I had someone tell me last week that a 'shaman' told him as part of a healing session that she'd had a strong message that he should go to Mongolia and be dismembered by a shaman. This guy has no connection to Mongolia. I could spend the next few paragraphs saying why I think this is bullshit.
A few months ago I had another 'shaman' (who trains people in this work) insisting I should de-possess someone, and was I able to see what was going on in this person? More bullshit, this time mixed in with paranoia and self-importance and power-games. I had to tell them to back off and let my spirits decide what they were going to do. And it wasn't de-possession.
Charlatanry like this aside - and these 'shamans' have all the certificates to enable them to practise - I've thought for many years that we need to train ourselves more in bringing discernment to 'messages from Spirit'. I don't expect too much from a lot of our shamanism. It is often low-level stuff, glammed up. You get good stuff going on too, but the group trainings to be ‘practitioners’ also give rise to a lot of nonsense. I think it begins with the teachers. It would not occur to me that I could train a bunch of people to be healers. I just don’t think like that, it seems false to me. I spend time in a natural way with whoever turns up, I love to say yes to that, and if they feel a pull to man the flatpack helpline (as I call it), I’m happy to chew it over with them. But it is for their Spirits to tell them how and when to start doing healing work, not mine. It is a very individual, subtle kind of thing.
I also work as an astrologer, and in my writings I sometimes make predictions about the world. It is the same territory. Sometimes I am right, and sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I get over-excited and get very definite about my predictions. And I can still be wrong. But then I go away and think about it. I'm usually seeing something, but I've got the words wrong. When it's a personal prediction, I will talk in terms of probabilities, and I am always cautious. Such predictions can help point people in a useful direction.
I think it's the same with the direct intuitive stuff we may get when working shamanically. It may not be intuition, it may be your own stuff. Or it may be a mixture of the two. So we need to be cautious and suggestive rather than emphasising that we 'know', as if to affirm our spirit authority. It is easy to confuse feeling with intuition. People want certainty, they want to hear flattering things, and they will pay good money for that. And we want to have something to tell them.
This is a big subject. I often find people do not want to question their 'messages from spirit', and they will try to make them 'right' even when they are not. And I think the trainings can place too much emphasis on trusting what you get from Spirit, at the expense of being discerning. Here are a few things:
(1) Be provisional in what you say, and ask for feedback both at the time and later, and reflect on it. It is not a threat to your authority to qualify what you have said. Rather, the willingness to do so adds to that authority. Personally, I can usually feel it when someone is speaking from intuition. It has a particular power and impersonal quality to it, and I accept that words can't always get it exactly right. And it is usually brief, to the point and practical. I am wary of anything that can't be verified, like past life explanations.
(2) Don’t be in a hurry. I think it’s no bloody good having someone you don’t know in for an hour and expect to be able to ‘heal’ them and give them spirit guidance. Well, needs must, but it is far from ideal. After the initial session, you need to give your spirits time to hang out with that person’s spirits; or, to use another language, you need to let your impressions of that person sink in and alchemise in your unconscious. The better you know someone, the more things will fall into place, and the more useful the guidance you will be able to offer. Shamanism was traditionally a community thing, there would already have been deep connections one way or another with whoever came your way. This semi-anonymous professional thing we often do is alien to Shamanism.
(3) What you say will probably be a mix of intuition – direct spirit message – and your own perceptions. Where one ends and the other begins isn’t so obvious, and it probably doesn’t matter, because these things aren’t separate anyway. Jung talked about intuition as a knowing for which we have no evidence, it comes in from somewhere else. The main thing here is to prepare and purify yourself, and that takes years. (I also ensure I don’t drink alcohol the night before.) We need to be a ‘hollow bone’ so that Spirit can speak in an unalloyed way through us. Sometimes people will do good work even if they are not truly ready, but it will be hit or miss, for they will fuck up also at other times, and probably won’t admit it. We’ve probably all met healers like that. There is no hurry to be doing this work.
It is a deep thing and a subtle thing to speak from Spirit, hit or miss isn’t good enough. We generally need to sit quietly for quite some time for the Spirit to speak, and that is after the years of personal preparation. Intuition is a mysterious thing, a sacred thing, it is given to us, it is the East of the Medicine Wheel, and it is rarely what we think. One of its hallmarks can be that jolt of realisation that it is not something you would have thought of. And sometimes we will get nothing. Trust that too.
I think a good parallel is the writing of poetry. A poet will often spend a long time working on a poem. They have seen something, and they come to know what they have seen though sitting with it and getting the words exactly right. We may not have the time for that, or the gift with words. But there is something important in it nonetheless about honing our experience, separating all the bits out, and being true to its complexity and subtlety. If you are more visual, you could also think of it as an artist working on a painting, and the training they give themselves in simply looking.
