Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

“Blessings strengthen us, subtly or powerfully depending on the person giving the blessing and the strength of the blessing itself,” explains our host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “What is important to notice is that the act of Blessing another strengthens both the one receiving the blessing and the one offering it.” Blessings can empower us, bring us back into right relationship with ourselves, or protect us. What is a blessing and what makes it strong? Blessings can be a formal, complex ritual process or a simple act of love, like calling on the spirits of the family totem to protect a child as she leaves for school. Blessings call on energies of the invisible world, like elementals, nature spirits, and angels, and ask for their participation in our lives in specific ways. Whether simple or grand, our blessings are most powerful when they are an expression of a deep relationship we have already cultivated with spirit. Join us this week as we explore the lost art of Blessings.

“How do I let go?” is the most frequently asked question of host, Christina Pratt, when she facilitates clients in the release of the old self and the awakening of the new. Winter is the time of stripping away the old and resting in the long, dark nights. This fall we discussed moving beyond good and evil, looking past sin to focus on destiny, and the Essence energies of Gratitude, Faith, and the Return—all to stir up the comfortable patterns of the self—so now what? Now we need to strip away all we have found within our selves that no longer serves us and surrender that energy to the winter fire. But, how? This week we will discuss how we can allow these little deaths, and with the gifts of self revealed within, to lay the path to rejuvenating an authentic life. In this way we can find the pleasure in our imperfect lives, the lost gifts of self that awaken the heart, and joy in the cultivation of a deepening relationship with our self.

How do you fill the well of your well being, especially when you feel tired, cold and exhausted? As adults we struggle in a dynamic between feeling the desire for experience and the need to return to touch the root of our essence, to replenish and restore. Culturally, the desire for experience wins most of the time. We tend not to take the time to reach the Source unless we are forced to by illness, exhaustion, or breakdown. Even then, we rarely spend enough time there to fill the well and remember why we are here. Winter is the season of 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. But we miss the point. These are not the return. They only hold the space for it. To return and replenish we must touch the Void and go into the source of our deepest dreaming. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as we explore how to restore your link to life.

If you say, “I love that show” and “I love my car”, what does it mean when you say, “I love my child” or “I love my wife?” The essence of love is weakened by casual or careless usage. Why does it matter to some that others take the Lord’s name in vain? Because casual and careless usage weakens the essence of The Creator. Don’t think this matters? Well, how do you feel when you pour your soul into a project and it is treated in a casual, ordinary, and careless way? We strengthen or weaken the essence energies through the quality of our attention to them. Essence energies are “essential” because they are the energies that nourish the soul. Shamanism gives us the skills and awareness to call on the essence energies, to tend them and to create a relationship of gratitude and reciprocity with them. Then they are there for the soul to grow strong and flourish. Join shaman and host, Christina Pratt, as she explores the essence energies of life and why your relationship to them matters.

“Faith is freefall. It is the liquid state of grace in which all change is possible,” explains shaman and host, Christina Pratt. “Without faith we are unable to cross that gap between what was and what needs to be.” It really doesn’t matter whether that gap is the size of a whole life that you are being asked to leave behind or the microscopic gap between two neurons in your brain as you desperately try to think a new thought, with out faith we cannot cross that Void. The most interesting thing about faith, given humanity’s history of killing each other over it, is that it doesn’t really matter what you have faith in. In terms of transformation and enlightenment it only matters that you are capable of that state of grace; that you can surrender all that you are and know to simply be in a state of faith. Join us this week as we explore the power of faith. When is faith the excuse for delusion and fantasy thinking and when is it the power needed to dance with the Unknown?

“Gratitude as a function in life that makes things work out,” says our host, Christina Pratt. When we are without gratitude we are without perspective. The visionary capacity of the heart slips into doubt and we fixate on what is not working. Living from a stance of gratitude is a choice that allows you to shift into the realm of energies where the coincidences of things come together for you. Join us as we discuss the power of gratitude to bring the blessings of life to you. For the Qechua, an ancient Peruvian shamanic people, gratitude is not only something that we needed to feel. Gratitude must take form; it must be part of the labor, love and wisdom of a society. It is not enough to say, “thank you”; gratitude must be made concrete through action and intent. The power engages when you show gratitude at all times, make every gesture of your life a labor of love and retribution for the gifts you receive and will receive. Give thanks for all of it; it is the miracle of life.

Your destiny is already present. It is here with you from the moment of your birth, and yet you are unclear. What you miss is that Life is constantly showing you the steps, but you don’t know how to hear, read the signs or follow the steps. In this behavior you commit the one True Sin, you stand in the way of your own destiny. With shamanic skills we can engage with all of our life—even our sins and those committed against us—and see them for what that they are—the path to our destiny. Join host Christina Pratt as we discuss “sin” in shamanism and it’s relationship with your destiny. Explaining sin as a “moral evil” is a challenge in a shamanic world where everything is connected and all are One. The threat of sin only really works in non-shamanic systems that profess a fundamental separation from God. However if everything is a gift, then what is sin? Even sin can be a gift, a stone to be turned that, in the turning, moves us a little further along the path to our destiny.

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating." With this inspiration from Simone Weil we will explore how to engage with life beyond the concepts of good and evil. The first step is to relearn to trust our intuition and see the power moving directly or as power over. Ideas of good and evil and the fear that they generate distract us from watching the real energy and tracking power accurately. Fear based thinking is the fertile soil nourishing the roots of the current paradigm and our inability to heal, transform, or to simply ask for help. This thinking keeps us locked in the problems of our ancestors and in their way of thinking about solutions. Join host, Christina Pratt, as we explore shamanic ways to see through the hackneyed 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.

"...one of the most sensual, deep, and delightful experiences I've ever had. I realized I'm not alone in believing that sex can be both sacred and fun." These are the words of a participant in the groundbreaking, healing work of our guest, Gina Ogden, PhD. Ogden is an author, licensed marriage and family therapist, diplomate in sex therapy, and practitioner of ceremonial shamanism. She joins us this week to discuss how shamanism offers us the critical element in finding the path through our wounds to the robust, sacred and fun sexuality our shamanic ancestors enjoyed. Through shamanic ritual, individuals at any age can find the sexual healing necessary to enjoy a pleasurable, passionate sex life. Gina will share ISIS, her study on integrating sexuality and spirituality and her breakthrough idea to use shamanic cosmology to organize her findings, thus becoming the first to effectively broaden the understanding of sexual experience beyond limiting notions of function and dysfunction.

Persistent depression, a disease of the heart and soul, is one of the most common problems motivating people to seek help. And shamanism is an effective approach to healing depression, especially for people who are willing to forge a direct relationship with spirit. While the idea of taking a pill to make the pain go away is initially a relief (and often necessary for the individual to continue to act on their own behalf), the result grows unsatisfying over time. Medication does help people to cope, but coping isn’t enough. This week we explore the many ways shamanic practices are used to transform depression from “the problem” to the path to a life of meaning. Shamanism gives us the unique ability to directly repair soul loss healing feelings of soullessness. It offers direct reconnection with spirit allowing the experience of universal love, protection, and guidance. Ultimately shamanic practices allow the individual to reignite their passion for life and capacity for joy.

In shamanic cultures mental illness is a community illness that is caused when the community’s many shadow projections overwhelm the collective benevolent intent. When we don’t withdraw our projections, we wear down the boundaries of the most sensitive, including children. The sensitives become vulnerable to the intrusion and influence of malevolent energies, wandering dead, and the unacknowledged secrets, betrayals, and transgressions of the community. Traditionally, the shaman diagnoses the community’s imbalance whether with the local land spirits, ancestors, the spirit world in general or the morals and ethics of good relationship with each other. The healing is then communal, requiring everyone’s participation, restoring balance and right relationship, and freeing the individual from the burden of acting out the community’s illness. This week we explore mental illness, old and new causes, and shamanism as the path forward to sanity and well-being even for our “Prozac Nation.”

Addictions abound in our lives. Whether persistent, problematic substance abuse patterns, the simple inability to wind down after along day without a glass of wine, or the addictions to food, sex, or adrenaline that fill our social calendars, addiction lives large in our lives and defies our best efforts. “When we ‘work on’ our addictions directly,” says host Christina Pratt, “we are developing an even more complex relationship with them.” Shamanism offers an indirect and effective approach. Every addiction began as a diversion from something our soul really needed that we weren’t allowed to have. The line between what we wanted and the addiction is rarely straight or logical. Shamanic skills allow us to access both the original soul need and the crazy logic transformation necessary to meet that need and become the person you were meant to be. Then, for those who want freedom, laying the addiction down becomes a matter of detoxification of the mind and body and living freely.

The Toltec I Ching: 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications. It recasts the I Ching of ancient China in the symbology of ancient, native Mexico and focuses us on an ethics, desperately needed today, of cooperation in the emerging world culture. William Horden will be our guest this week to discuss “The Oracle” and why we should bother with a new divination tool at this time. Divination tools can guide us into our own spiritual warriorship and its expression in our daily actions. In this tool, Ramirez-Oropeza’s stunning artwork illuminates the wisdom of the ancients while Horden’s lucid text unlocks the divinatory power of these two world traditions. The Toltec I Ching “inspires us to see more clearly, live more creatively, and love more fully.” Join us as we ask The Oracle, “What do people need to know today to transform from wherever they are into people of courageous hearts?

What would it be like to live in a culture with 8 genders or 64? In shamanic cultures your biology, gender, and sexual preference are not necessarily linked. They can be, but its not a given. They are all variables that are experienced as an expression of Spirit moving through the individual. They are not only varied in shamanic cultures, but they may change over a lifetime. Join shaman and host Christina Pratt as she explores gender variance and transformation in shamanism. Important in shamanism is the transformed shaman. These are often considered the most powerful shamans. These are men in a variety of shamanic cultures around the world including Siberia, Africa, and North America, who have become women to follow their call from spirit. These changes are culturally sanctioned and expected. They begin the transformation very young and progress into functioning as a shaman and a woman after initiation. The bigger mystery: why women don’t have to become men to be shamans?

In 1991 Sandra Ingerman published Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self. In this beautiful, easy to read book she rebirthed the shamanic art of soul retrieval in contemporary times. After training with Sandy, your host Christina Pratt, began as a practicing shaman performing hundreds of soul retrievals a year. Now, after nearly two decades there are many tales to tell not only of the power of soul retrieval healing, but of the joys and the challenges that come after. The first challenge is how to reintegrate with parts of yourself who have been gone decades or who see the world as a child. The lasting challenge is how do you live in our world, that asks you to be small and fit in, when you are filled with emotions, passions, and well-being that are your birthright. Christina will bust some myths about soul retrieval, answer the FAQS, and share how soul retrieval fits into the modern understanding of illness and healing. Join us to delve deeply into these healing waters.