After seeing this Four Winds Society (Alberto Villoldo) https://thefourwinds.com/ image posted this morning shortly after I’d just read an email of shamanic classes posted by a friend who conducts her version of them herself, it stirred some memories of my own explorations in that field of study a couple decades ago during my two-year Shaman Apprenticeship.
The image above saying “Can You Read the Signs of Nature?” hit me strangely—probably triggered me in a sense. I think we ALL read the signs of nature in our own ways. Perhaps I might have interpreted those signs one way prior to my shamanic training and a different way afterwards, but still, I think how we interpret the world around us is a very subjective assessment and one not easily defined as right or wrong by any standard interpretation—whether shamanic or non.
I laughingly say to friends that I tend to “reinvent myself” every decade, but around 20 years ago I was coming out of my ‘ALL THINGS REIKI’ (Usui/Tibetan/Karuna) phase and was starting my ‘ALL THINGS SHAMANISM’ (Peruvian, Central & SW American, Tibetan, De-possession training) phase that lasted easily a decade; and I can say without hesitation that the shamanism experiences were powerfully life affecting in many ways—some experiences were absolutely amazing and some were downright traumatic.
When you dabble in life areas that you don’t fully understand (And who really DOES understand any of them?), you open up yourself to that Field of ALL Possibilities I was mentioning in the last post. No amount of background reading could have prepared me for some of the experiential learning I gained through that Shamanic Decade of exploration. It was a mystically exhilarating and yet very humbling decade for me; proving to my inflated ego that I wasn’t nearly as smart nor as powerful as I had believed myself to be at the time.
We tend to think of ourselves as apex predators—top of the food chain sort of mindset, and then you are shown how little you actually know about this strange world that we live in and often struggle through. (It’s a part of that multi-dimensionality aspect we don’t normally consider.)
While I found that I wasn’t powerful enough to stop the horrendous ordeals I had to experience back then, I was at least strong enough to endure them until they dissipated; so I now have greater appreciation for my more ‘stubborn’ attributes. I simply refused to give up or give in until I had my life back to some semblance of normality during that decade; but it took years to get there. When you open a door into the unknown, you better be prepared for the ‘unimaginable’ behind it, because if you crave “learning experiences”, you will ultimately get them.
The decade between ‘All Things Shamanism’ and the present day was my ‘ALL THINGS HYPNOSIS’ decade (certified hypnotist, NLP Practitioner, Past Life/Spirit World Explorations) and that training helped me gain greater perspective on putting this entire life experience into a workable context that made a little more sense.
I also learned that whether you are dealing with the subconscious mind (shamanism’s lower world) or the super-conscious mind (shamanism’s upper world), the techniques to explore each might be different depending on the healing modality, but the same result could be achieved using hypnosis with less theatrical display and often more self-empowerment for the client.
But still…there is that inner part of me that loves a good fire ceremony or embodied nature walk or an acute awareness of the winds and the animals and the earth at my feet and sky above me that brings me back to deep appreciation for the shamanic training in whatever form I had experienced it.
The good, the bad; the black, the white—the boundaries of this LIFE as we know it—we are the artist intentionally drawing our life across this blank paper in whatever way that we choose—using whatever medium that most appeals to us. It is our self-portrait of who we are, created by our own hand—complete with highlights and shadows nuancing the extremes of our experience.
This is OUR process. This is how WE EVOLVE.
FINDING YOUR TRUTH 