I have a deep sense of shamanism being fundamental to who I am, but I wouldn't find it easy to say what it is, and there's people who won't use the word, but I think that can be a bit snobbish, like yeah course there are chancers out there using the word, but you'll find that wherever you go, it's better to just carry on instead of going purist on it, 'cos that just creates its own religion. I love shamanism, I will defend the word!
One thing that matters to me is that I have this sense of spirit presences guiding my life, maybe putting me through the mill for years on end. And that is fundamental, maybe that is why I call myself shamanic. And I have sometimes had the sense of my spirits and someone else's spirits holding hands, as it were, and that's really rare, it doesn't happen often in a lifetime, and that's something we go with if we have any sense. And it's a different thing to desire, though it doesn't exclude it. But Hollywood doesn't really talk about it. And it's not the same thing as when there's projection involved, though it is easy to mistake the latter for the former.
Anyway, I used to get a bit lost in this idea that to do shamanism you have to have spirit guides that you talk to, coming out of the core shamanism thing. But really, it's a speciality, that may not be how you work. You may just have nudges, or know to do certain things.
The main thing is being on this path of personal transformation. There are no bibles, no prophets, no teachers to idolise - well, there may be, because that's something probably most of us go through, it's part of the process - it's just us and this dreaming called life and becoming fully part of it.
Yes, that is a big part of the transformational process: incarnation. And that involves coming into relationship with all 4 elements within us. It's not enough to be Air and Fire and visionary - that is called spiritual bypass. It's about Water and Earth too, the child and adult of the Medicine Wheel I use. So it is about arriving fully on the Earth, and bringing our spirits into that too, they want to incarnate, they want to be part of our lives, and they will help us transform all that wounded, painful stuff. It may take decades, it may be there for the rest of our lives, but it keeps our feet on the ground, it is hard to be too egotistical when you're limping and you know you're limping.
So I don't have a feeling for running courses that qualify people to be practitioners of something or other. I have no beef with that, it's just something I don't connect with for myself. But I do have a feeling for being with people on the transformational process. It is what I have been doing in my astrology readings for years. My adult life has consisted of 2 18 year transformational periods, though in each case I didn't know that was what was happening till near the end.
The 1st one, in my 20s and 30s, was the teacher teaching - about finding my deeper, existential autonomy, and not giving it away to a teacher. Of course, every self-respecting person thinks they have this autonomy, until one day they wake up and find that their values are just the ones around them, they are received, and they have been assessing their lives according to how well they perform according to these received criteria.
And the 2nd 18 year process, in my 40s and 50s, was the relationship teaching, and again I lost some of my mojo, I was even persuaded to distance myself from the shamanic world, and that really did start to sink me. But I also found that thing that blokes often don't find till they are older, which is the ability to relate and to feel, and as that happened, so did I realise that I was no longer with the right person. But it was still a protracted struggle to find my way out, to trust my instincts enough to know it was right to go.
And both of these processes always had an element of misery that lasted right through, and sometimes a lot of misery. They took me to the Underworld - which is where you often need to go to transform. So I have a sense of the transformational process, that happens in so many different ways, and I know that I can be with people in that. And it is fundamental. If who you are isn't moving, changing in some way then you aren't living.
So I reckon this is what I'll be doing more of as time goes on. I don't know when and who with and how, I'll leave that to the spirits. That's one thing this path teaches you: there's so much you don't have to worry about, it gets taken care of, and if something goes 'wrong', or not as you imagined, trust it. It is maybe necessary for reasons you don't yet know, and it is taken care of too. As long as you keep your camel tethered, and know where your camel begins and ends
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