Sacred Space and the Archeology of Motives

As with surgery, in shamanism we want to maintain clean workable spaces when we roll up our sleeves and get elbow deep into Soul. We want to create Sacred Space. It’s such a basic principle of most indigenous shamanic practices, and yet not something often talked about in trainings.

For many of us, we have routines—perhaps setting up our altars, honoring our spirits, maintaining power objects, smudging the room, and calling in the Spirits. But even in situations when such elaborate routine is not possible (ICUs, for instance) the one sine qua non for setting space (besides the presence of the Spirits) is our intention. Our intentions provide the “rules” or “guidelines” of the playing field in which energy runs. (The actual mechanics is provided by our cosmologies, but that’s another post.)

A practitioner is the main power object in a healing session. S/He is the power object for the Spirits. We anchor spiritual realities into the physical world. Being a power object is a capacity everyone has to varying degrees, but shamans are born (by agreement) and beaten into serviceable shape for the Spirit by initiatory experiences. They are therefore effective power objects for the Spirits.

Human beings are in a privileged position—we are Spirit but we are also players in this physical realm. While the Spirits affect us, they don't grease all the squeaky wheels of this world without our help because the human sphere of the Middle World was set up for us to learn through Free Will, Choice and Awareness. This is why, in most cases, only the living can help the dead if they haven’t crossed over after a time…because we are the ones responsible for setting the space in the human portion of the Middle World. 

A practitioner is a power object, but a power object with history. Power objects with histories are mixed bags. Some have gathered much healing power over the years, but in most shamanic cultures they often are considered dangerous enough to outsiders that they must be buried with the owner. Those who attempt to use these artifacts usually need to purge enough of the original owner’s energy from the object before they can use it.

In our case what we need to purge are our motives, and our motives are tied to the artifacts of our history and psyche: our wounds and insecurities, our needs and the world’s inability to meet them. We’re matryoshka dolls, and we can’t assume that what’s within us is a mirror to our conscious intentions. Our motives to heal and do right may carry deeper personal needs (feeling power or wanting attention) or ulterior motives (proving that I am a good person or that I’m worthy). And unless we’re aware or have mechanisms to deal with these surprise-centers in our chocolate box, they can end up messing with our space setting in small (or not-so-small) ways. Intention is tied to motive.

Consider the above issues seriously, but don’t freak. The reality is that intentionality is a skill that we all need to hone and re-hone, and we’re always going to find surprise-centers. Being a responsible practitioner doesn’t mean being perfect or “pure,” it means taking responsibility for what you know and don’t know about yourself. Meanwhile you can make an agreement with your Helpers to face and work with your hidden motives, provided that they keep them clear of the space during a shamanic session. Learning this skill can be bitter medicine, but if we’re not afraid of the passing discomfort we can come out much better practitioners.

Cosmologies and the Virtuosity of Senses

Let’s say we are fully alive to our senses and we’ve begun to experience the vibrancy of everything around us. Now what?

For most people that is enough. Their ripening senses underscore the preciousness of all things and validates their being—the oranges that deliver sunshine, the oceans that cleanse us, the earth we plant ourselves on, the trees that greet us every morning. We are precious in how we feel and appreciate these things, especially in this world where so much of Spirit goes unnoticed. Spirit finally witnessing and loving spirit. Once the pores of our sensoria open, we can finally saturate our parched selves in the juices of Spirit. 

For practitioners, this is just the first step. We’re not only nourished by Spirit, but we’re also instruments for Spirit. That means we cultivate a virtuosity in our senses so we can actively and accurately hear the messages all around us. Our awareness allows us to siphon more information from our surroundings, our clients and our Helpers—which means our actions can be more thorough and effective, in a way that benefits more of Life.

We also need to know how to handle the impressions that aren’t pleasant without freaking out. (People who have sensation-overwhelm should take the Mediumship class with Betsy Bergstrom who gives the best instruction I’ve seen on this.) We freak when we have no handle on a situation, when our cosmologies can’t deal with the information we’re being given and we therefore have no appropriate response. This is where PTSD can come in. If we’re not successful in making sense of something, it get blocked out—and before you know it, another one of our senses shuts down and gets archived into the dead zone. 

Our cosmologies are living things that need space to grow, to handle more of what we witness as our senses (and therefore spheres of knowledge) open up. Sometimes we just need to flesh out what we already understand through our experience. Other times, we need to drop our working cosmology (the machinery through which we do our shamanic work, and the landscape in which our Magical Selves operate) in order to take up a new one. This takes courage and beaucoup assistance from the Helpers…in fact, it’s usually instigated by them. But without this renewal, we get prone to what Roger Walsh calls “Truth Decay”—the dogmatisation of a living reality. 

Magical Thinking and Our 360 Senses

Ancient Egyptians believed that full humans (which may mean people who have run the gamut of initiations) have 360 senses. Mind Scrambling. My marbles roll confusedly on the floor just thinking about it. Okay, so we've got five down...more or less. Rupert Sheldrake tells us that sixth sense has been appropriated by scientists to categorize the way that animals use the magnetic, gravitational and electric fields to detect migrate, detect prey, etc. (and there has to be at least a few senses stirred in there). Sheldrake goes on to coin the term "seventh sense" to engulf all the other extra-sensory perceptions like clairvoyance, precognition and telepathy (the three that he focuses on) and describes how difficult it is for researchers to tease these three apart.

Those of us who have taken classes from Betsy Bergstrom knows that there are different types of extra-sensory perception like clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairolfaction, instant knowing, etc. If we stretch everything out to its extreme, we may come up with almost 20 senses that we know of. The implications of this are immense.

Ancient Egyptians had an understanding that we do not know a concept or thing until we knew all aspects of it. Quick calculations say that the most astoundingly psychic of us would know only about 5.5% of anything. This is where humility and the Great Mystery come in.

Do you remember when you were little and you made something, a picture perhaps, and you showed it to someone who didn't appreciate it or thought it was just clutter? If this happens on a regular basis, eventually that special something that we had (that we put into the picture) withers and goes dormant for lack of recognition, acknowledgement and feedback from the outer world. It's like it didn't exist. Eventually, we ourselves forget about it. This, my friends, is soul loss. Lack of perception can engender soul loss.

What happens when we walk the world, appreciated only for the quantifiables: money, possessions, appearances, career, etc.? What happens to all of those non-goal-oriented parts of us? What happens to the peach-lick toed, mudlicious, creamy nougat, juicy joy parts that could: feel what Christmas Morning was, sniff the change of seasons, eat the sunshine in an orange or allow the undulations of the sea run through our bodies as we stand on the beach?

This is what makes life worth living. Jobs and possessions allow us to live so we can experience the world in our own way, to feel these things and thereby become one of the tongues of God/Goddess/Allah/All-That-Is that's busily licking our own scoops from the 5-gagillion flavors of the Great Baskin-Robbins of Life.

Such people, each in their own way, contribute to the experience of the greater whole of which we are all a part. So it behooves us to help people find their destined scoop of life and regain their abilities to enjoy it--because at the deepest levels (where our commonality finally trumps our divisions) we are enriched by their experience too.