IS THERE A WAY FORWARD?

The way forward for myself with Shamanism as a collective phenomenon isn't clear. We need to work with society, not against it, as Medicine people in any traditional society would. The basic attitude needs to be one of appreciation, from a place of strength and discernment, rather than mistrust from a place of insecurity, of not having done the shadow work. That oppositional place is often a necessary starting point, but it is very provisional, it needs to be grown out of.

Society is what it is, because we humans are what we are. It is not a threat. We have another basis within us that is Spirit, that is limitless, that is not dependent on the tragi-comedy of collective human existence. Recent events around the pandemic have showed me how deep is the oppositional attitude in the Shamanic world to our collective. I don't yet know how to approach it.

What I do know is that a necessary step, maybe even the next step, forward for many of us lies in accepting the collective for what it is, and in turn we shall become more at ease with who we are. This is a deep thing, and it is not a compromise; rather, it is about accepting part of who we are, for we are collective creatures, we belong, and that is also a metaphysical truth. It grounds us in a new way, it gives us authority and strength, it connects us. Some Shamanic teachers convey the opposite, they perpetuate this opposition, and they are not serving themselves or anyone else. You could say it comes down to shadow work.

My thoughts for some time have been on how to address this oppositional attitude, indeed can I, it is so prevalent, it has become so fundamental? I am sure that Spirit will show me. For the moment, I just need to keep writing :)

DEMENTIA MEDICINE?

I once heard a story about a Native American Medicine Woman who got dementia. She'd been well-known and respected in her time. But now she was no longer what she had been. She would sit there, vacant, saying nothing, recognising no-one. One day her daughter and a friend were sitting with her, and the friend was commiserating about what a tragedy it was. Suddenly the old lady sat bolt upright, her old self, and said brightly, "Don't worry, dear, I'm just having a different experience." And then reverted to her now familiar dementia self.

My mother had dementia for many years, and once it was obviously there, she became much easier to be with. Before that, she used to drive everyone away, myself included (she had Sun conjunct Mars in Aries.) Once she had made the early and difficult transition, she was happy in a way I had never known her to be. I once said to her, I know you can't communicate, but I think you are having a different experience which is hard for me to imagine, and you seem happy in it. At that point she tried to grab my hand, the first time there had been any kind of attempt at communication from her for a very long time. So maybe she felt recognised. Towards the end, one of the staff at the home commiserated with me about how sad it was, and it was well-meant so I didn't say anything. But I didn't agree.

What occurs to me is that sometimes when people get dementia, maybe it is a necessary corrective to how they have been. It seemed so with my mother. Maybe, for example, if you've been living for all these decades with a strongly defended idea of who you are, then eventually life bursts in as your system ages and demolishes that proud self, allowing you to return home, in a sense to who you always were. My mother announced at one point, while she still had speech, "My name's sixpence." There was an Irish trickster in her. I think she was abducted by the little people when younger - she used to hang out with them as a child - and never fully made it to this world.

MY ASTROLOGY BOOK

 Yes! I have copies of my astrology book, which is influenced by my shamanic perspective. Not available in the shops till later next year. You can purchase from me for £14.50 including p&p. 

Here is what published astrologer Joanna Watters said about it: "The astrologer's first job is to demystify. The second is to fascinate. Through his insistence on pure craft winning, at every turn, over personal feelings or bias, Barry Goddard achieves just that. An astrological page-turner."

AMERICAN INDIAN THOUGHT

Lewsi Mehl Madrona

Lewis Mehl Madrona, a Cherokee guy who is also a conventional doctor, introduced me to the concept of Two Eyed Seeing, where 'alternative' and conventional approaches live alongside each other, neither criticising the other. This is includes healthcare, and I think is particularly important to bear in mind at the moment, where one side is fiercely criticising the other. There is never a good outcome, as Lewis points out, when this happens.

Donald Fixico

Anyway, Lewis regularly interviews interesting people, and here he is with a Native American Professor, one of his heroes, who lectures on American Indian Thought. (Just scroll down a bit once you are on the link.) It is fascinating. His foundational point is that modern thought tends to be linear, whereas Indian thought is more circular, it thinks in wholes and relations. And out of that comes the idea of being in relationship to, listening to and learning from, the natural world. I'm half-way through, and I am gripped, and I thought I'd put this point down before I forgot it :)

EMBODYING THE SPIRITS

A 5-day retreat in Snowdonia with Barry Goddard and Emma Edgington 22-27 June 2022

The spirits are close to us. They welcome the opportunity to be embodied. It is the way traditional shamans usually work, giving a visceral power to their engagement with the Spiritworld. This was appreciated in the Middle Ages, when people used to dance in the churches, before it was banned. It is time to reclaim the body as a vehicle for Spirit. It is not about ‘dance’, but rather surrendering and moving as the spirits want. This retreat will combine embodiment journeying, dream sharing, ceremony and walks in Snowdonia.

The venue will be Cae Mabon, a magical and jaw-droppingly beautiful eco-retreat in North Wales: a fairy-tale village hanging on a steep hillside, with stunning views across to Snowdon.

Barry Goddard has been involved with shamanic practices for 25 years, and before that Buddhism for 16 years. He has recently published two books: The Medicine Wheel, and an astrological book, Surfing the Galactic Highways. He lives on Dartmoor.

Emma Edgington lives near London where she teaches shamanic journeying and healing and is the creative director at Knowing Healing Hub.

Prices vary from £299-£369 p/p with the option to camp or book shared accommodation. A 50% deposit is required to assure your booking. Prices include food and accommodation.

For all enquiries and bookings please email Barry at BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk

MY BOOK

The perfect Christmas present for yourself My book on the Medicine Wheel won't be in the shops till next autumn, but you can purchase from me (signed) for £14.99 plus £3.50p&p. Paypal at BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk. Email me.

 

SPIRIT ANIMAL ANCESTORS

This is where I am writing my shamanic fantasy novel. 50k words so far. It is my Medicine Wheel Room, which has the most natural light. I happen to sit in the Southeast (the red and yellow stone) - the place of the ancestors. Yeah, that's a picture of a mouse on the wall behind the computer. And that tiny black thing on the left of the red stone is a flattened roadkill frog.

 The story is about people who can shapeshift into their animal souls, but they have to live with prejudice in a society ruled by a cult of tyrannical reason. They are seen as mentally ill, and treated accordingly. The book is full of magic you can actually do. It is both way out there, yet close to experience. And it is a polemic.

Anyway, because it is about our animal helpers, and because I sit in the Southeast, I thought maybe they are also ancestors. Sure they are, I'd just never thought of them like that before. The ancestors I see as whatever it is that supports us from the past. And that is literal animals because we are animals and have been living with animals for millions of years. But also our spirit helpers, they come from somewhere deep that is not just defined by this life. Maybe they have been helping us and our people for many lifetimes. But even that is too literal: they come from somewhere outside of time, because they are our gateway to Spirit. Our literal ancestors too, are no longer in a world bounded by time.

MY MAGICAL THING

Julian Vayne recently got me talking about 'My Magical Thing', a series he has been doing. I talked about the Pipe Ceremony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4NOuSwAqvU

PS You can also find my astrology writings at https://astrotabletalk.blogspot.com/

ON JOURNEYING AND HEALING

The Spirits are all around us. We just need to tune in and they will come to us. We don't need to travel miles down rabbit holes to go and find them. That notion suggests they are remote from us, and they are not. They are more powerful when we embody them, and they want to do this. We don't always have to know who or what our helpers are - feeling their presence is enough. The Spirits take us to a deep, sensitive place, from which we need to come back slowly, without the disruptive harshness of the so-called 'call-back' signal.

When we do healing work while embodying the Spirits, a raw, visceral, vocally expressive quality can emerge, a bit like you might imagine a witch doctor to be, and it is all the more powerful for that. The real qualification to do the Spirit work is our relationship with ourselves and with Spirit - same thing - which generally takes years of being honest with ourselves and being willing to go through difficult transformations.

It is generally better that the Spirit work is carried out in the context of having got to know the other person well over time. It is the relationship that is the main catalyst for change, and it needs to be genuinely two-way: psychotherapy is sometimes not very good at this.

SHAMANISM, CLIMATE CHANGE and THE MADNESS OF COLLECTIVES

Shamanism begins not by talking to a power animal, but by remembering that we are part of the natural world. A natural world that is alive and inspirited. This is particularly necessary for us moderns, who have been forgetting that belonging for thousands of years.

It is natural that we Shamanisers might feel as acutely as any the deleterious effect that humans are having on the natural world. We can never return to how things were: we have too much technology, and are too inventive, ever to do that. But nevertheless, new balances need to be found.

 

What can we do individually? It maybe depends on temperament. Some people like to take part in protest. Some like to pray, and don't underestimate that. We of all people know its power and its necessity. Prayer in the sense of a heartfelt conversation with the natural world.

But the one thing we do need to be aware of is the madness of collectives. Collectives have always been prone to madness, and probably always will be. They over-simplify, they get it wrong. And they set up an enemy, a shadow projection: it can be capitalism, politicians, climate deniers, transphobes or toxic masculinity. Or, dare I say it, the vaccine. Even, maybe especially, philanthropists. The list goes on.

Our primary job is not to support causes, even the so-called liberal ones. Our job is to be conscious. Very few people are conscious, though many think they are, just because they support the right causes: hence the ironic term 'woke'.

Being conscious is difficult. Spirit shows us how, often by leading us into difficult situations that force us to see things differently, that separate us from the group values around us. A Medicine person takes his or her authority from Spirit, not from what everyone around them thinks. That is what sets them apart and gives them wisdom, which people instinctively recognise.

Coming back to climate change, large parts of the collective are currently in a state of alarm, like a herd of frightened horses. They genuinely think that humans are faced with extinction, and there is an undercurrent of feeling that it is because humans are bad. Because it is part of being 'liberal', many shamanic people have become part of this frightened herd. But Shamans are not liberals, they are not anything. They are just attempting to be conscious.

The collective at best finds it hard to think straight, and certainly cannot do so when it is in this state of alarm. Yes, there is some genuine science behind it. But there is also the news, which exaggerates the bad side of things - that almost seems to be the nature of news - while inconvenient facts get ignored. Like, for example, that polar bear numbers are increasing: the problem was not lack of ice, but people hunting them. Or that vast areas have greened over due to increased CO2. Or that we are now giving more land back to nature than we are taking from her. And that unprecedented numbers of people are emerging from extreme poverty. The list goes on.

There is good news as well as bad. If you are trying to be conscious, balance is needed. It may not make you popular. It may get you called a 'climate-denier'. Not minding what others think is an excellent warrior training, an inevitable one if you want to be conscious.

Meanwhile, if you want a more rational and balanced view of what is happening with climate, the environment and the future of humanity, you probably won't do better than read the book below.

 

 

 

I have spent the last year extricating myself from environmental alarmism. I felt trapped by it, like I was meant to have this gloomy view of humanity's future. I was caught in the collective madness. But there is a more rational and optimistic position to be had, simply by examining the evidence in a wider and more disinterested way than is generally presented to us. I would say this is true for all collective issues.

MAMA'S LAST HUG

I'm halfway through this book, and it is moving. 

 

 

 

The Bible gave humans dominion over the earth, while in recent times we have had Science putting us at the top of the evolutionary tree - same difference, really. Mama's Last Hug, written by a long-time research scientist, persuasively demonstrates that other species experience the same emotions that we do. For us moderns, Shamanism needs to begin with the experience that we are a part of the natural world - a corrective to the last 1000 years and more. This book gives that sense of belonging.

 

ARE MEDICINE PEOPLE CONSERVATIVES?

I've never got the impression when reading about indigenous peoples that the 'spirit' guys lived in a state of opposition to, or alienation from, the traditions of their people, or were generally suspicious of their political leaders. Rather, it seems to me that they were/are seamlessly a part of the establishment, and generally supportive of it.

Our modern shamanism, by contrast, is part of the counter-culture that arose in the 60s in opposition to the establishment. You can see why that counter-culture needed to happen. But eventually you have to make your peace with convention, or you're no bloody use to it. The state of opposition (which is understandable when we're starting out) becomes a prolonged adolescence, an institutionalised spiritual bypass. 

 

There is a regular event called 'Breaking Convention' that occurs in the UK. I am sure it does some very good stuff. But many of us have spent half our lives 'breaking convention'. Eventually it goes nowhere. It is not interesting. What does go somewhere is making your peace with it, not fearing you will lose your magic and radicalness if you conform. That is a necessary, and much more difficult, thing to do. Try it one day a week :)

It's a journey I've been on myself. I found when I honestly analysed my attitudes to authority and to government and to politicians, that my responses were often self-serving and ill-thought through. And gave me a group identity, it made me one of the 'good guys'. Now I live with being thought naive by some, but that's OK 😂 The oppositional attitude goes deep in our culture, it becomes a part of who we are, and it can seem like reality. But it ain't.

JOURNEYING TALES

Seem to have started meeting with some friends to do journeying. A couple of weeks ago we did soul retrievals for each other, and then today checked in how that had unfolded. It's been a while since I've done much of this work, but it seems to be time. When I was working, my body was possessed by the spirit helper, and I was vocalising intensely - that itself is part of the energy work, and the person afterwards said they felt something quite ancient and raw was working through me. It seemed to do the job, something underlying was catalysed for the person over the last 2 weeks :)

For myself, there is a way I become out of sorts and feeling bleak and uncared for in the evenings, and I reach for the red wine to comfort myself. Work was done on that. The outcome was that it had got worse by a few days ago. And I just had to sit with it. I got the 4 of Swords when I pulled a Tarot Card, pointing me inwards. And I recalled the 'sky-like' attitude to difficult mental states from my Buddhist days: eventually they pass. And it did. Late Friday night I remembered my animal helper, and immediately I felt comforted. When I'm in a bleak state, it is because I feel disconnected, and so I forget the spirit help that is always there, and it does help. I recommend it, that is what these helpers are for.

Saturday morning and the storm had passed. I was still feeling fragile in the aftermath, but something had shifted. That was how the soul retrieval worked for me: it made things worse before they got better. So Saturday night I bought wine to celebrate rather than commiserate, and a pizza on which I put loads of chorizo and chilli, and watched 3 episodes of Vikings. Now that is what I call a party. I had earned it through sticking with all that shit, which has been going on for months now. Childhood stuff.

So today we were just hanging out with our animal helpers. As I said, you may want to travel a long way to the Lower World to meet them, but when you've had helpers for years, often they are just there, you don't need to go anywhere. Those 3 worlds are just a useful structure to get you going. Even the Otherworld is just a structure, this world and the Otherworld, indeed life and death, are for the Shaman the same place. As William Blake said, death is just like moving from one room to another, and he was looking forward to it.

The other 2 did their journeys lying down. I was on my bison hide crawling around, and pretty soon I realised I was embodying a crocodile, which was a first. The animal can do so much more, can get into you so much more, when you let them embody you. You get a felt physical sense of the animal. I thought I'm NOT going to look Crocodile up in a book, this has to be purely my own sense of it: that is how these things work if you want to do it deeply. It has to be your own.

 

 

The Crocodile has a skin as tough as you like, and nothing to fear. He is also a very ancient species, and has the knowing about life that comes with age, especially this big mother that I was embodying. And that is something for my anxiety and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Don't let any of it bother me, let it just bounce off me. And sit there patiently and watch, like the Crocodile does for its prey.

I am not on a career trajectory that requires plans and busyness. I am on the slow path of working for Spirit, where a lot of deep work can be done in a short time, you can have a lasting impact in just a few short years, look at Jesus. So there is no hurry. Just wait, do nothing for what may seem an interminable time (and my life has often felt like that) and then bam out it comes, do a bit of work and watch the ripples, remember the ripples that you won't know about. Just who we are can have a tremendous effect. So this Crocodile turned up today just after I'd had all this shit to go through, giving me a new toughness and a shifted perspective.

I've had the Journeying thing on my mind for some years, not quite sure when and how. I learnt all the 'core' stuff in the 90s, but I have always felt compelled to go away and not do much with it until I'd really made my own deep original connection with it, and to do that I needed a deeper connection with myself first, and that has taken 20 years. So Spirit will show me the way in with this. It's fantastic work.