As long as the 'bad guys' are 'out there', and not within, it is hard to make much progress. You may think of yourself as a teacher, and therefore one or two rungs up, but it still applies, and I have seen plenty of it. The Tories, the CEOs, the rich, the pharmaceutical companies, the patriarchy, the secret cabals who really pull the strings. And so on. All of whom, we fantasise, mean us harm. It is all projection, and not easy to reason with. Being on the side of the good against this imagined bad is not part of being 'spiritual', it is just one more manifestation of collective consciousness.
Friday, 29 July 2022
TAKING BACK THE PROJECTIONS
Monday, 11 July 2022
YOU ARE SIMPLY A BUMBLING HUMAN BEING WHO SAYS YES WHEN PEOPLE ASK FOR HELP
It seems to strike a note when I write about the difference between religion and spirituality, as one might term it. A feeling for that distinction has always been one of my main intentions in this blog. It is still something I am working through for myself.
Tuesday, 5 July 2022
NOLO EPISCOPARI
If you are appointed to be a bishop in the church, you begin by refusing. You say "Nolo episcopari" which means "I do not want to be a bishop." It has become a formality. But you can see the sense in it. You are there to serve God rather than your own ambition.
But of course they want to be fucking bishops, which of us doesn't want promotion? And which of us doesn't want to be a shamanic teacher or healer? Of course we fucking do. I spent years wanting to, and yet there was another side of me for which it felt wrong, so I didn't. I thought it was because there was something wrong with me. In fact there was something right with me, it was the voice of Spirit, that had a much deeper agenda for me than I could know.
Sunday, 3 July 2022
SOUL-RETRIEVAL AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
I am good at teaching myself things. All I need is a book and off I go, or a pen and I will work it all out myself from scratch. I've sometimes felt swindled when I pay a lot of money for an event, and realised I could have read all that myself in half an hour. I felt a bit like this about the 'core' shamanism course I was on in the 90s. It was probably a fairly standard one. I did most of the journeying on my own, intensively, back in the room where I lived, and I came to understand its transformational power in my own non-verbal way. The actual teachings seemed to me to be just a few simple techniques, spun out over nearly a year and surrounded by mystique.
Of course journeying with others was helpful and necessary. But still, the teachings themselves were spun out. And the teacher himself was anxious to be seen as the authority in the Spiritworld, and that's not the way to go IMO, even though it's very common. In fact, he was so egotistical that I thought nobody could fail to spot it and be misled by him!
I like to put all the labels aside for what it is I am doing when I do healing work, and just do what I do. All this extraction, soul theft, depossession and soul retrieval is for me just so many words we apply to a process that is beyond our knowing, and maybe better left unnnamed. The possession idea I am particularly wary of, because it can create a paranoid universe that lacks personal agency.
Nevertheless, I want to say something about soul retrieval. I was taught it in the context of the psychotherapeutic paradigm, the idea being that a piece of you goes missing as a child due to trauma, and the healer's guides find the soul part, which generally takes the form of the child at the age it went missing, and persuade him/her to return to this world.
All well and good. The Spirits are very adaptable to whatever stories we tell ourselves about how things came to be. But it is a particularly modern thing to see who you are as being a product of your childhood and how your parents treated you. I read a book recently called The Nurture Assumption, in which much more shaping agency was given to children's peer groups and much less to parental influence than we tend to assume.
Are we the first culture in history that thinks it has to go digging around in a childhood it cannot remember in order to become a balanced human being? For many indigenous people, if you suffer from say extreme anxiety, then you don't go digging around in childhood for the cause, rather the healer would say that the spirit of anxiety - which belongs to the wider universe rather than to you - has come to visit, and you need to form a relationship with that spirit. I love this, I think it's brilliant.
Another angle came to me last week when doing what looked at first like a soul retrieval. There was clearly stuff to be brought back, the spirits were waiting with it for me to collect off them just a yard or two away (when I journey, the spirits come to me physically, and I move around, embodying them.)
What I was given was a stone cross, with a sunstone in the centre, and a sword. There were particular reasons behind these 2 objects, but more broadly they belonged to the West/Earth and North/Air directions of the Medicine Wheel respectively. They were to help this person achieve balance with these directions/elements in her life. And that is the whole purpose of the indigenous way: to become a balanced human being - balanced within yourself, and in balance with the world around you. That is the point of the Medicine Wheel. And that is how the spirits had decided to present this healing to me.
I thought this was brilliant. A whole new angle on soul retrieval, which sidesteps the psychotherapeutic paradigm, giving a way of looking at it that is probably very traditional. You don't necessarily need to know the reasons for why you are imbalanced. Such reasons can only ever be partial, they are like a bone thrown to the rational mind to shut it up! Why we are the way we are is a deep mystery, and a huge perspective is needed.