A Few Thoughts on Urban Shamanism

What I call myself

I don't call myself a shaman. In the urban, industrialized, computerized world, that word is both loaded with New Age fantasy and with cultural appropriation, and I don't find either of those energies useful in effective healing. And, really, the word has become meaningless as it is overused to make everything sound more magical (as in "shamanic" this or that.) 

It took me 15 years of study with teachers, extensive reading, and intensive work with the spirits before I stepped overtly into the role of healer. Shamanic healing is not about having learned a strange technique or two, but about building a strong relationship with helping spirits. This takes time, sacrifice and commitment far beyond anything commonly imagined. 

When I stepped into the role of healer - something I did not choose, but was compelled to do - I worked with groups, mostly in drum circles that became increasingly ceremonial over time. It took me another 12 years of doing that work before I formally started taking individual clients in 2011. That's 27 years of study and practice before I said formally to the world, "I'm a healer." Maybe I'm merely slow (I've certainly I've felt that many times). But usually I think I've just been very careful not to overstate who I am at any given moment.

I will always carry with me this fundamental definition of a shaman given to me by Martín Prechtel: "A shaman is someone whose shamanizing works." What I take from this is that it doesn't matter how the person dresses, what they say, what names they drop, how eloquently they boast of themselves or how humble they are or are not. It doesn't matter where they have traveled, what kind of certificate they have, how beautifully their drum is painted, or how cosmically booming their voice is. What matters is that their work is effective. 

Because I grew up a blue collar kid, the son of a truck-driver/mechanic - a strapping man with a smile that melted waitresses' hearts from coast to coast, a manly man who everyone called "Buck" (the male deer, a primary helping spirit across cultures), a man who died saying "I never had so much as a pot to piss in, and still don't"; and because I grew up the son of the sales girl at the K-Mart jewelry counter, whose name was Faye (the Gaelic word for "the faery realm"), I resonate deeply with this grounded, unadorned definition. A shaman is someone whose work works. 

A plumber has to stop the leak, get the clog out, get new water flowing or he ain't a plumber. He can call himself whatever he wants to - a shamanic aquatic priestess or a fecal life coach or an ascended pee-pee master. If he gets the job done, it doesn't matter what he calls himself. And if he does not get the job done it doesn't matter what he calls himself. I've been told that in indigenous cultures, a person doesn't refer to themselves as a shaman - only others can call you that. True or not, I like that. 

In essence, I believe if you were not raised inside a "shamanic" culture, you should not call yourself a shaman. A white guy like me, who has had to spend so many damned years un-winding the tangled inner vines of western consciousness, well I stick to what my colleagues usually do: call ourselves "shamanic practitioner." I'm actually not fond of how dry that phrase is, because shamanic practice is the juiciest thing I've ever seen. So I just think of myself as a "worker." 

There are two basic elements to shamanic healing. One is the technical work - the ritual or ceremony, the work with the spirits. If you hire a plumber he or she brings the right tools, sees what needs to be done, and gets to work. 

The other element is your (the client's) attitude, or openness - what the Celts call the power of your yearning. We are creatures whose bodies are partly visible (our meat, water and bones) but largely energetic and non-visible (our energy body, the emotional body, the mental body). Western medicine treats the meat. Shamanism also pays attention to the attitude, motivation and psychology of the patient, and to the spirit of the plants and other tools used in the healing.

After my father's triple bypass surgery, he stopped smoking, stopped eating bacon and went for walks every day. When the plumber cleared my pipes he told me to stop re-potting house plants in the sink and washing the dirt down the drain. When you see a therapist, you may open a new understanding of what has been driving you, but then you do your best to leave old behavior patterns behind you. Shamanic healing asks the same of you: be ready to change. Be ready to act as if your life is different, and patterns have shifted. Be ready to live with trust, and with the courage to take on different behaviors. If you think you can go to the shaman, get whickle-whacked by magic and not have to change your behavior, you're wasting time and money. It would be better to go visit Zoltar.
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I want to say, "Shamanism is not magic" to make sure you understand that you will be actively involved in your healing. But I have witnessed so many magical things happen - big and small - in my clients' lives and in my own life, so I can't in truth deny that there is weird/ Wyrd magic infused throughout in this work. Your shamanic healing can be magical, in the best, archaic sense of that word: "Summoning a mysterious sense of enchantment which alters reality."

This is my wish for you, and it's why I do this work. 

Therapy can be effective and helpful. 85% of the clients I see have had some or a lot of therapy, and most of them say it has been helpful. Also, most of them say therapy doesn't seem to quite reach "all the way." 

Shamanism is not therapy, and I remind clients that I’m not a trained therapist. My training is shamanism, my formal academic training is in theology, theatre, myth, writing, storytelling, ceremony and creativity, but not psychology.

Ours is a exceedingly mental culture - we love thinking, and analyzing and categorizing. It's a great gift of the human, to be mentally nimble and deep-thinking. Therapy is grounded in the power of the mental, the "left brain," the analytical. Shamanism is grounded in myth and art, "the right brain," the non-rational.

The great archetypal psychologist James Hillman said, "Of all psychology’s sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty." The “father of modern psychology,” William James, was grounded in the philosophy of pragmatism: the function of thought is to solve problems leading to practical actions. These two ideas point to my view of the difference between shamanism and therapy.

Psychology began inside the western medical model that espouses a mechanical universe, including mechanical human bodies. Psychology is grounded in a basic goal to help a sick person return to functioning smoothly in society. In other words, you are sick because you have fallen out of being able to function in society. The medicine (therapy or pharmaceuticals) makes you well enough to function once again in society. The trouble is, what if you are returning to a sick society? Is that really the goal of being alive? Is it your goal to live happily in what Hillman calls “the system of rip-off economics [that] promotes its communal senselessness by substituting "more" for "beyond.”? (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 82.)

Shamanism’s goal is to transform suffering, to bring peace to the body, mind and spirit, to help improve your relationship to yourself, your life story and to other beings. But the core goal in shamanic healing is not necessarily to return you to society to function smoothly. Shamanism's goal is to return you to functioning as a member of a sacred world. Its goal is to restore beauty. Its goal is to help you become a “walking blessing” who feels blessed and who blesses others. In a society that has forgotten that beauty is a fundamental nourishment to our species, that actively disdains beauty as a waste of time and resources, or as dangerous to the power structure, becoming someone who "walks in beauty" is not an act of functioning smoothly in society. 

Therapy is grounded in reason - rational analysis separates, tosses away the useless, then labels and fixes the problem. Therapy is also boundaried by the human mind and human experience. It tells us our problems are contained inside our mind and inside the timeline of our life. “Childhood has been declared the source of our disaffected behavior…every therapy session searches memory for traces of unhappiness...bad mothers, absent fathers and envious siblings are the demons and ogres in psychology’s fairy tale” (Hillman, A Blue Fire, 234).

Shamanism’s healing geography is more expansive in its reach, and it is founded on the irrational, the mythopoetic and mysterious – the realms that reason says do not truly exist. Shamanism says that our current issues may come from outside of the human mind and from well beyond the confines of our biological, linear life span. Where psychology acknowledges and addresses family patterns, shamanism says it can heal and nourish the ancestors, and that will affect our daily life here and now. Psychology can acknowledge the impact of our DNA and our parenting, but shamanism says there is a spiritual DNA embedded in us that no machines can detect, and we are actively parented by the Unseen. Shamanism acknowledges that our symptoms may be a form of communication to us from the gods.

Shamanism throws its arms open to metaphor: the strange, the wondrous, the frightening, the ridiculous, the poetic, the emotional, and the mythic. All of these are our teachers. In shamanic healing, beauty is itself a cure for psychological malaise. Beauty is a holy power, the breath of God, it is the energy found at the Source, the life-force animating the quantum flux. Shamanic healing gathers this energy, condenses it, and directs it toward the issue at hand.

Shamanic work does indeed heal - in ways unexplainable by the rational mind. A million more words written here won't help you grasp intellectually why shamanic healing actually works. Check your heart and belly right now to feel if anything said here sounds right to you. If you want more words, a decent place to start is with this collection of articles by Stanley Krippner, PhD.[8]. 

Resources:
For a good book that delves into the blend between shamanism, western medicine and therapy: Cecile Carson, Editor, Spirited Medicine, Otter Bay Books, 2013. It’s put out under the auspices of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, Buy it here.

Fo more reading:

• James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, New York: Warner Books; 1996, 35
• James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse, HarperOne; 1993). 
• José Luis Stevens Awaken the Inner Shaman, Boulder, CO: Sounds True; 2014.