MY WORTHY OPPONENTS

I don't know about you, but the people I've learned most from are the ones I've had to struggle against. I guess I should feel grateful, and indeed I am, but through gritted teeth. I have been pushed to claim the truth of who I am repeatedly for most of my life.

The first was my Dad, a businessman, who judged everyone by their monetary worth, and led me to feel that I could have no self-respect outside of his way of seeing the world. After that came my Buddhist teacher for 18 years, who judged everyone according to his own spiritual paradigm, and also led me to feel that I could have no self-respect outside of his way of seeing the world. Against both of these I had to believe in myself and rebel, and the emotional catch-up afterwards took some years. Using the shamanic paradigm, the spirits wanted to claim me for their own, but I did not trust them, and indeed they had to make me ill in my mid 30s for some years before I would listen. But once I did, everything began to come right.

And then the first Shamanic event I went on in 1996, a week in the wilds of Wales, the guy leading it had something new, a spirit about him that spoke deeply to me. But he was wrapped up in his own image of himself and preyed on vulnerable people, and I was old enough by then to see that pretty quickly. And then shortly after that came my first long relationship - 18 years - and like everything before it, there was something genuinely in it for me, as well as a sting. She had an unusual intuitive ability, but also a disconnect from people, and particularly from me, so that in the end I was just being used, though it took some years for me to believe that.

In the last 4 years I have for the first time been free of anyone who needed me to be something for them. I have spent most of my life around people who wanted to deal me knock-out blows, and I have kept standing up again, and that has at times been to the derision of others. But I am also (figuratively) a heavyweight boxer, and this is what that long journey has taught me. I can now stand up and punch them back just as hard. I have a confidence in who I am and in what I think that is hard-won, and I do not have the usual fears of what others may think.

It means I do not easily fit in anywhere. I certainly do not fit in with shamanism-as-religion, which will always be for the majority, for that is human nature, and something we hopefully transition away from over time. No, I trust my own connection, and I will always put that first, however indigenous and authentic the teachings that are coming my way. That is the difference between religion and spirituality: do you put your own judgement first, or that of the teacher and his/her tradition? For us shamanisers, that means indigenous teachers: can you keep your own end up around them, or do you treat them as special, as inevitably knowing more than you do?

So there is something in me that is my own, that has been hard-won over decades. It is like a clear spring that comes up from a pool as big as the universe. It is usually there when I'm doing readings or teaching. I am 63 and I feel I have the main thing to do in my life yet, based on what I have spent all my life building, without quite realising it at the time. The 2 books I wrote earlier this year - one on the Medicine Wheel, one on Astrology - will probably be some kind of springboard. I don't know what is coming next, but I have a deep sense of a powerful seed of something that I will be speaking from. That is also quite casual and natural, because that is the way I work. I shy away from being a 'name' with special abilities and powers and initiations. Yet I also know I have something real to offer that needs to be passed on. It is a matter of letting whatever it is work through me for a good while, and then moving on.