THE EAGLE and THE WAY SHOWER

35 years ago I had a dream that I was an eagle launching off a high crag into the infinite blue, and as I took wing I lost confidence that I could fly. The intervening decades have been a period of slowly building that knowledge of who I really am, with a couple of dismemberings along the way.

Today I was over at Derek Gane's monthly journeying group, and for a while I was that eagle. And one thing that showed me, or reminded me of, is that I do like the big picture shamanically, I am not identified with a particular approach. And that helps me see the essence of what this Shamanic thing is about. That is what the big picture enables you to do, to find the heart of things.

But then also as I was the eagle, I found myself being carried along by strong winds, and I'd never thought of that before. I thought Eagle was just big picture, but no, because you are soaring, Spirit finds it easy to take you where it wants, more easily in a way than if you have your 4 feet planted firmly on the ground, which is its own medicine.

And those winds were strong, and I don't know where they were taking me, and I don't need to know, but it feels very good. No particular major course of action yet feels right in my life, and that is because I need to be taken to where those winds are taking me.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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And then we were each given an oracle card, and I picked The Way Shower. On shit. I'm English and I'd rather be modest, but Spirit seems to want me otherwise. So here it is. One of my abilities, which comes through in my Facebook posts and blogs, is to be able to articulate experience. Some people have deep experience but aren't that good at putting it into words. Some people are good with words and ideas, but it can feel a bit cerebral. I can do both, and this is why I sometimes get corresponding responses from people, that I have expressed something they feel. This is what writers do. Or more than that, I have expressed something they had kept quiet about but that needed saying. I have also found courage, and that is because like the armadillo I have developed a thick skin, yet keeping, I hope, a soft heart. Living with others disagreement and even judgement forges character and gives you freedom and a sense of solidity in who you are.

So what would give me the right to be the Way Shower? Experience of the Way of course. The first point is that there is no' Way', in the sense of going from A to B. We are not going somewhere, like Heaven or Hell. That is an old and out of balance paradigm, that leads to hubris or despair, and that has continued in the idea of 'Evolution'. No, we are looking for the centre of the Medicine Wheel, we circle around that true centre of ourselves, like I have done with the Eagle all these years, not even knowing a lot of the time that that was what I was doing.

So I am a Shower of the Way firstly because I know there is no Way. And then secondly because I know, at least to a degree, how to navigate that boat which is ourselves as it is carried along on the river of Spirit. On the deepest levels, we cannot set goals, rather our task is to listen to and trust in Spirit. And in that is everything, all the abundance we could wish for and all the joy and meaning we could wish for and more. But to get to that point of listening.... there's the rub. I have been dismembered twice in the last 35 years, all with the aim of getting me to listen more deeply. That is what the Shamanic Illness is about. Spirit will take us to death's door or beyond in its compassionate imperative to get us to listen and to live accordingly. It is a slow process, and it can be confusing, and I can be with you on this one, I will stay the course, and in this sense I am also a Way Shower.

And I am the Way Shower because I am the Eagle. I can tell you about this Shamanism because I understand the heart of it, the essence of it. And I am the Way Shower because I have the courage and inclination to proclaim it, this feels like who I am.

As I say, I have no major course of action clear in my mind yet. But that is because those strong winds have not yet taken me to the place they will be taking me; have not yet given me the perspective and vision that is the essence of this Air element that is my home. But the Journey and the Card have pointed me towards what Spirit has in mind. I just need to keep navigating the boat

SCIENCE and THE MEDICINE WHEEL

We are a hungry people. We eat 3 times a day, and so our stomachs have pretty much a full-time job. We are hungry because we are disconnected from Spirit. This process began 1000 years ago when Christianity removed the sacred from the everyday to an authority up there somewhere. From that point it has been just one step to getting rid of the sacred altogether, as materialist Science has done. We think Science has made us more advanced than any people before; in reality, as the first society to largely ditch the sacred, we are the most out of balance.

The story of life is not about a linear progression from lower to higher stages of development, but a circling around a centre, and we have moved a long way from that centre. The Medicine Wheel shows us this principle in our individual lives. We are at the centre when the 4 Elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air are in balance. Or Spirit, Emotion, Body and Mind respectively.

Fire and Water are the foundational directions, out of which arise their opposites, much as Death arises out of Birth. So the Body (West) is dreamed into being by Spirit (East), while Thoughts (North) are largely the froth on the ocean currents of our Emotions (South).

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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One form of imbalance occurs when Mind and the Body acquire lives of their own, imagining themselves to be independent of that which creates them, namely Emotion and Spirit. And this split is precisely what characterises the scientific method, which relies principally on Theory (Air) and Data (Earth). There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it so easily forgets its debt to, its foundation in, Fire and Water.

And I think this forgetting has spread to the way we live, so that we are often a people of Mind and Body, with Emotion and Spirit in their shadow forms. So we are hungry for mental and bodily stimulation. I have a hunch that the digestive system has more roles to play if it is not set to work all the time. There should be laws against it. It is, perhaps, symbolic: we are endlessly stimulated, endlessly 'eating', and we easily judge negatively the 'nothing' time when stillness can happen, and when Fire and Water can reveal themselves and feed us with food that will nourish.

THE SHAMAN'S DAEMON

I don't know if any of you are Geminis, but if you are, you might have noticed that you have a light, socially adept side and then something else behind that: darker, uncompromising, transpersonal, a force of nature that works through you. It has beauty and sensitivity, yet is also ruthless. Your night personality.

You don't need to be a Gemini to experience this. Gemini just illustrates this interplay between personal and transpersonal most clearly. If you are any sort of healer or teacher, then there is this other person in you, who is your real life; who if you follow, then your life will unfold as it needs to and you have nothing to worry about. But you will still be given some serious grappling, you will be presented with situations and choices that are very difficult, that really demand of you, otherwise how will you grow? If there is nothing seriously difficult in your life, then you may not be listening to the daemon. And you will know you are not listening.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, a Protestant impression. If you rise to the ongoing challenges, if there is always that gritty flavour, then you will experience joy as well, the joy that comes from spirit that is divine, that comes from inner union, and which is not generally part of ordinary life.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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These thoughts arose out of my consideration of the preponderance of Geminis in our political life right now, and the way they can switch between clowning and ruthless determination. And then a series of lectures on Jung by James Hillman that I am listening to. Now if anyone was a Shaman, Jung was. If you want to understand our path, go to Jung. And at one point, Hillman says that Jung was 2 people - the adapted bourgeouis socialised one, and the 'extremely difficult' personality who was occult and driven, rough and ruthless, and subject to rages. He was a contradiction. It is a contradiction that maybe many of us who do this work, who are driven in this way, experience, because we have to get on in the world as well as being true to this other thing.

I think we long for the daemon as well as being scared of it. In Pullman's His Dark Materials, the daemons are animal familiars, and this has proved a powerful and popular idea. Without a daemon, we have no soul. But we don't want too much of it, thank you very much, because we are tiny fearful people who swagger around like something much bigger.

As Rilke says, 'Every angel is terrible'. The beauty of the daemon, and the demands he/she will make of us, are too much for the little lives we want to lead, surrounded by false certainties, and shielded from death. If you let your animal helper really have her way, she will take over your life, you will live on an edge that has beauty and the bracing air of a high mountain crag.

And who you are will be a mystery to those around you, you will be lonely until you realise that Spirit is always there for you, there is an inner joyful union to be found that is never lonely. What is loneliness, but a longing for this, which connects you far more deeply than the dependency that we often mistake for relationship.

So we dip our toes in, because we cannot resist the soulfulness of the daemon. The Shaman's illness is all about the ordinary person wanting to remain so, and the spirits saying no buddy, we have something much bigger in store for you, and you ain't going to do this voluntarily, so we'll make you ill until you listen. And we see so much of this, people with their ME and fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome and autoimmune diseases and it is NOT 'psychological' but a call from the soul to listen, and sometimes people do, and even then it is a long process, this shamanic path is a slow one.

And sometimes, tragically, and with the complicity of the medical establishment, people turn the illness back on itself and make it who they are, they put themselves in a box, and this can go on for decades, and yes it can eventually kill, because life will not be blocked in its unfolding, the daemon needs eventually to be listened to, and we often learn by our not listening. But it is the only way to live, and it is a life that is much larger and more edgy and joyful than the received values of society can provide.

SHAMANISM IS UNIVERSAL

There is a way in which I like the fact that the Medicine Wheel I use is not Celtic but Native American. What I like is that it connects me to a sense that the whole earth is our home, that we are one people who borrow from each other and learn from each other. Of course local connection to the land and to culture is important. But we can do both. 

Shamanism is a universal phenomenon, and modern life, with its access to all cultures, can show us this. Yes, our world culture has become disconnected as never before from a reciprocal relationship with the earth. But we also have the possibility as never before of being universal in our sympathies and in our shamanic practices.
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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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TRANCE DANCE and THE FALL OF MANKIND

Within the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition, people often meditate with their eyes open. The idea behind this is that the divide we make between the inner world of Spirit and the outer world of the senses is artificial, it is a duality to be overcome. This world and the otherworld are the same place; it is a distinction we make because we humans get so caught up in material activities - and this is natural if you are a busy adult - that the world of Spirit that drives this dream recedes from awareness. Hence many of our practices and ceremonies: they are there to remind us of our origins in Spirit. An experienced medicine person does not need these ceremonies, for she will feel the presence of Spirit with her all the time. She does not need to journey to a drum, for example, for Spirit with its input is already there.

POSSESSION

Trance Dance is a way of journeying that involves the body. What has become the standard method of journeying does not involve the body, and the reason for this is not just its origins in academia via Michael Harner, but goes further back to the Christian split between matter and spirit: the world of matter is the devil's domain. If you exclude the body, then you exclude the most vital connection to Spirit that we can make, and in that way religion can control people.

So I am making a bit of a suggestion here: that in our journeying method that excludes the body, we are unconsciously perpetuating the Biblical Mythology of the Fall, and all the prejudice against the feminine principle that came with it, and to which which our Shamanism is supposed to be a corrective.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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Connection to Spirit via the body, suppressed by the church in medieval times, has been returning to our culture via rock and roll, sporting crowds and the American Pentecostal churches. In Shamanism, one method we use is Trance Dance, and this brings us close to eg Mongolian Shamans, who dance. Ongod Orood - embodying the Spirits.

From what I understand, the Mongolians dance with a curtain over their eyes, that breaks up the light. We go one step further, usually, and wear blindfolds. And this is what I want to address, from both the Dzogchen view point of not separating this world and the otherworld, and from the point of view of our historic issues with the body and Spirit.

I have just been on a Trance Dance weekend with Leo Rutherford, and for my last 2 dances I removed my blindfold, and the freedom that gave me to move vigorously and freely around the room considerably deepened my trance. I have been trance dancing for 20 years, and this weekend I had probably my deepest ever embodiment of my animal helper. It was joyful and delicious. When I trance, it is immediate, and my eyes are looking sufficiently within for the visual input not to distract me, and it is how I do healing work. And the trade-off, if one is needed, for the free physical movement is more than worth it. If you watch videos of possession dances - which generally go much deeper than what we do, involving a total surrender of the ego, something most of us would find terrifying - they do not wear blindfolds, they dance freely.

I can see the rationale for blindfolds, but I also find myself thinking of our historic issues with, and downgrading of, the body, our most vital connection to Spirit. And I wonder if blindfolds are not also an unconscious way of keeping it all safe, of not giving the body too much free rein, for where might that lead?

PLANETARY ASCENSION: THE NEW JUDGMENT DAY

In recent years I have been encountering the idea quite regularly that this reality is going to split into two, and take those of a higher vibration off to wherever those with a higher vibration go to, and leave behind the lower vibration and its troubles. It gets called 'Planetary Ascension'. I encounter it amongst Shamanic people - which is why I am commenting - and it is often channelled, which is intended to add veracity to the claim.

I think it needs to be treated as a story, as does just about everything, including science, rather than literal fact. Spirit speaks in stories. I also think that channelled information needs an extra dose of discernment in how we treat it. Yes, it can have a lot of power, and you can feel it when it does, and it needs to be taken seriously when that power is there; but its mouthpiece is a limited human being, and some of the stuff people come out with is just bollocks, and sometimes they are otherwise gifted and experienced people that others look up to coming out with the bollocks. So we need to feel our way into this stuff. As I say, feel the power when it is there, but put big inverted commas around the words, even if the person doing the channelling isn't.

I also think there is an element of groupthink around it. Planetary Ascension gets presented as a fact which one is supposed to be sensitive enough to perceive, and one can feel like a party-pooper for questioning it, not that I usually let that stop me.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

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And then there is the mythology around it. I cannot see the difference between the idea of Planetary Ascension and Judgment Day, when all the good guys finally go to heaven and the bad guys are cast into hell. Humanity's myths are perennial, they keep returning in new forms - think of Evolution and the medieval Great Chain of Being, one is an inversion of the other. In promoting Planetary Ascension, one is unconsciously revisiting that crude myth of the Last Judgment. I think PA merits some psychological exploration in this sort of way.

PA is a myth that is fired by hubris and escapism, but presenting itself as redemptive. The hubris is that we 'spiritual' people are an elect, a different species to the point that we deserve a whole different world. And it is escapist: the world, as usual, is going through a troubled time, and when those troubles reach what seems to be a crisis, people start coming out with redemptive myths and prophecies. PA is a prophecy, and most prophecies do not come true, if you examine the evidence.

And most importantly, our purpose here is to be part of humanity and its tribulations, to be deeply engaged with whatever it is that is happening. Because whatever is happening is also part of who we are, and we need to sense the mysterious workings of Spirit within that too. And that engagement may not be obvious, we may be a hermit who prays, but are nonetheless engaged for that, maybe even more so. We are one people, we are not composed of the damned and the elect. The whole point of Shamanism as a corrective to institutional Christianity is that sacredness exists everywhere, rather than in some higher dimension to which the privileged few have access.

I like to try to be nuanced and to see both sides of a matter. But when it comes to Planetary Ascension, I find it hard to do so. It is a bad story in so many ways, it is a denial of so much of what Shamanism is about. In my opinion. And I've done my best to be polite about it 🤣