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I am very fortunate to be a participant in Betsy Bergstrom’s 2 year shamanic training in Middle World shamanic skills. Betsy’s training is designed to help shamanic practitioners like me to sharpen our disciplines, learn new skills to support our work and find fellowship and replenishment among our colleagues. Betsy has dedicated a lifetime of work to studying the Middle World, and sharing what she’s found too those who are living a shamanistic life and to those who are just beginning to learn. Betsy’s work is also shaped by one of my favorite human qualities: compassion. Studying with Betsy you will learn how deep and effective compassion can be as strong a force in this World and others. Participating in any of her classes is life-transforming.
In this Middle World work we strengthen our relationships with many helping Spirits of the Middle World, using various techniques. One of those is the art of Mediumship. In Mediumship, we agree to “share” our consciousness and, sometimes, our physical bodies, with other Spiritual helpers. This is beautiful and powerful work, and must be undertaken within carefully planned and supported places and processes. In such a carefully planned way, I was able to share my consciousness recently with a helping Spirit who brought many lessons for me. This helping Spirit is one who manifests Joy in this world; she expresses herself and the Joy she carries in the form of the element of Fire. Sharing my physical self and my mind with her was an experience beyond my ability to describe. And yet, she charged me with sharing with you, and all who will hear, her lesson of how to manifest Joy in your life.
Joy, she explained, is born of the union of both Love and Passion. This isn’t necessarily the love and passion of human sexual realtionships, though that, too, can be part of it. This Love is the Greater Love for all beings, we humans are capable of. This encompasses our love for other humans, but also our love of the earth, all the things on it, and all the forces that move it. Similarly, Passion can include strong feelings of desire, but it is intended here in its larger manifestion, which is the strong feelings of elation you feel when you are fully engaged in where you are, what you are doing, and who you are with. So, the passion of the run, the dance, the song, the story. All of this and more is what true Passion embraces.
Obviously, in order to manifest Joy, we are encouraged to bring more Love and Passion into our lives. Of course, we say, who wouldn’t want more of that? The question, however, is HOW? And this is where the answer from this compassionate being surprised me. She said: You build an edifice of Joy in your life by inviting in the foundational bricks, the sources, of Joy:
- Surprise
- Sweetness
- Delight
I’ll be writing more about what she means by each of the “bricks” you can begin collecting now to build a solid foundation for Joy in your life.
Many decades ago anthropologist Michael Harner developed and presented to the Western world the cosmology of Core Shamanism. As a result of his study and experience with shamanic cultures around the world, he determined that all have some things in common. One of those commonalities he described is the division of our experience of existence into Ordinary Reality (OR) and Nonordinary Reality (NOR). Ordinary Reality is this reality in which we find ourselves living; I call it the “consensus reality.” In this reality, we don’t perceive that trees sing, rocks move of their own volition, etc. Nonordinary Reality is the spiritual realm, which in the shamanic realm is the source of the reality we experience. In other words, Ordinary Reality is a reflection of Nonordinary Reality. And in Nonordinary Reality, trees sing beautifully, rocks move about freely, and we converse with spiritual beings to gain knowledge, help, healing and perspective. It is in Nonordinary Reality that the shamanic practitioner does the bulk of his or her work.
Another organizing principle Dr. Harner presented is that Nonordinary Reality contains (at least) three Worlds: the Upper World, the Lower World and, of course, the Middle World. And there are various “levels” or locations within each of those Worlds. The Lower World is a very dense and expansive version of our own reality, with landscapes and animals like those in our reality. These caves, rivers, oceans, meadows and these Bears, Owls, Eagles and all other Power Animals, are very much more intensely SO than in our reality; it is as if we are perceiving the essence of these things and forces in the Lower World.
The Upper World has, in my experience, opposite qualities from the Lower World; it is a place built of light and clouds, the place where we meet with higher beings, our ancestors, our inspirational teachers. Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman, in their excellent book Awakening to the Spirit World, write of the Upper World that it is “formed by the dreaming of the higher gods and goddesses, the ancestors, the ascended masters, and the compassionate angelic forces that are willing to be of service to us–most often as teachers and guides.”
The Middle World is this reality in which we live, encompassing both the Ordinary and Nonordinary versions. Shamanic practitioners become skilled in the work of allowing their consciousness’ to travel, or “journey,” back and forth between these two versions of our World, in order to do the work of shamanic healing. It is in this World that we encounter souls, both living and dead, find lost power, call lost soul parts to return during soul retrieval, extract intrusions, psychopomp the dead, depossess the lost dead and all of our other shamanic work.
These Worlds, these Worlds of wonder and beauty, are yours, if you are reading this, by the right of your birth. You came into this life of human form to experience being fully human. And the shamanic journey, the feat in which the consciousness is able to be both in this Ordinary Reality and in Nonordinary Reality simultaneously, is yours by right. If picking up this gift of yours is calling out to you now, consider remembering how to journey. You will meet your Power Animal(s), the Upper World teachers, and the compassionate beings that support your very existence.
Thanks to the sponsorship of the amazing Rubin Museum I discovered the fascinating documentary film Edge of Dreaming. In this film Amy Hardie documents, very intimately, a year in which she transforms from a “rational” scientific documentary film maker, into a dreaming, shamanic-journeying film maker. In the course of that transition, she experiences a convincing dream-based prediction of her own death and the healing that was needed to make that death an ego-death, rather than a physical one.
I was initially drawn to the film because Amy declares early on that she is a person who doesn’t dream. My Beloved is also one who rarely remembers his dreams, and I often wonder about the meaning of that. One night, Amy dreams that a loved pet horse has died. She awakens from this unusual dream to discover that her horse has, indeed, died, and in precisely the way portrayed in the dream. Some few months later, Amy dreams that she is to die in her 48th year, which is about to commence. Amy’s life begins to focus on what this possibility might mean to her, to ponder what this dream might mean, until she becomes ill in her 48th year with a lung illness that threatens her life. Amy then embarks on an exploration both intimate and scientific, within her own life and in interviews with various scientific experts in dreaming and neurology, eventually deciding that there might be some kind of “knowing” in her dreams. It is then that Amy consults with a shaman, Claudia Goncalves, who helps her to journey to the source of the problem. In this journey to non-ordinary reality Amy encounters helping spirits who show her how her life is connected to that of the Earth, and how her illness is a reflection of the Earth’s illness. And then they show her the way back to life and healing.
Amy has since begun work with Sandra Ingerman, who is leading explorations in the understanding of how human well-being is intimately woven with the well-being of our planet. And Amy has experienced healing as a result. She describes on a PBS web page her recovery from her illness. From a lung capacity of approximately 48% of normal, due to an illness that stumped her doctors, she has regained a lung capacity of 94% of normal. Her film now draws people all over the world to an exploration of their own dreaming, and she conducts workshops to help with this process.
In this documentary, Amy Hardie has explored one of the many edges of shamanism: Dreaming. As we approach and extend our shamanic explorations and practice, Dreaming is one important component of our shamanic toolkit. I find that as my daily work with Spirit deepens, my Dreaming deepens. I have come to find that my Dream time is an important learning time in which Spirit fills me with wisdom, experience and knowing that I don’t have time or attention for in the my waking time.
Here’s an exercise to consider: Ask God, the Universe, your Helping Spirits, to send a dream to you tonight answering this plea: Heal in me what also needs healing in this world. Ask for this healing dream three times before you sleep. Then see what changes in you and in the world.
I love the Internet. It has completely changed the way we communicate with one another, and created open doors for ideas and interactions that we couldn’t have dreamed of a few decades ago. When previously I’d have had to write you a letter or produce a flyer to let you know what I was thinking or what classes I am offering, now I only need think about it for a few moments, hit the keyboard, and you are informed and I’ve communicated.
Another thing I like about the Internet is that I can read what you are thinking, as you wend your way to my web site. I’ve invited Google, in the form of Google Analytics, to tell me how people arrive at my web site. So it tells me a lot of general, not specific, information about who is looking at my site and how they found it. For example, I can see that my average viewer spends over 3 minutes reading my site. And I’m glad of that because one purpose of my site is to help you understand healing, coaching, Reiki, shamanism and the possibilities they offer for your life. Another thing it tells me is how you, my anonymous reader, might have arrived at my site through a Google search. And those are the really intriguing bits of information Google feeds to me. The most fascinating Google search that brings you, dear Reader, to my site is this: Is Shamanism Real?
I like this question because it is what I asked, myself, for several years. As I intently studied shamanism and began a shamanic practice, I found great joy in it. But I asked myself at least daily: is this real, or are you making it up? I decided at the time that it didn’t matter to me whether it was real or not; it made me happy. And yet, there was a nagging doubt in me: how crazy is it to engage in a practice I don’t even know to be real?
As often happens in shamanic practice, a wild synchronicity eventually embraced me. In a healing session with the woman who was then my teacher, she began to describe a place in the “spiritual realm” that was my “power spot.” A power spot is a place that a shamanic journeyer visits routinely—perhaps every day. In a power spot, one gathers ones power, establishes connection to ones helping spirits, and prepares to embark on shamanic work in a strong way. And my then-teacher described in perfect detail my very unusual power spot, a spot that couldn’t be found in our world, only in a spiritual world where our rules of physics, biology, geology and botany do not apply. It is a spot so peculiar in its specifics as to be outside of the realm of ordinary reality.
It was that moment with my then-teacher in which I began to understand that this shamanism thing is real. I was floored, and my life was changed forever. Since that moment, I’ve had many moments in which the effectiveness, the reality, of shamanism and its practices have stepped starkly forward. Yes, dear reader, shamanism is real. It exists for us, and it is a technology that helps us to heal, to step more fully into wholeness, into our destinies, and into relationship with the Divine. I invite you to invite shamanism into your life.
I’ll confess right up front that I’ve struggled to get to this spot, my first blog post. And I’m not even talking about my usual struggle with semi-colons versus commas, Arial versus Verdana or even my titanic passes through the thesaurus looking for the word that perfectly describes the nuances of my idea.
 I mean that I’ve struggled for years to give life to this web site, this simple bare-bones statement of who I am and what is my work in the world. And I’ve struggled for weeks with the text of this first blog entry: what new is there to say about the struggle of beginning?
Modern life and technology has made it possible for us to regularly engage in the act of setting out. The kinds of settings-out our ancestors engaged in were epic and huge, requiring tremendous acts of courage, expenditures of time and resources, and even the consumption of human lives. Migrations and explorations are the stuff of our history: entire continents, people and cultures “discovered” halfway around the world; the flight into space; the journey of our species to become one human race through all of our wars and peaces, disasters and triumphs. I can’t help but contrast these epic efforts with the ease with which we modern humans can simply open an electronic space and create something entirely new where nothing existed before.
And yet, despite this ease, I have still experienced a great reluctance in this stepping out, this setting out. When I’m stuck in a process, I sometimes like to ponder the cultural understanding of that process, and so I often begin my process of getting unstuck with the dictionary. And this time, I find that Webster’s has handily provided me with a deeper understanding of my dilmena, and a roadmap for how to free myself to move forward. Here is what I found:
Set Out is a verb originating from the 14th century. (I’m already delighted by the connection to the ancient explorers who overcame their own huge hurdles in order to set out.) And I find three definitions:
1 a : to arrange and present graphically or systematically b : to mark out (as a design) : lay out the plan of?2 : to state, describe, or recite at length <distributed copies of a pamphlet setting out his ideas in full>?3 : to begin with a definite purpose: intend, undertake.
In this ordinary dictionary definition lie tremendous tools for getting myself unstuck in this process. Taking Webster’s advice, my first step was to mark out a step by step plan for my own setting out. You’re reading some of the fruit of that plan now; there is more to come down the road. Webster’s second bit of advice is to state my ideas in full; and my newly arrived web site does just that. I hope you’ll take a look and let me know what you’d like to see in its pages in the future.
Finally, Webster’s third bit of advice: Begin with a purpose, a definite intention. This is, perhaps, Webster’s most critical advice. When we act within our purpose in the world, when we act in concert with Spirit and in connection to the Universal Life Force, our intention is the critical factor to shaping the outcome. When our intention is unclear, our path forward cannot be sharp and clear. When our intention is false, our results cannot be true. And this was the final key to getting myself unstuck: understanding and stating my intention, then pouring that intention into my work. And so, my intention that I reach you through my words, and that you are led to your own healing through them, has finally freed me to set out on this blog. I thank you for the part you play in affording me this freedom.
A query: Where in your life do you need to set out? What do you call the place where you are stuck? Pick up a dictionary and see what your culture says about that thing. Is there a map for your freedom in there?
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