafness or simple stubborn refusal to do what we know we need to do gets in trouble. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this replay of a favorite show on the Trickster. Author Lewis Hyde writes, “The Trickster cannot be trusted. It is a contact that puts us slightly at risk; we open ourselves to disruption whenever we call on him.” But it is that opening that allows miracles, the impossible, surprise and the reversal of fortunes. The Trickster reveals the short cuts that allow us to get to the full, loving expression of our soul’s true purpose in spite of ourselves.

What are the ethics for receiving shamanic healing? Much is written about ethics for practitioners, but is it really ethical to drop all the issues of your life in the lap of any healer and ask them to heal you in one session? Is it ethical to get angry about a session when the healing offered doesn’t play into the story you carry about your woundedness? Is it ever ethical to ask for healing, which is always an effort of energy expended, without offering anything in exchange for the healing energy spent on you? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the very prickly issue of the ethics for receiving shamanic healing. This week we slash expectations for magical cures and effortless life changes in the hopes of revealing how contemporary people can come to an ancient healing form prepared, informed, and ready to do what is needed to follow up responsibly.