Cosmologies and Reconstituting Ourselves as Practitioners

Considering it's been a year since my last post, this topic seems fitting.

There are moments in our practices where it's appropriate and perhaps necessary for us to take a break: either because we deserve a well-earned rest…and/or because fundamental changes begin stirring our innards into rice pudding and we have to wait until we solidify into a new shape, much like a chrysalis.

(Common Crow Butterfly Chrysalis)

These moments generally happen when our cosmologies--that is, the stories through which we perceive and create reality--groan and creak under our burgeoning evolution. In some way, we have permanently or temporarily completed our explorations of these stories. Perhaps they are stories about good and evil, about the nature of reality, or about our place in the Universe. We face new experiences which don't reckon with our old stories, because these stories do not offer space for our expanding range of awareness. And when we have enough new experiences for critical mass, something catalyzes within, forcing us to spend time with Great Mystery until we hit the next Magnitude of Order in our path.

But why go through this? Why put ourselves through the grinder until we're reduced to metaphysical baby food? Frankly, it's dang hard to stay functional when your insides are pureed into protein shake. Why not just plow on using our well-worn machinery of perception and understanding--those trusty ironclad tools that have served us so well, and for so long?

Stagnation is not pretty. All of us have witnessed what it looks like in others: how the ever-changing, supple vitality that graces us as children turns into hardened cheese that's well beyond its expiration date. Perhaps we've seen it in our grandparents who refuse to give up old ways of thinking. Or in dogmas that do not account for the new ripples and patterns that are ever-emerging in life. Or people who hold onto jobs, relationships and insecurities for so long that their fear in losing these things outgrows their exuberance to discover new aspects of the world and of themselves. These are folks who have lost their abilities to engage with dismemberment in a good way. And without dismemberment, we cannot grow into the new selves that await us…that is, we cannot re-member the other innumerable aspects of ourselves that haven't had a chance to assume their places in our life. 

The more we recognize our multidimensionality, our multi-layeredness, our beautiful complexity, so may we better witness them in others. Not only are others honored and nourished by our accurate (and therefore loving) comprehensions, but such perceptions nourishes the perceiver as well. We eliminate the diminishment and mini-soul-losses that come from incomplete witnessing, that come from viewing people or events through too-small cosmological binoculars. More expansive recognition elicits a Win-Win which is the holy grail of shamanic living and practice. 

Why these musings of late? I've just come from another workshop from Betsy Bergstrom. It is a workshop I took 3-4 years ago on Compassionate Depossession and Curses Unraveling--but Betsy has expanded her explanations on cosmology and field theory. If it's been a few years since taking this workshop: Totally. Worth. Taking. Again. With a few years of practice under my belt, I found that I took things in more deeply. She unfolds much more information about practices we know and love. I got to witness all the different styles of practice while sitting in a powerful community field. I re-experienced what it was like to sit in the client's seat--always valuable for a practitioner. And as a fringe benefit, I received healings. 

Mulching our cosmologies (every so often) is an energetic dismemberment that allows for renewal. Our cosmologies are spiritual immune systems (more on this on a future post), so it's worth doing. When our immune systems are healthy, we use massively less energy to "defend" ourselves or to avoid situations and people. We naturally and effortlessly handle things as they come along--thereby allowing us to settle into our world in a good way.  

Curses and the Language of Victimhood

It’s a long-standing tradition in indigenous societies to visit your village shaman if you thought you’ve been cursed or spiritually injured by another. These injuries usually came at the hands of a sorcerer, a paid agent of one’s enemies. We modern folk, who have worked long and hard at civilizing the “savage” in us, dislike such talk because it raises the hackles of ancestral superstitious impulses that we want to think we have long buried (and don’t ever want to see again).

Middle World practitioners know how alive and kicking these impulses are—however much grave dirt we may try to throw on them. It’s not EEE-VIL, really. It’s human. It’s human when you harbor ill-will toward that mean aunt who just took away your favorite toy. Enough 9-to-5-ers have a Voodoo doll of their bosses inside their skulls that they torture in order to relieve the burden of their unjust serfdom. For that matter, how many corporations have cursed their clientele with goods that are intentionally fashioned for profit and not for the benefit of the populace. It’s part and parcel.

Thoughts are things, we’re oft told. If we can heal ourselves or manifest our wishes, then it stands to reason that in the great balance of the Universe, we can also harm ourselves and manifest our nightmares. Pollyanna thinking is ineffective when it denies the actuality of what’s going on. If we stick our fingers in our ears, pinch shut our eyes and start reciting positive mantras, we’re shutting ourselves off from the world of reality and (here’s the kicker) we’re doing it because deep inside we’re scared of what’s REALLY going on…meaning that the root intention of our actions (our rites) is the validation of what we fear. (Yeah, read that last sentence again.)

So again, it behooves all people (but practitioners especially) to closely examine the seeds of their actions—even when it’s wrapped in bright-and-shiny denial.

. . .

The validity of curses need to be handled with level-heads. After all, we can scare more soul out of our clients by filling their minds (not yet hardened by initiatory experiences) with stories about curses and possessing thoughtforms…thereby leaving them more vulnerable than we found them, and to the very things we're trying to help them with.

But how do we talk about how curses without freaking our clients out? The very nature of curses implies intention to harm, injury, vulnerability, unjust causality, existential uncertainty and fear of the unknown. A big mosh-pit of human chaos.

The strategy some practitioners enforce is:  Do the work, but don’t talk, think or otherwise mention it ever again. Perhaps this works for some, but I’ve always sensed, as a client, when this sleight-of-hand is operational (and this was even before I ever began practicing shamanism). The subsequent dissatisfaction left an unquenchable thirst to know the truth…a thirst that I also see in many clients. Because not telling them what’s really going down is equivalent to telling them that neither they nor the practitioner (in your best Jack Nicholson voice, now) can handle the truth. 

And what does it mean when we can’t handle the truth? If truth isn’t the thing that we’re handling in a shamanic session, then we might as well register in an Actor’s Guild. “Can’t handle the truth” means that, in our shamanic work, there is not a presence, a consciousness, a wisdom, a power that’s present/conscious/wise/powerful enough to handle what’s really happening when someone (intentionally or not) curses another. So. Not. True.

Illustration: When a kid has gashed their shin or broken their arm, and his friends run from the scene screaming bloody murder or lifting their open palms to the heavens at life’s incomprehensibility, it deepens the kid’s sense that something is majorly (perhaps irreparably) wrong. On the other hand if an adult comes along who (while sympathetic to the pain) knows exactly what to do and tells the child, in a knowing way, that everything is going to be okay then the pain can be borne without panic. 

Illustration 2: This even works when the child has been the target for intentional misdeeds. An adult can either get hot-under-the-collar and deepen the Mini-Me’s sense of injustice and wounding, or the adult can help bring the child to understand some valuable life-lessons, take appropriate action, and teach her how to effectively deal with such situations--all with the understanding that these things happen...and the quicker we learn to take them in stride, the easier our lives will be and the faster we can get on with more important things like friendships and growing into the people we’re meant to become (instead of meditating on the wrong-doing and possibly perpetuating the victim-pattern throughout life). 

Where does such mature, wo/manly attitudes blossom? In our own hearts and minds when we deal with our own pockets of fear and victimhood…those little (un)intention seeds inside the happy-go-lucky ideas of ourselves that we maintain to preserve functional sanity. It means going hammer-and-tongs into our own history (personal and ancestral), peeling back the glossy layers, and realizing that we can fix the unfixable. We can stare into the gullet of our deepest fears, and (while the ride can get wet and wild) we come out of it okay—enough times that we don’t pee our pants each time anymore. In other words, we’ve initiated ourselves (with serious Spirit help) and passed the guardians of No-Can-Do, Too-Big-To-Fix, and Just-Live-With-It. 

[Equip yourself properly and take some solid Middle World training before undertaking a meeting with such guardians...Betsy Bergstrom's classes are excellent.]

To the degree that practitioners don’t take their Hero’s Journey into their fears is the degree to which they will continue to buy into and therefore perpetuate the Language of Victimhood through their clients. At best, such language evokes a commiserating sympathy and at worst sustains the client’s victimhood—and those who come to practitioners to commiserate aren’t interested in actual healing because they’re not done with their victimhood. Serious Gotta-Heal folks want to run to the hands of reassuringly adept, mature practitioners. (I know, this can create an overwhelming Middle World learning curve for newbies, but at the least this Darwinian process ensures that only tenacious, scrappy and effective practitioners make the cut…another guardian to pass.)

Braggadocio and (blind) Positive Thinking doesn’t work. Neither, really, does Fake-it-till-you-make-it. Only the solidity that many pee-free self-honesty sessions impart will give you the aura of knowing, compassionate adult that the vulnerable crave. In a rocking shamanic session, not only is the practitioner’s Truth-O-Meter active, but so is the client’s. So faking it won’t wash (and frankly, I don’t know how any practitioner can get away with it if their Helpers are standing around with a burly Truth stick at the ready), or it will register with the client at an unconscious level and cause anything from irritation to anxiety. 

The reality is that many Middle World practitioners (the butt-naked honest ones) will be scared shitless for a bit. So we should all take heart and keep facing the challenges that appear on our path without getting t0o down on ourselves. After all, if the Spirits choose us, we’re meant for this work. (Read Martin Prechtel’s last chapters of _Talking Jaguar_, and he will tell you the same thing about his first years as a shaman.)

I’ll continue this discussion next time about some of the implications of rapidly initiating and maturing ourselves.