STEPHEN JENKINSON ON DYING

This guy is doing some events in the UK next year. At one point in the video he talks about a young woman he goes to see who is dying from cancer. And she says to him that she is seriously ill. And he thinks no, that is an avoidance of the fact that you are dying. Your life now IS your death. And her Mum turns up and colludes in the avoidance by praising her daughter's brave battle against the cancer.

SHAMANISM, POLITICS and WHOLENESS

Things are very intense politically at the moment, in the UK at any rate. We are maybe most of us feeling strongly one way or the other. How does this work out from a Spirit perspective?

Our primary task is to become whole, balanced human beings; and maybe to help others do so, by being whole (to some extent) ourselves. This is what all the various practices and ceremonies we do are aimed at. And that balance comes about through placing Spirit at the centre of our wheel, listening to that voice, and letting the rest our being organise itself around that centre. It is a long process, a slow process - and we are not always sure what is Spirit and what is something else - but it is the only one worth doing.

One way we achieve balance is through the mind, through the views we hold. We humans are perennially one-sided and partial. We take the side of the view that matches who we are. This is a well-known psychological finding. The judgements we make are primarily instinctual, and the reasons to justify those judgements come afterwards. In this respect, we are like an elephant with a tiny rider on the top. The elephant makes the decisions instinctively/intuitively, and the rider on top is the rational mind that thinks it is making the decisions.

It is, if you like, the North of the Medicine Wheel thinking it is in charge, that it is the Elder; but all along it is being led by the South, by Emotion.

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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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So I think our primary job as teachers/healers in the area of politics is not to back one side against the other (though obviously we will have our own preferences, and will vote that way), but to do these things:

(1) Be conscious in yourself that you vote mainly on the basis of a feeling in yourself, not on the basis of a reason. Be true to that feeling, for it is who you are, but also stand back a bit from it, be conscious.

(2) Develop an awareness of why people vote differently to you. I don't mean just with the mind, I mean FEEL it, for only then can you have the necessary empathy. It is not our place as healers to take sides. Remember that people are generally being true to something in themselves with their allegiances. They are not 'wrong', and this needs honouring. Don't 'awfulise' the other side as heartless or Marxist or whatever - this is just one-sided consciousness at work, it is shadow projection, which is the norm in politics on a popular level.

(3) Watch this guy and take what he says to heart. The left/right divide is worldwide, and both sides have points that need to be listened to. And if you are on this site, it is most likely the 'liberal' box that you need to get out of. Though it may be the right wing box. Get out of all boxes. Become conscious. All views are provisional, we don't know what is going on really, we can never know the bigger picture. All is the Great Mystery.

WHAT IS INITIATION?

I don’t know much about formal initiation. It is something we don’t have in our culture any more. I guess the nearest I got to it as a kid was when I didn’t get confirmed into the Catholic Church. I did the communion, but I’d been changed to C of E, for reasons of schooling and social advancement, by the time confirmation came along.

And then when I was 27 (in 1985) I joined a Buddhist Order, and that was supposed to be an initiation, but it didn’t feel like one, it didn’t feel like much at all. However, when I had applied to join that Order earlier that same year, that was something else. That request amounted to the affirmation of something deep within me that had been growing for some years, it was a commitment to what us Shamans would call Spirit, to making that connection the centre of my life. And Spirit responded – over the next couple of months I felt the seed of what I had done taking root and spreading throughout my being, like it had been waiting for me to say yes, I will do this.

So that was an initiation. I think an initiation is essentially an inner experience in which some new element of Spirit, or of the Jungian Self, comes into consciousness, and our whole being rearranges itself around that. And I have had 2 further major periods of initiation since then – one when I was 40, and another in the last few years.

It is much easier to think of things in an external kind of way, so that initiation becomes a particular series of ceremonies and maybe trials that one goes through. In the case of young people in a tribal situation, it marks the transition into adulthood. In the Buddhist Tantric traditions, initiations are often into connection with particular deities, that get passed on from the guru to the disciple.

From the Movie 'The Wound'

And ceremony is of course a powerful thing, it can catalyse a shift in consciousness. And it can also be a bit empty, a rite that is done because it has always been done, and gives the group an identity. In any case, what is essential is the inner event, the new consciousness that comes in, and around which our being re-organises itself, it is a new 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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The ceremonies of initiation are a formalisation of something that life does to us anyway. If we are open, if we are willing and have the courage to say yes at a deep level when life demands change of us, then we will be initiated. And it will keep happening.

This is the nature of the Shamanic illness that one reads about in Siberian cultures. The young person, leading a ‘normal’ life according to the values of her people, becomes ill, and will not recover unless she says yes to becoming a shaman, to living according to what the Spirits ask of her. It is about saying yes to an initiation, and about saying yes to what one always was.

I see this a lot in our culture – the hard-to-treat long-term illnesses like ME and chronic fatigue and rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome and various auto-immune diseases and allergies – they often seem to me to have a big soul component, and that their resolution lies in saying yes to Spirit, to listening to ourselves in a new way. And it’s not an overnight thing, it can take years and can be gradual.

I was doing some astrology with someone yesterday, and you can often see the initiatory process through this lens. This person was having such a difficult time, and I could see why. And I could also see that the end result needed to be initiation. But before this can happen, the old often has to go. So things stop working, our old activities no longer have the same interest for us, and events may seem to be working against us, what seem to be awful things may happen. And you might think you are going mad, and certainly the medical establishment may want to give you pills or diagnose you. And this is because the understanding of what is really happening is not there in our culture. You have to seek it out. It is about a different type of consciousness that is creative and comes from Spirit, and life is demanding it of us.

Life can be ruthless when it wants us to unfold. And in a way we can feel honoured when this happens, because it means the Spirits think we are a worthy vehicle, that they can work through us. Some people, you see these periods of difficulty going on, and they hang on to the old until it passes, and they seem able to do that, and then they reconstitute their lives as they were before.

It is all about letting Spirit in, about living close to that which both is us and is more than us. And with the best will in the world, however open we have become – and that is something that is built, that is forged over time – we still often have our rigidities that block the next level of incarnation of Spirit. And so we get dismembered as a prelude to being initiated again, and we may spend years in a kind of wasteland before Spirit considers us ready, sufficiently surrendered if you like, for the next level.

We lack tradition in our culture. That is a lack, but I also think it can be an advantage: we are not tied to particular ways of doing things, so we can be creative, and it is so important to be creative. And it also means we can see to the essence of things, to the inner events that the outer forms are pointing towards.

And in the case of initiation, it means we can see it as something that life does to us anyway, and it is not easy, it often involves the most difficult things that have ever happened to us. But if we are open to it – and sometimes it is just a matter of hanging on in there and consoling ourselves with chocolate – then new life, in a way that we had never imagined, but had always been there in the wings, can grace us.

PHILOSOPHY, THE DREAMING and WHY SHAMANS ARE DEAD

Martin Heidegger

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his 1927 book ‘Being and Time’, accused the Western tradition of having forgotten, since ancient Greek times, the main question of philosophy, which is what does it mean to BE? He reckoned that it had already gone wrong with Plato and Aristotle in their assertion that the cosmos pre-dates us, so that we come into the world as subjects merely seeking to know its objects. “From then on, according to Heidegger, Western thought was led down the false path of only attempting to know the truth about things in the world, rather than posing the more primordial question of how it is that we have a world in the first place.”*

Heidegger’s position, in my view, is in accord with a Shamanic view (note I don’t say THE Shamanic view, I don’t think like that.) For Shamanism, the world is continually dreamed into being. All we have is subjectivity, our own experience. There is no firm ‘objective’ reality (the basis of science) into which mere ‘subjectivity’ must be subsumed if we wish to have true knowledge.

No, if you are a Native American and from a distance you see an owl sitting in a fir tree, and as you get closer it becomes a fir cone, then it is a spirit that first presented itself to you as an owl, and then as a fir cone. How interesting, how wonderful, what is it trying to tell you? The modern view is that there is an ‘objective’ reality, and to start with you got it wrong and thought it was an owl.

This is so illogical. The slightest reflection on the brain tells us that our perception of an external world is a fabrication, a model that works, and that everyone else’s model is slightly different, or very different, to our own. All we can know is our subjective experience. And there is an important point here: we have been taught to downgrade that as ‘merely’ subjective. And when we do that we become lost and disempowered, for we attempt to anchor ourselves in something external and contingent. No, we need to reclaim the subjective, honour it, trust it in its depths, for it is all we have, it is who we are. Taking care of that is our primary calling in life: anything we do for others comes out of that primary care of that deep thing within us. Getting people to listen to that is, I think, our main job as healers.

So the world is being continually dreamed into existence by the primacy of Being. This dreaming is all there is, but we easily have the illusion of a solid world external to ourselves, and we forget about the dreaming. As Shamans, we know the dreaming. It gets called the Otherworld, and that is itself a concession to our corporeal forgetting. In reality, this world and the Otherworld are the same. I think this is something that many of us come to experience over time: the Otherworld, the Spirit world, is just there, we don’t need drums or rattles or whatever to ‘travel’ there. And that means we are always connected to the dreaming, at least when we’re not too busy or in the grip of our shadow stuff :).

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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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So when we do work for people, we are working on the level of where things really happen. WE ARE ALTERING THE DREAMING OF THE WORLD. What a wonderful and profound thing to be able to do. And of course, it is not ‘us’ that is doing it, because the self is also a concession to corporeal existence.

And when we die, the dreaming stops producing the experience of a world ‘external’ to ourselves, I think that is all that happens. ‘All’! That is hugely threatening if you haven’t practised loosening the sense of self and its anchoring in an apparently solid world, that in turn gives us an illusion of a substantial self. But the experienced Shaman is already dead, in the sense that it no longer makes a difference if he/she has a body, for it is experienced as contingent, illusory.

It is on this dreaming level that we can have the greatest effect, although we can never know exactly what that will be, for it is not a simple cause and effect relationship. Prayer - a conversation with the natural world – also brings us onto this level. Words can come from this level too, and they can really hit home for people: you may not be the sort of shaman that bungs bits of soul around, but you may work with words instead. And it is also a reason that activism may not be our thing. As a Native American friend said to me, all some elders do is pray.

*Angus Nichols - Times Literary Supplement 6/12/19

Introductory Day run by Barry Goddard

SHAMANISM

An Introductory Day at Penmaen Village Hall, Swansea

Sun 9^th Feb 2020                     10am to 5pm

Ancient people understood that humans are a part of the natural world, and that sacredness is everywhere, that all is imbued with Spirit. And that the purpose of human life is to become balanced, or whole. There were no holy books or religious founders, just ways of being in the world, and stories and ceremonies and practices to remind people of their connection to Spirit.

‘Shamanism’ refers to our modern attempts to reclaim this natural way of being in the world, and the range of practices many of us use: Sweatlodges, Shamanic Journeying, Pipe Ceremonies, Trance Dance, Medicine Wheel, Vision Quest….

The Medicine Wheel sees the human as made up of Spirit, Emotion, Body and Mind, with life as a process of continually bringing them into balance in order to find our true centre. These 4 aspects also have correspondences with the 4 Elements, the 4 Seasons and the 4 stages of life. On this introductory day, we will focus on Spirit and Emotion: what have been the points of transformation in our lives, where some new element has entered in; and what have been the most serious challenges, that are also often part of the same transformative processes?

The event will be facilitated by myself. Here's a bit about me, written in the 3rd person:  

Barry Goddard first came across Shamanism in the mid 90s. He’d been involved in running Buddhist Centres in London for 15 years, and while he liked much of the philosophy behind it, the organised aspect had come to feel confining. It brought him to a point where nothing seemed to work anymore. Shamanism, which has no holy books or gurus, sees Spirit everywhere, and which considers humans to be an integral part of the natural world, was to him a delicious experience. And it placed the emphasis firmly back on listening to himself, instead of to somebody else’s teaching. Through his experiences of shamanic journeying, sweat lodges, trance dance and the Medicine Wheel, his whole life changed. Astrology also came on the scene for him more strongly at this time, and as an intuitive art, he finds it to be very compatible with Shamanism. 

In the early noughties, a Chippewa Cree teacher started staying at his house in Glastonbury, running sweatlodges and pipe ceremonies, telling traditional stories, and discussing metaphysics around the breakfast table. This gave Barry another perspective, and since then he has been asking himself what it is, in the absence of a tradition of our own, that is essential to Shamanism? And while seeing the benefits of a tradition with its detailed understanding of symbol and ceremony, Barry also thinks that our lack of tradition gives the freedom for each of us to be creative. Essential to this path, he says, is listening to our own Spirit rather than to all the other voices that try to tell us what to believe and how to live. This requires courage and time – Shamanism is a gradual path – but all the practices and ceremonies point towards this deep listening to ourselves, out of which comes the life that we need to be leading, the only one that can really work.

Barry lives in Moretonhampstead, which is on Dartmoor in Devon, where he loves to walk. He runs the UK Shamanic Community Facebook group, is involved with running the annual UK Shamanic Gathering in Somerset, and writes a blog at www.shamanicfreestate.blogspot.co.uk

To book, message me on FB or email BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk Cost for the day: £50. Please bring lunch to share.