THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS Part 2

 THE SHAMANIC ILLNESS Part 2

The Heart of Initiation

I'll begin with Mary Oliver’s poem The Journey. I’ve abridged it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—

though the whole house began to tremble

and you felt the old tug at your ankles.

"Mend my life!" each voice cried.

But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do….

Little by little, as you left their voices behind,

there was a new voice which you slowly

recognized as your own, that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,

determined to do the only thing you could do—

determined to save the only life you could save.

In a way that's what this theme of the Shamanic Illness is about. It's about claiming your life, claiming your own life, not just being part of something, a role, a well-defined identity that you can trot out at social occasions, which is how normal society works. It's how relationships also work, psychologically we adopt roles. There's nothing wrong with division of labour and all the rest of it, but we are in a role, and in this initiation that is the Shamanic Illness, we are stepping outside of that.

There's something very powerful that wants to claim us. And it can force the issue, so to speak, by making us ill. In my mid-30s I had a fatigue for a few years. I call it fatigue rather than tiredness, because I wasn't tired in a normal sense. I just couldn't carry on in the way I had been. The fatigue was like the plug had been pulled, there was no energy there. I realized that I'd taken my life force as my own to use, and that's not how it is, you are used by it, we are in the service of life. Life has this plan, this blueprint, this something or other, this destiny, this fate, the something writ for us in a gentle living sort of way, where we have choice all along, and it's about responding to that, it's about going yes to that.

So I'd been I'd been very wilful, overseeing a Buddhist set-up in London - several communities, businesses, a public centre, all according to certain ideas. Ideas which I’d stopped believing in, but still I pushed myself to do this thing, that maybe it would come right somehow. I was doing it to kind of prove something to myself, which isn’t necessarily all bad, and to the people around me. After I'd been running it for a while, we somehow pulled it all together and it reached stability, because it had been in a bit of a crisis. As that point approached, I started going into a kind of meltdown, in which I could apply myself to nothing, unless it was like this mysterious thing called Shamanism which was buzzing around in my head, or astrology as well, they both of spoke to me.

When I listened to that kind of inner ambrosia, for that's how it felt, instead of listening to these ideas from outside myself, this Buddhist tradition and the teacher, I had all the energy I wanted, I was full of fire. I'm not saying the ideas were wrong, but they weren’t mine, and I’d been using them in the wrong way, trying to change myself from the top down, so to speak, instead of allowing the depths to speak on their own terms.

I think this is central to the recovery from the Shamanic Illness: learning to listen to something deep within yourself - to the Spirits. And acting on that, having the courage to do so. It may not make sense from an ordinary point of view, it may be very threatening to your ordinary life and to what other people around you think. I had to leave the whole life I was in and the friends I had and a lot of people who were prepared to say you've got it wrong. "Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice." I had to leave all of that. It took me right through my 30s, this process, this turning about.

It was a turning about in the sense that my point of reference underwent a major shift from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, so to speak. It had always been considerably ‘in here’ – I’d been attempting to practise Buddhism, after all - but it shifted decisively in that direction: my point of authority, my guidance, was now within, even though it took me some years to fully trust that. I would slip in and out of it. But it was enough to catapault me out of the life I had, my whole world, and to start afresh.

So there was this voice within, in that deeper place that is beyond the narrow self, that had its own agenda for me. It was, in a way, who I’d always been, without knowing it. That is what these crises do. They remind us of who we are in a deeper way, that we have, so to speak, forgotten, and we need re-initiating into that, because it is so outside who we have been up until now.

Initiation is something we don't have in a formal sense in our culture. In some traditional cultures, you get the thing with the boys where they'll get chucked out into the wilderness, and they’ve got to learn to survive. There's maybe certain physical scars put on them, all that sort of thing, they're taken away from the women, they're brought into the world of the men, it's time for that. Women have their own initiation when they become capable of having children and all of that. Giving birth is of course an initiation, and men don’t have that, which is why initiations need to be created for them. For one thing, men need to learn to bear suffering, something that happens to women naturally through childbirth.

We don't have ritual initiations, and sometimes people bemoan that. “We haven't got initiation so we can never discover this profound thing, we can never move on to these next stages properly, we never become proper adults, because it is initiations that move us on in this way. “

I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. It's not the Chaos Shamanism way of looking at it. The ordinary way of looking at it, the religious way if you like, is that you have these forms and you have to go through them to come out the other side initiated. Chaos Shamanism always says form is secondary, it's finding the meaning of these things, and living that. So what is at the heart of initiation? At the heart of initiation is something new being born in you that isn't just a rearrangement of the old, and you need to be opened up in order for that to happen.

This is why in in the rituals you get put through these quite extreme circumstances. They demolish you, you don't know who you are anymore, maybe you're naked in the darkness, you don't have a name anymore, you're waiting for a new name to come. All these sort of things create a space in which the old has to die – or at least is suspended. That's what happens when you go into a sweat lodge: it's a death and a rebirth, you go naked into the darkness, and you come out reborn, as a new person. So these forms just point to that and they can help with that.

But - and here’s the Chaos point – initiation is something that happens anyway. Life initiates us anyway if we're open to it, if we're lucky, painful as that can be. Many people, maybe most people, are content just being normal, they don't want anything outside of normal and that's fine, that's who they are. They have their own particular path to do, and life will still initiate them on to the next stage in the usual kind of way.

But if you're reading this, then there's something else going on that needs to be listened to, the ongoing initiation into the new, that life becomes once you’re on this path. Life may initiate you from the outside, you can lose all sorts of things, particularly if you're not being open in the way that the universe wants. The Spirits have chosen you, you could say, and they’re not going anywhere. You may lose people close to you, they may die, you may lose your job, you may lose your health, you may lose your money, all these things can happen that are really painful. They demolish us. Well these things can happen anyway, but sometimes they happen for this purpose of taking us apart, so this new thing can be born. Or rather, so that we can decide at long last, after many trials, to claim it, as in the Mary Oliver poem.

It can be a long slow process, and it brings us back to the health thing, the Shamanic Illness. People can lose their health, and I think when the illness is hard to diagnose, that is particularly key, it is particularly showing us, look there's something you need to listen to. And then you may gradually, over the years, get well. I mean even now, 30 years later, I will get twinges of this fatigue if I start pushing myself, if I have too much of a plan about what I'm going to do, and I start doing it. So I'll do 10 minutes gardening, and then I just can't do anymore, not because I haven't got the capability, but because of the way I'm going, “right I'm going to get all of that done”, the Spirit goes no no no, we'll decide what you're going to get done, not you, just go at it in a gentle reasonable sort of way, and we'll tell you when to stop and start, and when you're functioning from Spirit you can keep going forever, you’ve got all the health you need.

I’ve emphasised the hard to diagnose illnesses as particularly suggestive of Spirit being at work. But it can easily be more straightforward than that. You regularly hear about how, say, cancer has changed someone. I mean, the Spirits really means business, they are prepared to kill you if you don’t yield to them. They have a different perspective on death to us, and they are not fluffy! They demand everything of us.

So this Shamanic path is a serious thing, your physical as well as your psychological survival may depend on it. It is not an add-on for Sundays. It is the most important thing in your life, it is the sine qua non of everything else. And it is deep, its roots go as deep as existence itself, into the vast, bottomless abyss that is the original Greek meaning of the word Chaos.