Shamanic Living: by Lauri Shainsky, Ph.D

Our animal friends are intertwined in our lives at so many levels, seen and unseen. They are our teachers, and we honor them reverently.

My friend Colleen had to put her horses down last month. She and they had been together for decades. I had had a dream about Dakota, her dearest horse. We were stepping over him as he lay on the earth. I did not understand the dream at the time I dreamed it.

Colleen told me how she had been outside after the horses passed, praying and connecting to Spirit, wrapped in her mummy bag under her tree, as she does faithfully in her practice. All at once, she was dumped out of her chair, and crashed to earth. This crash to earth set into motion a long period of pain and recovery.

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I have noticed that I can begin to “shake things up” in my life–to reconfigure my energy system and invite more vibrancy in my everyday being-ness– by touching the wild. While I am not in Africa anymore (where the above kill shot was taken), and probably neither are you, we have wildness around us everywhere, no matter how disconnected from nature one might feel or believe that we are.

I touch the wild by simply opening the window and listening to the birds singing…or my car window for bird-song drive-bys! Watching the buds on our house plants break out into leaf- and flower-dom. Better yet, the emerging crocus and daffodil outside… Taking a walk, with an invitation in the heart, that something wild (of nature) will inform the walk in some way.

Shamanic living for me is attuning to the rhythms of nature, and treating other organisms as if they were sages. Read the rest of this entry »

I have always seemed to carry Coyote energies. In love with, and at the same time afraid of, being the “bad girl”. When Bradford Keeney came and shared with the Portland shamanic community “shaking medicine”, a sense of permission, remembering, and a breaking out of the confines of my own rules burst forth in my life. It was not just the 60,000 yr old wisdom and power that comes from the Bushman of the Kalihari that has shaken my world (and many of my mates), but the wildness of the teacher, Brad, and the remembering of our own wildness within.

The rawness of the wild that we have forgotten in our modern world calls to us, to be breathed in once again. The ancient and steady power of the earth and star nation (sky god) calls to us again, to be invited into our hearts and bellies for healing ourselves and our communities.

As Brad was speaking, the altar that i pour my sweat lodge under turned on its ear, and a dawning of a new age of being with spirit was born. to be continued…

I have been doing some Spirit writing from some of the journeys in and out of class (Healing Through Sacred Sound and Song, A LightSong Course Taught by Dr. Lauri Shainsky), as they relate to what I am moving through personally. I guess this class is opening the door to my own personal healing and that will hopefully open doors to healing within my ancestral lines, especially with my daughter. I know this is also the door for bigger work down the road.

The Song–To the Depths of Emptiness

I was taken to a cave, to the void where there was nothing but darkness. I am a visual journeyer so this was frustrating as I kept wanting to be shown something. I felt like I was just led to nowhere. I couldn’t even tell if I was still on the journey. So I just lied there, and asked: So now what? Is this it? They said yes. They said stop looking and listen. I did and heard nothing. I was actually pissed off. I asked again, is this it? They said yes. Then, after awhile they said “This is the place sound is born”. Then we were called back. It felt so frustrating. It wasn’t the same place of quietness and solitude that I have been where you feel expansive and blissful. This place was empty to its core! It had no feeling, no sound, no light, no sense, no space. I am still sitting with it. It was actually a little scary to think about. Like I never acknowledged that there could be such a place. It reminds me of an agnostic death, where when you die, that’s it.

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My benevolent helpers have shown me this beautiful process which they help me perform at the end the soul retrieval ceremonies they perform through me. They call it “singing the soul forward”.

They have instructed me that an effective way to integrate the recently-retrieved soul parts into the wholeness of the soul. It involves helping each retrieved part re-experience all of the events that the rest of the soul has experienced since that part was lost from the whole. The benevolent ones give me a unique song for each person, which is sung while the events are vibrationally infused during the integration and sealing process. This part of the ceremony “catches the soul part up” so to speak on what the rest of the soul has experienced, so it, too, gets to experience the history of, and become integrated into, the wholeness of the soul.

Thoughts? Experiences? you can also email me at lauri@hiddenlakeretreat.org

I am inviting you to write about your experiences that you would like to share with others, your questions and wonderings, about the shamanic healing that you do with the spirits, or that you have received from the spirits through shamanic healers.

Please Use initials or made-up names so that people’s privacy can be maintained.

My wondering for the day:

My spirits performed a soul retrieval on a client “NC” the other day. They retrieved an important part that had been taken by a parent as they passed on. We traveled to the edge of the light, my spirits went in and retrieved the soul part, then returned.

When we returned and began discussing things, NC noted that the evening of her parent’s passing, she experienced a profound state of peace and light.

My question or wondering or learning was this:

we have often thought that the soul part is caught in another space-time, and that the host soul is having experiences in in this part’s absence. apparently, it seems, the soul part is having its own experience, too. NC felt as if she was having an experience of the light, as her soul part had been transported there.

Thoughts?

We listen in the shamanic life to messages from our benevolent helpers. As I was preparing for solstice lodge, they were asking me to inquire about the relationships between what I perceived as the “light” parts of myself–things I honored in myself, the good, and the dark parts of myself–my shadow, the pain of wounds, fears, things i tell myself about myself that are “bad” ways of being. This line of inquiry catapulted all of us in the lodge to look.

The spirits’ underlying message was this: the dark always informs and feeds the light.

The spirits were showing us that the Earth experiences a dynamic balance of light and dark every day. On her skin, every day, in the dance with the sun. As the earth spins through this dynamic balance, so do we. There is no Home without this dance of light and dark.

The dark aspects of ourselves are only perceived by us that way. We know this. They are integral to our divine whole. They inform what we have judged to be “light” sides of ourselves; they cause us to seek help and advice, retreat and go into silence, journey, whatever multitude of means we as spiritual beings endeavor to do to bring healing to our lives.

There is a partnership between these aspects of ourselves. The events that prompt pain are karmic, for the pain and fear informs the development of the soul.

People come to me as a shamanic healer and say “I want you to help me get rid of this…” Sometimes, the “this” does not belong to them,  so we do an extraction or cord-cutting on this dense energy that is foreign to the person’s energy system/soul. Sometimes, oftentimes, the “this” they seek to be rid of is some aspect of themselves that they struggle with. The spirits were helping us see that healing this is about helping come to peace with those things, to end the struggle, to see into how to use those aspects as gifts for growth and development. How this “dark” feeds the “light, with these terms only metaphorical, like the dance of the earth with the sun.

I had heard this before, over and over, but this time they finally conveyed it to me in a visceral fashion that i could truly grok.

What was even more interesting was what they told me as I was speaking about this to a friend. They said that whenever we begin to “dis-own” the dark parts of ourselves, to speak about “getting rid of” these aspects we deem our dark side of our personalities or even our life, those quirks and fits of behavior we do not deem spiritual–as we poo poo these things about ourselves in our own minds, or as we seek help to get rid of these, we are actually causing mini events of soul loss (see www.hiddenlakeretreat.org/shamanism.htm for discussion on soul retrieval). Little splinters of our essence “pink” off (can you hear it???) into another time space continuum until we honor them and come to peace with them, or until a soul retrieval is performed.

So we learn from the Earth how to feel the dynamics of light and dark, to allow the dark to inform and feed the light. We thank the benevolent ones for this message, on this path of shamanic living.

The first step on this path of shamanic living is surrendering to the knowing that there are benevolent spirits in, what Carlos Castaneda termed, “non-ordinary reality”. On numerous occasions, they reveal themselves with the exuberance of “dogs at the door”– the eager puppy zeal displayed when our canine best friends are waiting for us to let them in the house (or to take them on a walk). This zeal is the energy signature my Helpers have conveyed to me–they are waiting excitingly for us to recognize that they exist and utilize them to bring health and information to “ordinary reality”. We are their vehicles, with our physicality, and it is our birthright (of all people) to be a channel for them. Our voices in service to speak their message, our bodies in service to dance their dance, our hands in service to direct our doingness with their healing power. And it begins with an act of courageous belief.

White, for the spirits of the north, coats all things here at Hidden Lake. It almost never snows here; it is a beckoning, once more, of the winter spirits. and of the hibernation, a reminder to re-become quiet, and go within to tend the heart, before going out into the world beaming it.
today, i call forth new benevolent, loving, compassionate energy medicine through the internet ethers. across the landscape of this 21st century, our callings are of a different kind, and of the same kind, as our ancestors.

we stand united calling forth health and healing for the people, calling forth wellness and fortitude for the creatures of nature, illumination for the people leading and following.

with a kind heart, a good soul, to others. to build this light here on this good earth. continuing the legacy of good shamans, loving life.