TAKING BACK THE PROJECTIONS

 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.

I think we need to let the world just be what it is and always has been, and not judge and take sides about it. Take back the projections. Then the real work can begin.

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.

It is the difference between received authority and our own connection with Spirit. Maybe most of us start out needing that guidance from others, it is probably a necessary thing. But life wants us to move on from that. That is what the 'Shamanic Illness' is about: moving on from the authority of tradition to what that tantalising inner voice is saying. Do you dare take heed? Do you dare live with the naysaying of family and friends and even shamanic fellow travellers?

There is always this step to take. It is this guidance from within - or from outside, from the Spirits - depending on your view of the multiverse - that needs to be prioritised. The Elders may be right, they may be wrong. But you need to put your guidance from within first. Before whoever your teachers may be. That may seem like disrespect, it may seem like grand egotism. This is the fire we may have to go through to own our souls, to recover from the illness, even, that is like a tank in our front garden. A good teacher will want you to do this. All teachers will say they want you to do this. You need to be able to tell the difference.

I have often thought that the main thing we have to learn from attending teachers and their courses is not what they have to teach, but rather breaking away from them. Which doesn't mean we haven't also benefitted from them. But it's like the pressure we feel from having given away our own capacity to guide ourselves makes itself felt, and it becomes a matter of integrity to go with that. Cherish the points of disagreements you have with your teachers, for they are the routes to owning your own soul.

I think I have less illusions as time goes on, though I still have ways to go. Most of shamanism is religion, not spirituality. It always will be, for that is human nature. People generally want a simple set of beliefs and practices, and a person and a tradition to believe in. Indigenous communities are like this also, do not idealise them. There is nothing 'wrong' with this, for it is what many of us need, at least to start with. Although, in our pride, very few of us recognise that this is what we are doing.

Never put the 'Elders' of the past or present first. Or your teacher. Put your own judgement first. That is the heretical essence of spirituality. Don't give yourself a label. You are not a teacher or a shaman or a healer. You are simply a bumbling human being who says yes when people ask for help, and you do your best, without promising anything.

Listen to and learn from others, but don't get drawn into being a formal student or apprentice, for then you are becoming part of the teacher's needs. Just learn in your own way, ignore the inner circle and its status. Especially be wary of a teacher who is protecting their own authority. That way lies giving away your own power.

Why do people set themselves up as 'teachers'? There is almost invariably something self-serving going on. It is what creates religion, for they become the authority that everyone relies on. And they love it, need it. There are no such things as courses or certificates in a real sense. There are just people you might learn something from by being around them, from the way they are as much as from anything they might say. It is individual, informal, and it is based on relationship.

I try not to underestimate myself, for that serves no-one. I know I have some useful things to say, and ways of being around myself that can be of help. But don't ask me what I 'teach'. I respond in the moment. What I say, and how I am, changes by the day, for everything is in progress. But I have a deep feeling for being of help, to any of you guys reading this. You are welcome. I will do what I can. And I will attempt to be be open, and to learn from, what you have to say also.

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.

But I had to get the ambition out of me first. There is nothing wrong with ambition, the desire to become good at something and to create a place for yourself in the world. I did that by making money and teaching myself astrology and writing. It probably took me till my early sixties until the ambition was sufficiently satisfied, sufficiently killed off, for Spirit to start to send teaching and healing work my way again. I'd been teaching from my late twenties to my early forties, and then it began to feel wrong.

Ambition has no place in a teacher or healer. The people in your care deserve no less. In the long term you will do far more good for other people by waiting, perhaps for many years. Unfortunately, this perspective is not part of our culture. We have forgotten it, and do not have the elders around to gently rein us in.

If anything, it's the opposite: courses on shamanic healing are readily available and relatively brief, and off you go. From there it's only one step to being a teacher, and then you've really made it. Lots of people will look up to you, and really, honestly, can you handle that, or will it become a part of who you are? That is another reason for waiting. I am not saying people don't do good by doing this stuff when younger, but it's easy to do harm as well, in fact almost inevitable, because of the shadow side. The unconscious needy ego.

And another thing. Self-promotion. I've never been able to advertise myself as this or that. I can say what I do, but I'll be damned if I'm going to say, or imply, that I am good at it. That is distasteful, it is boasting, and I would not trust anyone who describes themselves in those terms. You know the sort of thing: they are perhaps from a long line of healers, they had unusual experiences when young that make them special, and they have had special teachings from indigenous people. I won't start on 'testimonials'!

Fuck all that. I am interested in who you are now, how you come across, not all the 'qualifications' you assign to yourself. That is for worldly matters, and it is probably necessary there. But this concerns your soul, and you do not boast about that.

Spirit is not in a hurry. Festina lente. Trust who comes your way and who doesn't come your way. Don't try and make it happen.

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.

What matters is that the imbalance here and now has been identified, and the energies needed to rectify that have been made available by the healer.

ON NOT TEACHING

Sure, do the odd bits of healing and readings for people. It is good service that helps. But don't even think about being a teacher until you are in your 60s or, better, 70s. There are things to know first that you cannot even imagine, slow and radical transformations that you need to live through. 

 

Our youth culture does not understand this. We have lost our roots in tradition, and that brings certain freedoms. But it also makes us superficial, and we no longer know this. Involvement with indigenous peoples is not a sexy substitute for this sheer prolonged exposure to life and it's vicissitudes. From what I understand, people are not considered to be elders in traditional societies till they are in their 70s or 80s. Then they may have some real wisdom.

NIGHT EAGLE

I began writing the 3rd volume of my Shapeshifters trilogy this morning. It is surprising me already. I sometimes weep when I write: the themes touch me deeply in ways I don't understand. I finished the 2nd volume last week. Writing requires solitude, we are living from deep inner connections. Then the book comes to an end, the inner connections fade, and the everyday solitude becomes oppressive, a disconnection. And I begin to flail.

So this morning came as a relief. The opening image was pressing on me, making me weep, so down it went, and it unfolded. Here is what I wrote:

The Eagle flew through the night, heading north-west. Hour after hour in the freezing remoteness of Earth’s upper reaches, mighty wings grasping a fierce purchase in the scant atmosphere.

In his solitude he felt keenly the presence of the stars, their myriad tribes shining down with an intensity virtually unhindered at this altitude, each constellation seemingly with a quality and story of its own.

Or so reflected Queen Elfina. This was her first experience of Shifting fully and physically into the Eagle. For the first couple of hours this kind of reflection had not been possible. The initial downward sweeps of the Eagle’s wings had flung her out of herself and into her distantly remembered home, the entire cosmos.

And there she had stayed, unformed, blissfully at one with the vast ocean, the Eagle a flickering point of connection, a wave on the surface.

SHAMANISM ANCIENT AND MODERN

I’m thinking out loud. Is this Shamanism thing that we have embarked upon purely about reclaiming indigenous consciousness, and finding a way of living that in the modern world? Or are there new elements of consciousness that we moderns bring to the table, that need to be integrated with that indigeneity? Is human consciousness changing, or is it perennial, with adaptation needed to modern ways?

I haven’t got any answers. It is just something that I sit with from time to time. I wonder about individual consciousness and group consciousness, and whether there is more room for individual consciousness in our type of society. And I wonder about creativity: we live in a ferment of it, technologically, artistically and metaphysically. In a traditional society, the emphasis is on – well, tradition, and knowing that deeply. That has its own strengths. But we have access to so many different ways of seeing the world, that our relativism can open us up to.

 

In his book Coyote Medicine, Lewis Mehl Madrona says that post-modernism, with its lack of absolute certainties, is hard for most people to live with - unless they are shamans, who get their power from this alignment with the flow of Spirit. And at the same time he says that, in his experience, most tribal people have a fairly simple set of certainties and beliefs by which they live. And he quotes another elder who said that to the effect that all creation stories are provisional, really we don't know how everything came to be.

I think it is the same in the modern world: most of us want a fairly simple set of certainties to live by. Science provides them: the Universe began with the Big Bang; Life arose through Evolution, driven by natural selection; and when we die, there is extinction. We know where we stand. Quantum Mechanics, that brings consciousness and uncertainty into the equation, is too subtle ever to catch on in the mainstream.

So modern people are the same in that kind of way. Most people want simple certainties and do not have a burning metaphysical quest, though they may wake up to that during the course of their lives, you never know.

The sheer size of our societies allows for the creative ferment, and an escape from what can become a cage of just one way of seeing the world (which suits many people.) From the viewpoint of the individual, that is a very good thing. From the point of view of the group, I think it is more difficult, because in our large societies we are collectively governed by impersonal rules rather than relationships. I think that has an alienating effect for many. I’m not sure there is any obvious way round this. It causes many people to react blindly to the authority of these rules, as though they are being oppressed by a ‘them’, and they think they are demonstrating their individuality by standing up to it. In fact, these rules – or laws – have usually been worked through and refined in practice over time, there is intelligence behind them.

I think our large societies create divisions between people purely because of their size and the impersonality that comes with that. It takes an effort of imagination not to slip into those divisions.

 Then there are the teachings themselves, our Medicine Wheels and Shamanic Journeyings and Sweatlodges and other Ceremonies. We can never be part of the traditions from which they came, though we can be inspired by them and learn from them. That frees us to concentrate on what it is in those practices or ceremonies that works, and to re-invent as we need to, based on having connected to them deeply in our own experience: that takes time. We can be in a hurry and not realise the depth of things. 

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I offer Zoom astrology readings, by donation. Contact: BWGoddard1 (at)aol.co.uk. My books, Surfing The Galactic Highways and The Medicine Wheel are available for pre-order on Amazon (or by post from me now.)

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 Given that, we are not beholden to tradition, there is no penalty for re-inventing and going our own way. This is another aspect of the creativity that I think is possible in our modern culture. Indigenous cultures are characterised by the preservation of what has come before, and slow adaptation to changing circumstances. They perhaps understand the collective aspect of consciousness better than we do, that it isn’t just a mob thing, but something that can be supportive and heightening, particularly in Ceremony. But we moderns don’t have to hold our creativity at bay in the interests of the continuity of tradition, because we have no tradition. There is a way we can be very alive by being true to the new ways that Spirit, which is unfailingly creative, is always showing us. Maybe this is something new that the ancients did not have.

Last year I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. I have no traditional training in it. Just a course or two with someone who wasn’t traditionally trained either. I wrote about it from the point of view of the sense I had made of it myself, in my own lived experience. I claimed the freedom to do that, I made it clear it was not a traditional exposition, I made plenty of my own additions, and drew in references from our own culture. That said, it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. I had had 40 years of being on a transformational path before I wrote the book, which I meant that I knew what I was talking about, experientially. That is one of the book’s strengths. And on that basis, I re-invented the Medicine Wheel.

I am attempting a bit of that with shamanic journeying at the moment: I am about to run an event in Wales on Embodying the Spirits, and I want to take it right back to my own experience. Put aside the words I have learnt like soul retrieval and de-possession and just do the work, and find out a few weeks later what it was that I did. So again, I am attempting to re-invent. I think a live tradition is always being re-invented, it is ever fresh in that way, and the re-invention emerges naturally from being true to one’s own experience. It is not a superficial thing, I think it takes years to be ready to do that. But nevertheless, we have that creative possibility in our culture, that I don’t think is there to the same extent in traditional cultures.