Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

The wisdom in the Wild Feminine, by our guest and author Tami Kent, is the medicine we need to reclaim and embody the power and pleasure that is the birthright of every woman. Given that three out of four women in America have experienced some form of sexual trauma, it is long overdue time for women to activate the energy of their bodies, reclaim the wild at the core, and understand that the creative essence within your own actual center is the key for giving life to your dreams. Tami is a women’s health physical therapist and she joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to explain how attending to the physical and energetic alignment in the pelvic bowl, a woman can clarify and expand her creative potential so that this vibrant energy flows more freely in her body and all areas of her life. Tami is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenges of their world. Tami’s work offers work offers a complimentary path for deep clearing and reclamation following soul retrieval and other healing practices.

What can happen now? We can step into our power to create a Global Shift out of our current Global Crisis. To do this we must engage in conscious practices to find our real power in our integrity and open heart. What needs to happen is a shift of ethos and practice to one that is earth-honoring both locally and globally. Join host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, C. Michael Smith, PhD, (aka Mikkal) author of Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue as they discus a path forward. Mikkal shares how we can use shamanic skills and processes to truly empower ourselves to realize the potential in our current times and risk manifesting a future better than we imagined. Mikkal is director of Crows Nest International, Centers for shamanic Studies in USA, France, Belgium, and South Africa. He is a Jungian scholar, clinical psychologist, and international shamanic teacher. He is also trained in both North and South American shamanisms, undergoing a 14-year initiation and apprenticeship with Cherokee medicine woman Ai Gvhdi Way and an 8-year initiation with Iachak don Alverto Taxo. This is Part 2 of a series exploring how we transform a global crisis into a global shift.

What is our part in the global crisis we find ourselves sharing in September of 2012? What is the nature of the challenge ahead of us? How can we use our shamanic skills and mature earth-honoring consciousness to actualize the shift All Life is asking of us? Join host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, C. Michael Smith, PhD, (aka Mikkal) author of Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue as they discus what the great and compassionate thinkers of our time are saying. In their own way each confirms the need for a heart-open and earth-honoring shift in the way we all live all parts of our lives. Mikkal is director of Crows Nest International, Centers for shamanic Studies in USA, France, Belgium, and South Africa. He is a Jungian scholar, clinical psychologist, and international shamanic teacher. He is also trained in both North and South American shamanisms, undergoing a 14-year initiation and apprenticeship with Cherokee medicine woman Ai Gvhdi Way and an 8-year initiation with Iachak don Alverto Taxo. This is Part 1 of a two-part series exploring how we transform a global crisis into a global shift.

The power of dance goes largely untapped in the contemporary world. When we dance we can access the power to reconcile inner conflict, to transform toxic stress into energy, and reshape the story that defines our path in the world. So why don’t we dance? Or why don’t we dance with the focus and intention required to enter sacred space and embody the Spirit of Dance? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores trance dance, ecstatic dance, and the ways we enter sacred space, the ways we try to, and why in some settings it just doesn’t come together. The movement itself is prayer. You don’t need to be a dancer or even enjoy dancing to access the power dance. You just need to get up in whatever way you can and move. Dance and rhythm are the means by which people across time and place have accessed shamanic alternate states and the healing relationship with spirit that awaits us there. The possibilities to create the personal healing needed for the global change ahead await us in movement. And together in movement, the possibilities to create the global change needed to thrive exist in the power of dance.

Where are you in your own Sacred Story? Your story can weave and hold you together or it can unravel your bearings in life and tear you from your true self. Stories have power; they can heal and they can harm. Stories, when be wielded with mastery by the Storyteller, can shape the hearts and souls of a people. “Shamans are and always have been the storytellers, the wisdom keepers,” explains our guest, Jeffery Stockton, winner of the prestigious international 2012 Storytelling World award. “It is essential to have stories in the medicine bag and to have relationships with them—the living experiences of stories of power.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and she explores the power of stories to illuminate our deepest sense of self and to shape the narrative of our healing and transformation. Jeff is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenges of their world. In our world we are “the story species,” as Jeff says “All species have memory and insight and instinct and many have complex language, but as far as we know, we are the storytellers.

If we live in our comfort zone the “to do” list gets done, all the bills get paid on time, and you never have your driver’s license suspended because the speeding ticket you got from the traffic robot was sent to your old address so you never knew. And if we live in our comfort zone we are living where we are already dead. “Without discomfort there is no warriorship and without warriorship there is no life,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “Life happens at the interface of our comfort and discomfort zones. It is that daily step into discomfort that takes us into where we are becoming, awakening, and aligning our life with a clearer consciousness of who self.” And into where we often make a mess because we are learning. The messiness of life is a great gift. It helps us to know where Life as the Teacher is schooling us, how to craft a powerful question for our journeys, and precisely how our heart spirit is calling us into deeper alignment with our True Self. Join us this week as we explore the many ways to use the mess you have made of your life and your shamanic skills to divine a clear and effective path forward for whole-hearted living and joyous well-being.

Assumptions blind us to the heart of the matter before us. The most common reason people cycle around and around working ineffectively on the same issue is their assumptions. The way we view the world creates assumptions, which influence the way we conceptualize our issues and keep us from diagnosing accurately. Without an accurate diagnosis our remedy will be ineffective, whether medical, spiritual or psycho-emotional. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores common contemporary assumptions that disempower our practices before we even start. The remedy? Cultivating a cross-cultural shamanic world-view can diminish our assumptions by simply drawing us back to the real energies that lie under the surface of what is apparent. From this place of deeper truth we can see what lies at the heart of the matter and apply our efforts there. If we are going to work to create change in our lives and our world, let’s be sure we are bringing actual remedies to places that truly need change.

For those of you interested in shamanism you can experience a shaman finding her shaman legs, reshaping the workings of her mind, and awakening her courageous heart in the re-release of Gift of the Dreamtime. For the rest of you this is a story of healing. It is an inspiration for those who have suffered great trauma, like incest, chronic violence, or the soul loss induced by the daily, normal horrors of war, and refuse to be hobbled or accept anything less than the life you came here to live. Join us this week as author and neoshaman, Kelley Harrell shares her experiences and insights with host, Christina Pratt. Kelley has served her local community in North Carolina and an international client base since 2000 through Soul Intent Arts. In her own words, “My path of shamanism is original and claims no culture other than the one of my creation. I do not seek to teach a branded path of shamanism, but to present the map for you to create your own. Through private sessions, classes, and Distance Mystery School, I'm here to create a new tribe of support for children and adults whose lives are blessed with an uncontainable inner knowing. This is The Tribe of the Modern Mystic.”

What do we do when things stop flourishing? What do we do when houses don’t sell, businesses fail, and illness keeps cycling through the family? Where do we go when we sense that the very matrix of the energy that supports life is somehow torn or set asunder? This week guest, David Franklin Farkas, joins host, Christina Pratt to explore practical ways to clear and restore the energies in our physical world so that we are able to maintain good communication and reciprocity with the spirits of the land, the elementals, and the Earth herself. Years ago a moment of prayerful asking how to repair a profound distortion in our energy world David was shown the energetic geometry of the etheric matrix and instructed in how to repair it. Over the past two and a half decades David has developed this proprietary method he calls Quantum Grid Restructuring, which normalizes distortion in the energetic geometry of a buildings and space by clearing the human dramas, the emotional history of human events, and other traumas we inflict on the world around us. These practices support the reconciliation with underground water, ley lines and vortexes as well as offering a context for rescuing ghosts and banishing meaner entities. Join us this week as we explore how to effectively clean up the mess we have made and restore right relationship with our world.

Shamanism is the practice of direct communication with the Divine lifeforce present in all things. The purpose of this communication is to cultivate and maintain right relationship with all living things, human and non-human, seen and unseen, so that life flourishes. “To aim for flourishing gives humans a way cultivate a good life, without the errors of greed, excess, and selfishness,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “which are each dead end streets. All human life as we know it exists purely and only because Nature exists. And Nature exists purely and only because the Earth exists.” Shamanic practices, geomancy, and feng shui each give humans practical ways to maintain good communication and reciprocity with the spirits of the land, the elementals, and the Earth herself. Anyone can begin to flourish from where ever they are with these practices. Flourishing begins by asking permission to do what we have come here to do. It is cultivated each day that we say “thank you” for all that comes into our lives—the food, air, water, and other gifts and resources that get us through the day. And finally to say, “I am sorry”, for all the ways my ancestors and I have trespassed in our arrogance and ignorance that all life is Divine and interdependent, especially our own.

Dr. Seth Farber is a writer, social critic, dissident psychologist, visionary, and activist on many fronts. He joins us this week to discuss his new book, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride, available now from Inner Traditions. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, Dr. Farber, as they explore the possibility that madness is a precious and dangerous gift. In his work Dr. Farber has seen repeatedly that many of those diagnosed as schizophrenic, bipolar, and other forms of “madness” are not ill but experiencing a spiritual awakening. He believes that that it is impossible for our society to awaken as long as the mad are suppressed because they are our catalysts for social change. At the same time those labeled “mad” must embrace their spiritual gifts and reclaim their role as cultural prophets to help the coming global spiritual transition. This week we discuss Dr. Farber’s passionate work, his new book, and the rise of Mad Pride and the mental patients’ liberation movement. He is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenges of their world.

The summer solstice is a time of fullness, expression, and manifestation in the physical world. And yet, in the frenzy of summer vacations, weekend get-aways, summer lovers, and the drug-infused blaze of Burning Man we forget entirely why we are here. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and remember. It is our habit as contemporary people to go toward excess and indulgence: to spend too much, out reach our grasp, and start off where we have not yet begun. This is the misunderstanding of the great, warm wealth of summer, the waste of our true yang resources. We must learn to invest well in the seeds of our authentic true nature offered up by our Dreamer Manifestor and planted in the earth ritual at the spring equinox. Summer is the time of the Heart, of full sun, and of the god/goddess united at the Solstice. Before you light the traditional Solstice fire to dance, rejoice, and celebrate life with your community, consider the plants of purpose you are tending. What do you love enough to bring to life? It is time to nourish your destiny with the deep songs, longings, and visions of your heart and your own inner reflection of Divine Unity.

Loneliness and isolation have risen sharply in America over the past couple of decades, a trend exacerbated by the time and energy we spend cultivating our vast, but shallow social networks through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Loneliness is an internal psychological state that is not fundamentally changed by external conditions. “When loneliness rises to the surface of our awareness it is an internal voice calling us into solitude and honest self connection,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “It means we are avoiding the very self we are looking for outside of ourselves liking on Facebook and following on Twitter.” When we have the courage of heart to turn inward, into the loneliness, solitude, and the inner self we have isolated, we can change the fundamental conditions of our psychological state. If we restore our intimate connection with that inner self, we restore our appetite for intimacy and authentic connection with others in the world. Shamanic healing, which bypasses the psychology and moves from the heart, allows us to find the stamina to move through our loneliness and to create the fruitful solitude necessary to develop soul satisfying connections in our inner and outer flesh and blood worlds.

Soul loss is unfortunately an everyday reality in America. While soul loss can be the result of abuse and trauma, it can also be caused by any unreconcilable situation in which the physical or spiritual life an individual feels threatened. With a little reverse engineering we can look at what causes soul loss today and extrapolate what we need to actually value in our lives if we are to protect the souls of our children. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares what she has learned from decades of soul retrieval work about what is really necessary to create a healthy environment in which to raise children. In pre-contact shamanic cultures two adults came together—sometimes a man and a woman, sometimes two men, sometimes two women—to create a stable economic unit in which to raise children. Much of the structure of these ancient unions was designed entirely for the support of the child and the preparation of that child to survive his or her initiation in to adulthood. The adults adjusted their lives and their desires because children were truly the most precious and valuable resource of the people. If we truly valued children we would honor the union of any two adults whose actions express love, open-minded intelligence, and an honoring of all life in all of its magnificent diversity.

In today’s vitriolic public discourse about marriage and family values the child is the banner held high and waved about. However, what we see from soul loss in contemporary life is that we no longer actually put what is best for the child first, but instead violently attack others for their differences or simply ignore the issue in our over-stimulated, virtually connected, self-absorbed lives. In precontact shamanic cultures two adults came together to create a stable economic unit in which to raise children. Much of the structure of these ancient unions was designed entirely for the support of the child and the preparation of that child to survive his or her initiation in to adulthood. The adults adjusted their lives and their desires because children were truly the most precious and valuable resource of the people. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares what she has learned from decades of soul retrieval work about what is really necessary to create a healthy environment in which to raise children. Fundamentalist thinking of any kind, divisive actions that separate us for each other and the environment, and the constant upheaval in the lives of adults without a practice of self-reflection cause soul loss in our children. If we truly valued children we would honor the union of any two adults whose actions express love, open-minded intelligence, and an honoring of all life in all of its magnificent diversity.