WHY SHAMANS ARE NOT HEALERS

I don't believe in healing people. My instinct, even my passion, is to help people to do that themselves. I will shunt energy if it is really necessary, and that has its place. I shapeshift in order to do that, but the animal presence which does it has been reluctant for at least 15 years now. I think it was partly to do with our 'quickfix' culture, as well as not taking agency from people.

I think it makes Shamanism narrow, and even counter-productive, when we think of ourselves as 'healers'. We are not. We are something much broader than that. We understand the earth as a living presence, and matter as spirit, and to some degree we embody that perspective.

People come to us because we stand for something they are reaching for themselves. Their woundings are often the way in. And we are only any use to people if we don't believe the pedestals they may put us on, but can stay at that point of humility and ordinariness, where we are always beginners, surrounded by the mystery of Spirit. We have names, but really we are no-one. The individual self is just a convenience, a temporary locus, while we have bodies.

ON WORTHY OPPONENTS

There's nothing like the 'worthy opponent' to get you to sort who you are. And it pushes me quite hard when I find it is the respected teachers within our shamanic world who are my worthy opponents. The ones who buy into the conspiracy nonsense, who claim there are unnamed people secretly controlling us (in fact, no-one is in control, not fundamentally, and certainly not in the way the conspiracists fantasise). Or who ask us to take sides in the war of good versus evil, which usually means left versus right, or environmentalists vs capitalists.

 I blocked a well-known shamanic teacher on Facebook today for that reason. I refused to go there any more. Believe me, I did it with regret, because the person also has good things to say. All the same, I probably took longer than I should have: I was being criticised at every turn, it seemed, and had been for some months. You have to live and let live, especially when you disagree, and this person couldn't.

If you are a medicine person, if you are allowing something greater than your ordinary self to influence who you are and what you do, then you cannot afford to get caught up in these worldly winds, these vast collective thought-forms, that press so strongly on us, through the news and through social media.

Energetically, we need to be hermits. It is never 'us and them', it is always 'us and us'. We love everyone. We do not believe in the 'them' of the shadowy controllers, or the 'them' who run corporations or who have political power. We are beyond such crude categories, 'beyond good and evil', as Nietzsche put it.

This will only ever be a minority realisation. Religion, which divides into good and bad, will always be for the majority. The impetus to judge, particularly to make 'left 'good' and right 'bad' politically, is deep-seated in the counter-culture within which shamanism generally seem to place itself.

This post is a bit of a cry from something deep within me, for I cannot find my home with many of the people who are looked to as shamanic teachers, even some I have learnt from. They are still on the side of what they see as good in the world against what they see as evil.

I cannot do that. If you are honest with yourself, if you can live at that coalface, you will see all those things that you attribute to the other side as existing within you, and almost certainly they have something that needs to be listened to. And if you stay at that coalface of honesty with yourself for long enough, you will become an Elder. Not that one thinks of oneself in those terms: if you are honest with yourself, any need for an identity falls away.

That is all an Elder is - not someone who has mysterious access to some higher state of consciousness that you have not reached, but someone who has been prepared for some years to be honest with themselves, to not judge themselves, to make friends with all those bits that we are told to judge. It is very simple, but also seems to be quite difficult for most of us. But it is something we can all do. It is the only teaching you will ever need - just be honest with yourself.

This is who I am, this is what I stand for. I come from a place where I have the same fears, self-doubts, anger, confusions as the rest of us. I try not to project it out onto the world or onto other people, and I do not always succeed. But I do know that if I take care of that, if I can be honest with myself in that simple yet difficult way, everything else will take care of itself.

THINGS ARE A LOT BETTER THAN THEY ARE MADE OUT TO BE

I've spent my whole adult life living under an apocalyptic, pessimistic narrative about the future of the world, which has only intensified in recent years. It seems that humans are hard-wired to take more note of bad possibilities, and there's probably some evolutionary reason for this. Anyway, a book has recently come out, based on freely available data, and thoroughly researched, that gives a much more optimistic prognosis. Below is a long interview with author Marian Tupy. I feel like an existential weight is lifting from me.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIANLddo-ec

 

Points made include: We're richer by far in terms of productivity and quality of products; absolute poverty has declined precipitously; commodity prices have fallen; we're not going to overpopulate the world in any cataclysmic sense; everyone has increasingly more than enough to eat; there's more land for nature, and that trend seems upward; more people are moving to urban areas and that’s advantageous rather than disadvantageous; there are more democracies and so we’re better governed; we’re more peaceful; and we’re less likely to die from catastrophes. And we're not about to be burnt to a cinder: Tupy condemns that narrative as untrue and irresponsible.