Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

We may be able to measure the ways in which depression alters our brain chemistry. However, that does not prove that brain chemistry causes depression. One problem with the brain chemistry explanation is that it does nothing to help us ferret out the root cause of our depression, to make a change there at the root, and then to make new choices in life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the interrelationship between soul loss and depression. In shamanic healing practice we often find that soul loss is actually at the root of the depression. When soul parts are retrieved by an initiated shaman and integrated by the client the resulting changes show that the depression was not the issue, but was a side affect of the original soul loss. In other cases we find that the depression is a side affect of the fatigue and energy loss that results from the constant energy drain out the holes in the energy body created by soul loss. Finally, we see hopelessness and feelings of impotence arise from continual, unsuccessful efforts to heal soul loss through modalities other than shamanism. Whether the depression results from the content of the soul loss, the energetic mechanics of the soul loss, or the hopelessness that grows from trying to heal soul loss without soul retrieval, depression is your heart lamenting for the soul parts that have gone missing from your life.

Contemporary life is filled with so much promise of happiness and fulfillment. Yet many people find that, though they are doing all the right things, that passionate sense of meaning and purpose just isn’t happening. Many others are so depressed or fatigued that they don’t have the energy to care about what is authentic or what aligns with their heart. People, high and low functioning alike, feel a sense of alienation and betrayal that runs deep while the source remains a mystery. All of these experiences are symptoms of a dis-ease of the soul. “This is not an issue of good soul or bad soul,” explains shaman Christina Pratt, “but of a distance from the soul and from connection to a community that cares that we are lost. As we reach out for help we are betrayed again and again by the failure in our culture to offer valid and effective paths back to our soul and its purpose for being here.” Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina, asking what soul healing Last Mask Center offers for the individual, why these teachings work, and how our passionate expression of our soul’s purpose is exactly the medicine the world needs at this time.

People around the world are calling out for new forms of leadership, economic exchange, and community. If we can tap the wisdom of our long ago ancestors we will find the wisdom of leadership by council, the energetic exchange based on a love for the future, and community built on engaging with the reality of the interconnectedness of all living things. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, Phillip Scott, as they discus Phillip’s experiences as a sitting chief leading through council and creating contemporary community based on indigenous wisdom. Philip Scott is the founder/director of Ancestral Voice, a center of healing and learning devoted to the preservation, application, and respectful dissemination of shamanic and Indigenous lifeways. He is a ceremonial Chief in the Lakota tradition, entrusted with sharing Indigenous wisdom and traditional healing practices with the contemporary world. These ancient teachings have much to offer us as we strive together as the human family to create systems of sacred economics and communities based on the exchange of the heart. Phillip joins us for the next show in the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series where we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world today.

Contemporary life is filled with so much promise of happiness and fulfillment. Yet many people find that, though they are doing all the right things, that passionate sense of meaning and purpose just isn’t happening. Many others are so depressed or fatigued that they don’t have the energy to care about what is authentic or what aligns with their heart. People, high and low functioning alike, feel a sense of alienation and betrayal that runs deep while the source remains a mystery. All of these experiences are symptoms of a dis-ease of the soul. “This is not an issue of good soul or bad soul,” explains shaman Christina Pratt, “but of a distance from the soul and from connection to a community that cares that we are lost. As we reach out for help we are betrayed again and again by the failure in our culture to offer valid and effective paths back to our soul and its purpose for being here.” Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina, asking what soul healing Last Mask Center offers for the individual, why these teachings work, and how our passionate expression of our soul’s purpose is exactly the medicine the world needs at this time.

How do you begin shamanic healing? And perhaps more importantly why would you start down the path of shamanic healing? Contemporary people begin to explore the path of shamanic healing usually because nothing else is working or they simply know something is missing. There is a growing frustration with the unfulfilled promises of pharmaceutical and surgical medicine and a growing irritation with the vacuous “you get what you need” response to our reasonable desire for efficacy and accountability when turning to alternative care. Shamanic healing with an initiated shaman offers direct access to the source of the inner dissonance that we experience as illness or disease in our mental, physical or spiritual lives. Often shamanism offers a direct response to our pain and suffering, like a soul retrieval or extraction, in just one session. Just as often the source of the problem is a bit more than we asked for, like ancestral healing and a strong need for a real personal daily practice. Nonetheless, the path forward is clear, practical, and doable. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares her experience and expertise to answer your question, “How do I begin shamanic healing? What is reasonable to expect from a shaman and what will they expect from me?”

Winter is the season of The Return. It is the time to rest and slow down. For most just slowing down is the challenge. We think all we need is to catch up on some sleep or restart our daily meditation practice. For others chronic exhaustion and fatigue is the challenge and we get caught up in the actions of healing. They are each a side of the coin of imbalance that is so common in the lives of contemporary people. Both require the same journey into solitude to remedy the deeper causes of this natural imbalance in our lives. However, to just rest or slow down or try a cleansing diet again are not The Return, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. They only hold the space for it. The Return is a Taoist term for the natural turning inward, a natural call to leave the day-to-day patterns, expectations, habits and small addictions and to remember. We are called to remember the path back to our mountain and to connect again to why we are here in this life at this time. And we are called to participate in the kinds of actions that open our hearts, allowing true emotions to flow and fill the lake that lies at the base of the mountain. In this way we go into the source of our deepest dreaming, realign with our heart’s path, and restore the resources we will call on throughout the year to come. Join us this week as we explore the renewal of Spirit.

“Let yourself imagine and experience the certainty that ADD and ADHD, birth trauma, incomplete bonding, sensory overload, dyslexia, and autism, labeled strenuous and unalterable by the mainstream society, can be immediately and beautifully transformed forever.” This is the reality accessed through the work of Jon Bredal, MA. Jon joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt to discuss his innovative, joyful, and effective healing process with children and families. His work integrates decades of art and teaching, deep exploration into kinesiology and BrainGym, and the influence of his experience with many North American indigenous peoples. Jon explains that, “These difficulties (for children) are primarily caused by incomplete infant developmental patterns. The methods and activities in this process work to eliminate the underlying causes through a combination of joyful, spontaneous play, integrative movement, repatternings, heart activities, as well as developmental/rocking movement.” Jon is our next guest in the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this show we explore how we could be more effective in our healing with children facing the challenges of ADD, dyslexia, anxiety, depression, sensory disorders, learning blocks, birth traumas, incomplete infant bonding, autism, and those other experiences children suffer for us that we can’t diagnose or explain away.

The “Winter Blues” viewed from a shamanic perspective are misdiagnosed. Through the eyes of the shaman the Winter Blues are not so much about less light, but about the fact that we don’t respond to the shorter days by turning off the TV, closing the email, unplugging, and going deeply within. The Winter Blues aren’t so much about depression as they are about the feeling of your soul’s purpose refusing to stay pressed down. The Winter Blues are actually your soul’s purpose saying, “renew your connection to me now or the path will grow too dim to find me.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the winter path to Darkness and the renewal, restoration and rejuvenation of an intimate relationship with your soul’s purpose. The activities that restore those parts of our self that move on a soul level, like dreams, journeys, mediations, and sleep, all happen in the dark. The increase in darkness each day is an invitation to visit Darkness. It is a time to ask for the threads of connection to the soul that have grown thin through the over activity, imbalance, and stress of the year to be renewed. It is a time to clear the calendar and be simple, in solitude, and renew your commitment to live from the inside out, finding again the voice of your heart and allowing it to move you. When we surrender our Winter Blues to The Dark we stoke the fire that will rise again in springtime in the rejuvenation of passion for our soul’s purpose.

Fear of abandonment, separation, or banishment is one of the great life hobblers, never quite stopping us from moving toward health, vitality, and our soul’s purpose, but effectively keeping us lame and unable to satisfy this core life journey toward our self. The irony in the fear of abandonment we carry from the past is that it inspires us to abandon our selves again and again in present time. “The unique logic of shamanic work allows us to slice open the debilitating infinite loop of abandonment and dig out the core,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “At the core of abandonment lies the seed to fulfillment and deep intimacy with self.” However to harvest that seed we must be willing to “return to the scene of the crime” as it is carried in our bodies, release the memory, sense of debt and remorse, and grasp the True Value that we hid there. With the help of our spirit guides and our own True Value firmly in our grasp, we can return to present time and come to know what mattered to us so much as a child that we would risk abandonment to move toward it. When we renew our relationship with what really matters to our heart, our True Value, we inspire our natural movement toward alignment with self and the richly satisfying fulfillment of our soul’s purpose.

“How could we ask for anything less than the future?” That is the question. And it was asked by spoken word poet, Drew Dellinger, in a November 16th post to the OccupyLove.org site. How do we—the Big We—take the restorative actions needed to manifest a future that works for everyone? “Many of our shamanic ancestors knew an answer to this question,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “From the often quoted Great Binding Law of the Iroquois Confederacy that our decisions serve the next seven generations to the Quechua concept of ayni, which is reciprocity and gratitude co-mingled in mature love, our shamanic ancestors knew how to Occupy Love. They created their entire social structure based on taking the actions necessary not only to thrive in their environments but also to keep the flow of energy that animates all things moving, exchanging, and reciprocating. For many shamanic peoples, prior to contact with the religions and beliefs of the Western World, their lives were shaped by accepting a Law of Universal Responsibility which means that everyone engages in the interchange of mature love, knowledge, and right work. And that they do so in a way that willingly acknowledges the interconnection between humans, the natural world that sustains them, and the invisible world of spirit. Our ancestors learned to live in this way by asking their helping spirits how. So we are not looking back to see what to do, but to learn how to ask the questions of spirit that will guide us in taking the restorative actions needed to transform our world.

“Whenever one wakes up to the awareness that they have been oppressed or suppressed the natural desire is "take control" to make one's presence known and felt,” explains Rev. David F Alexander of the New Thought Movement in Portland, OR. “Once this occurs, the door opens to the next step - to take restorative action. But before restorative action can take place there must be a grounding in a greater awareness of who we really are. Without this grounding restorative action turns to reactionary and retaliation action. This is the difference between effective social change movements and ineffective ones.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she discusses the simple and yet profound daily practices necessary to rise to the moment and clear the energies from our bodies that keep us from the quality of a greater awareness required. In all the charisma and promise of the current consciousness movement there is a jaw-dropping dearth of deliverables. Actual clearing must happen if we are to co-create restorative action from this first phase of the Occupy Movement. And actual clearing happens only when we clear physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Each of those realms is cleared through its own language and wisdom. Join us this week as we explore the direct application of shamanic skills to clear what must be released for restorative action to be clear, communal, and deliverable.

“Rather than just appealing to or confronting the worldly powers that be, shamanic rituals bring the mass of people into a coherent collective that draws power from the unseen world, and collapses the dichotomy of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’,” explains our guest, spiritual activist and shaman, Lenore Norrgard. Join host, Christina Pratt and her guest as they explore shamanic activism, what it looks like, and ways that practitioners can respond to these unprecedented times. Shamanic skills allow us to work with the dynamic tensions between spiritual and social transformation, to use the richness and power of diverse faith traditions, to practice deep democracy, and to advocate for those without a voice. And shamanic ritual and ceremony allow us to engage these forces, human and non-human in the alchemy of transformation. Lenore is our next guest in the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In addition to her shamanic healing practice and teachings, Lenore offers Shamanism for Activists trainings; leads large, public peacemaking rituals, most recently for the opening rally of The Peace and Justice Studies annual conference; and she is currently involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Death is a point of transition. There is the approach to death, a process we call dying. And there is the departure from death, a process we barely know exists anymore, having given it over to whichever “god” we claim. It is important that we know where we go after we die and how to get there all on our own. In ancient times the movement of the soul in times of death and dying was very much at the heart of shamanic work, a branch of shamanic healing now called psychopomp. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores a shamanic perspective on how we can be with the process of dying as a soulful process, whether that of a loved one or our own. She shares the importance in seeing Death as an ally in life, of reconciling what we have left in disharmony, and making true inner peace with what we have done and not done on the path of living our dreams. The shaman’s special gift for those who are dying is to share the understanding of what happens after death, who will be with you on that journey, and how to be sure you will truly get to where you are going. Having made the journey from the Land of the Living to the Land of the Dead and back many times the shaman is perfectly positioned to offer practical information to cleanse our fears and the skills needed to navigate this most important journey in peace.

The distinction between acts of healing and acts of sorcery is self-control. In the realm of shamanism a conscious act of sorcery isn’t about good or bad or dark or light, but about the motivation behind the action. In contemporary America the most common form of sorcery is unconscious, usually unintended, but damaging nonetheless. We are an immature culture that revels in its right to neglect the inner journey that results in self-control. Instead we offer ourselves up to addiction, familial dysfunction, and the tyranny of our own wounded child. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the everyday manipulations and unconscious abuses of power that are effectively unconscious sorcery. When we tell a child they are stupid or an MD tells a patient they have 6 weeks to live we are casting a curse and practicing sorcery. When we engage with others to manipulate a desired outcome, the very essence of co-dependent behavior, we practice sorcery. When we let our emotions fly, project our stories, and blame others we give up all self-control and practice sorcery. Unconscious though this sorcery may be, it is still harmful. And since these behaviors usually arise out of our unconscious patterns, the repetition of these actions makes the sorcery powerful. Join us this week as we discover where self control arise from authentically and how that place within us the birthplace of true freedom.

Shamanic practices involve the intentional movement between the visible physical realm and the invisible mental/emotional/spiritual/mythic/archetypal/Unknown realm. They also involve the inner journeys between the realm of the physical body and that of the energy body. The energy body involves both “structures” and aspects where the form follows your thoughts. This is a point of great confusion in our current understandings and misunderstandings of what practices actually cultivate a healthy and vital energy body. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the difference between the structures and the free-form nature of the energy body and the practices we can engage in to develop and integrate both. When the communication between the physical and energy bodies is full and effortless there is no gap. Where communication is ineffective or absent a gap widens and illness—physical, mental, and emotional—settles in. With all of the world’s people’s sacred texts translated on the Internet sharing hundreds of different perspectives on the energy body it is hard to know where to begin. But shamanism, with its focus on function and efficacy, helps us to focus on the truly functional parts of the vital energy body that we must maintain and cultivate if we are to master the art of living well.