Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Now more than ever we must bridge the heart-centered, earth honoring, and interconnection-based practices of shamanism with the contemporary mind and depth psychologies—and we must do it globally. Our every decision must begin to intentionally and consciously shape a different world. Join host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, C. Michael Smith, PhD, (aka Mikkal) author of Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue as they discus ways of walking the path of the heart, in which the mind finds its proper relationship with the heart to serve, focus, and act to create the new vision. 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. 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.

When people call out to their ancestors, they call out to a diversity of energies. Some people call out by name to the men and women of their bloodline all the way back to the first man and first woman. Others call out to all of their relations; their request reaching out to all life through the interconnectedness of all living things. While others call out to their ancestors and visualize that request reaching from humankind to nature and on through their cosmology until they reach Grandfather Fire, Grandmother Water, and the Void from which the dream of life unfolds. Though we call out in different ways and mean slightly different things, traditionally “the ancestors” is a universally good thing. So what does it mean when we diagnose “the ancestors” as the cause of chronic disease, family patterns of addiction, or lose of hope and passion for life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores why the dead aren’t becoming traditional helping spirits and why they remain stuck here hijacking the lives of the living. And more importantly she will share her non-traditional shamanic healing practices that effectively heal the energy stuck in the ancestral lines, which frees the living from the unresolved issues of the past and the dead take their place as helping spirits who offer us the rich legacy of all those who have gone before us.

We all have the ability to create art, make love, and offer healing. And some people have the gift. Part of the art of life is to find your gifts and infuse them with your passion so that you do what you have come here to do. How do you tell the difference between the feeling of “coming home” when you are introduced to shamanic practices and the actual call to give your life over to the work of being a shaman? How do you know that you have that gift? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and she explores the confusing terrain of becoming a shaman in the contemporary world. The greatest challenge is truly understanding how deeply nourishing and healing it is to come into shamanism as a way of life. And to fully understand that the inner peace, blessings, and ecstasy that comes with this way of life is meant for everyone. This is how we are meant to live in the world; it isn’t the call. The call to a path is far more demanding. Once you surrender to that call you must resist the temptation to follow others on that path. For the new shaman trusting and following the path your helping spirits lay out for you is paramount. It is in the ever unfolding of that path that you find your confirmation.

Literally thousands of people around the world have been taught to use the shamanic journey practice to connect with their spirit help and guides since the 1960’s. And yet, even with the ease, direct access, and humor inherent in the technique few people are able to step from the basics into a more dynamic practice in which spiritual input becomes part of their everyday problem solving. How to you make that leap? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares some tricks of the trade when working with helping spirits. Balance is key as with all practices that engage power. We must balance the inspiration and practicality, the life plan with the unknown, and the hero’s journey that we didn’t even know we were on with the relationships we have chosen to show up for in our life. The next steps require learning to craft questions that truly work as keys to unlock the wisdom and inspiration of the spirit world. They require accessing your symbolic language without the distortion of knowledge, fear, and emptiness. And they require a willingness to risk who you are and what you know for who you could be if you were to trust the guidance of spirit in your life.

“Curing is the successful treatment and resolution of an issue; healing is to bring peace or fulfillment on an emotional, mental or spiritual level, regardless of the outcome of treatment on the body,” explains our guest Leslie Bryan. Leslie works in this the realm of healing particularly with people at the end of life. From hospice work to volunteering in a network of healers that serves search and rescue teams to working with the dying in her private shamanic healing practice, Leslie is at the forefront of the integration of shamanic skills back into the process of healing into death. Join host, Christina Pratt and her guest Leslie Bryan as they discuss the art of being with the healing process through the end of life. Leslie is trained and experienced in a range of shamanic and energetic healing techniques and joins us to share her pioneering work with the gravely ill and dying. She is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are these shamans meeting this extraordinary need today?

If helping spirits are present for all of us then why are they so hard to talk to? From a shamanic perspective everyone from child to adult has spirit help, though most contemporary people don’t have any idea how to connect with that help and use it. One of the greatest gifts in the reintroduction of shamanism into contemporary culture is the gift of direct communication with our helping spirits. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the simplicity of working with our spirit help and the complexities that arise as we begin to allow spiritual input to guide our choices in life. Balance is key as with all practices that engage power. We must balance the inspiration and practicality, the life plan with the unknown, and the hero’s journey that we didn’t even know we were on with the relationships we have chosen to show up for in our life. This week we discuss accessing our symbolic language and the things that distort our relationship with our helping spirits like knowledge, fear, and emptiness. And Christina will share some helpful hints in moving your relationship with your helping spirits beyond the basics and out of the shamanic playpen.

What are power animals and why do they help us? Power animals are one of the many ways that shamanic peoples, ancient and contemporary alike conceive of the help that reaches out to humans from The Source. Humans have never dealt well with direct communication with The Source. They tend think that a visit from God will solve everything and then when the visit comes they are overwhelmed in such a way that the message is lost. Humans prefer mediation from burning bushes and angels and things that have faces they can talk to. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the vast realm of shamanic helping spirits and why they tend to help us, in spite of our selves. Helping Spirits come to us in dreams, journeys, meditations, and altered states in the forms of animals, plants, fungi, some insects, fish, mythical beasts and beings, ancestors, deities, elementals, and features of the local geography, like mountains or lakes. All true helping spirits are protective, though they may specialize in their guidance and teaching. All true helping spirits are a voice of The Source. Shamanic skills help us to answer the questions who do you communicate with and how? And, more importantly, how do you know whom to ignore?

The ancients understood that soul loss could occur as a result of trauma, warfare, sorcery, accidents, or abuse. So simple and deep was this understanding that soul retrieval was often the place to start the healing process. Today, soul retrieval is often the last resort when nothing else succeeds and the individual is desperate to clear the energy of a past trauma before they lose everything that they hold dear in life. Uncleared trauma becomes a chronic trigger for our fight or flight fear response, creating a host of real physical diseases and pains. Uncleared trauma shapes our outlook on life in a way that leads to inaccurate decision-making, addiction, mental unwellness, and self-destructive behaviors that wear at our most intimate relationships and destroy our connection to our true self. But what is trauma really? And why are we so resistant today to giving our selves what we need to heal the traumatic events of our lives? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt as she explores a variety of ways shamanic healing effectively repairs what is set asunder in trauma and the rich variety of effective clearing work offered today to restore the body and soul to unity and wholeness.

“Shamans cannot undertake personal healing, action in the world, and service to the community using only their personal life-fore energy; they must harness the more powerful energies of nature, spirit and the nonordinary worlds,” explains our guest, Colleen Deatsman. “To practice shamanism in modern culture and our own home environment, we need only wake up to our awareness of self, nature, life-force energy, and spirit and reap the rich experience available to us in each moment.” Join host, Christina Pratt, and the author of The Hollow Bone: A Field Guide to Shamanism as we explore self-healing, the unintentional things we do to disempower it, and how we can better support others in their own self-healing. Colleen has explored health, well-being and shamanic practice for 25 years and is the author of five books. She is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are these shamans meeting this extraordinary need today?

Our soul’s purpose lives in our body, deep within the root of our being where we carry our piece of the original spark of life. Like bulbs in the ground and buds on the trees, that spark of your soul’s purpose wants to rise up and out of you, blossoming into an expression of your unique gifts given to the world. The irritation and restless energy that we feel in the springtime is more than cabin fever and a lust for newness. It is the energy of the Inner Dreamer waking to dream true and instead finding the need to detoxify the winter’s crop of old energies, ideas, and beliefs. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares a shamanic practice for planting the seeds of your Soul’s Purpose as an Earth Ritual for spring. For our seeds to take root and blossom we must prepare the soil. This requires bringing in the nutrients of our essence energies and aligning with the things we know we cannot live without. It also involves fertilizing the soil with the release of aspects of our self that no longer serve us or have been outmoded by our growth. And most important of all, we must plant the right seeds, the seeds that resonate with our authentic true nature.

“Shaman’s sickness,” refers to the specific, physical and/or mental illness that results when spirit chooses a new shamanic candidate and possesses the candidate or takes his/her soul into the spirit world. The sickness does not respond to normal treatment, nor does it progress like a normal illness. It may advance and retreat without reason and defy our understanding of how similar symptoms normally function in the body. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how the shaman’s sickness appeared traditionally and the many ways it presents in our time. This illness is cured only when the one stricken surrenders to the will of spirit, faces his or her fear of death and cures that personal madness or illness. The individual forges working relationships with their helping spirits and gains shamanic power in the process only when they find meaning in the crisis and his or her own cure. As a result of this passage, the individual can work with the fears and madness in others having now crossed that emotional and psychological territory within the self.

Where there are blessings there can also be curses. The ability to send a blessing or a curse has been with humankind in almost every culture since the beginning. And cursing continues in almost every culture as a casual, uneducated act and as a skilled art form. Curses can be intentional or unintentional. They can be self inflicted or sent by another, usually as an ill-advised response to anger, resentment, jealousy, envy, or greed. Curses, like blessings, have a strong intention, an energy that fuels it, and a direction or intended target. The person who creates the curse is not always the one who wants the curse created and nonetheless, both will be harmed by it. Curses can harm the person they are sent to, but not necessarily. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the many sources of curses in the contemporary world and the cures. Perhaps most important as we consider curses is to understand that they are balanced in the great reckoning of things by our blessings. We can be free of the ill effects of curses if we live impeccably, have courage of heart that allows us to move through our fears, and practice the spiritual arts that allow us to stay in the vibrant lifeforce of the Oneness of all things.

“Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found,” explains our guest Robert Moss. Join Mr. Moss and host, Christina Pratt, as they explore a vision of what the coming dreaming society could be like. Active Dreaming is for individuals and communities. For individuals active dreaming is a way to live consciously, to move beyond scripts into the fullness of our story, and to step up to the challenge to create something new in the world. For communities active dreaming offers a new mode for leadership that fosters truth and a model for intentional community that extends to include the Earth and the next seven generations. Robert is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are these shamans meeting this extraordinary need today?

What does it take to live a legendary life? A human is born to live a legendary life because we are all born of the Big Dream. In the creation stories of shamanic peoples the Great Timeless, Spaceless Mystery Void dreamt, for reasons no one knows or understands. But from that Big Dream came fire and ice, yin and yang. As they continued to dream, the world as we know it was manifest and those legendary dreamers took the form of Earth and Sky. When we are able to release our parents and the small story of our personal childhood with all of its beauty and suffering we can then take the Earth as our True Mother and the Sky as our True Father. In that initiatory act of surrender and release we step into our true family and we orient ourselves for a legendary life. “We are born into this world with a blueprint for a legendary life,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “But that doesn’t mean living it will be automatic. To engage the blueprint for your legendary life you must consort with beings of legend, sacrifice your mediocre expectations of safe comfort, and reach within for the passion that lights up the heart memory of why you are here.” Join us this week as we explore the acts and attitude necessary to live a life of legend.

2012 is here. What do we need to focus on? “Many of us have been moving forward to wake up, but we are still in a collective trance,” explains Sandra Ingerman. “The earth is evolving and we are evolving. There are and will continue to be earth changes we need to surrender to… We need to learn how to acknowledge grief and experience it. And at the same time we must allow our spirit to create change that takes us into a more meaningful life.” This week host, Christina Pratt and author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman, discuss the places people and practitioners must deepen their work if we are going to be able to hold the space of universal love and detachment from outcome in these challenging times head. If we are to become tools for the Divine and true agents of change it is essential that we become fully conscious of our thought forms, learn that what we give energy to we give life to, and surrender our ego-driven plan so that we are able to see the bigger picture with the eyes of spirit. Join us this week as Sandra Ingerman shares the aspects of human development she feels are most essential in this auspicious time we all share.