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.
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| 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.
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