Shamanic initiations aren't usually what one focuses on in an early exploration of shamanic practice unless it is what leads you to it.. However, it seems more people are experiencing initiations that they often are unprepared for and do not understand; hence there is more difficulty with integration and making good use of such a profound event. One such initiation that can be disorienting is that of dismemberment, especially when it is full-blown. As a companion to you on this path of direct revelation, I'm sharing one early part of my own on-going initiation.
Thirty years ago my life radically changed. After a interrupted suicide attempt that threw me into a landscape I hadn’t known existed but which felt somehow familiar, I was suddenly no longer a rational materialist but a wide-eyed albeit quite confused and ignorant traveler within an unseen and dramatically shifting world. Through twists and turns I’m not going into here, I landed quickly as an entrepreneur with a holisitic healing center in North Carolina and was sitting in my office one day. Everything felt very normal. My business partner was talking on the phone. I could hear the birds singing out at the feeder. At one point I was in the everyday world, and without the slightest clue to me, something large and important had dramatically shifted. I was somewhere else. But I didn't know that at the time. I simply got up from my desk, told my partner I was going out and that I needed to walk around outside behind the building. There was a great expanse of empty, grassy field under the highway overpass that I suddenly felt very drawn to.
So I walked through my office, out the door, turned to my left and through the parking lot. As I was getting closer to the field, I noticed that my heart was really pounding and the taste in my mouth felt sort of dry and sick and full of iron. The sunlight seemed too bright in some areas and too dark and almost smoky in others. And I was having a hard time breathing. But I was accustomed to denying my body sense and anyway, something strong was pulling me forward. Compelled, I continued to the back of the building with escalating nervous system vigilance yet decreasing sense of autonomy. When I finally got there I looked around and there in the tall, yellowed summer grasses was a pride of female lions. They were lying there peacefully, tails slowly swishing. I have no words for the paradoxical sensation of how natural and almost welcoming it felt seeing them, their beautifully shaped, graceful enormous heads and hypnotic liquid eyes and yet how shockingly unbelievable and terrifying. That tension of paradox glued me to the spot to the degree I felt I was slowly sinking into the ground. And then they met my eyes. When that happened, first I heard, within my head, one of the lions say very casually, “Oh..hello there, it’s you” as if I passed their way everyday, just another savannah neighbor on the way to the watering hole! And then I saw this lion's eyes get wider and heard, more forcefully, 'oh, it’s YOU,’ as if suddenly remembering something and talking to herself. At that point all of the lions got up and approached me with such languid assurance, almost tenderly it seemed, but fiercely intently, and I suddenly knew what was coming; they were going to tear me limb from limb and there was no escape.
This did not feel like a dream or vision, did not feel like a hallucination or anything unreal (and I have never been a drug or entheogen-user, either.) It felt completely life-like and seamless with the time I had been mundanely working in my office. I bowed my head, didn't want to look; was simply terrified and yet fully submissive. I felt the moist heat of the first mouth touch me and it was like the sun roughly licking me with its stabbingly intense rays.. I felt a sharp pressure on my side, terror, and then I went very cold and everything went black. I was gone. I don’t know for how long.
When I came to, I was still standing, but alone in the field. I looked down at my body and it was hardly being held together, it was that ravaged. I couldn't see how I could even stand much less walk like that. Huge chunks of bloody meat hung off me, there was blood everywhere and I could see viscera, ligaments and bones. Even though it felt hopeless and ridiculous, I knew I needed help, but how to get it in this shape? As I stood there looking at my barely connected limbs and the meat of me hanging in big shredded hunks, I decided to try and walk back to the office to get help without understanding how this body could possibly do so. With each step I took while walking I noticed that chunks of flesh were merging back with my body and I couldn't see my innards any longer. By the time I was back at my office door, my body was merely covered in countless raised violent purple welts and then as I walked past my partner, who didn’t seem to notice anything alarming, the myriad scars, too, began to soften and diminish. As I stood at my office chair, thinking I should phone an ambulance, my body morphed into a healed form; completely smooth and whole.
I got some water, asked my business partner if she had seen or heard anything unusual while I’d been outside and went back to my desk in a daze and sat--stunned, confused beyond words, and yet for some strange reason, calm. I never experienced "coming to" in any way. There was no waking back up into ordinary reality. Reality continued seamlessly......sort of.
I had no concept or language for what had just happened. I thought I must be losing my mind or having a seizure. I hadn't been studying anything that might tell me about this experience. I had been studying Reiki, which for the time period and location where I lived was as far-out in the alternative belief world as you could get, and in my business also did work with emotional and somatic integration processes. I knew from recent personal experience and contrary to my upbringing that the Earth was alive and sentient, and that it glowed and sang secretly at night with beautiful and wise, beguiling forces. I knew there were presences of some sort seemingly guiding and likely acting through me although in an uninformed and, for my part, quite undisciplined yet sometimes powerful way. But this particular experience was beyond my ken. However, my life deeply altered. Perceptions greatly expanded beyond the increasingly sensitive physical senses, physical reality became, well...quite unpredictable; shifting and wobbly, all sorts of non-corporeal beings began coming through, and time/space seemed to be bending and shifting all over the place. Although there was often great enchantment here, there was also deep confusion, resistance, psycho-emotional disturbance and general overwhelm with concomitant attempts to define, catergorize and control. I felt I needed some kind of container/teacher for understanding and appropriate processing and relating but didn’t know what that needed to be or even how to find out..
So I did what I’d been doing since the time I first tried to end my life: I spent all of my time in the wild. I got rid of almost all material possessions. I slept on the ground and bathed in the stream. I covered a lot of ground walking and much time sitting watching. I touched rocks and trees with the tentative awe of a lover and surrendered to what I heard in the wind; I gave distant attention to the shining beings I saw glimmering and heard singing in the woods at night and closer engagement with the forest animals and birds. Always birds….. I listened to the songs of the beloved elder trees and to the rocky creek I slept by. I observed, spoke with but especially listened to the surprising and generous flowers and other plants and grieved so long and deeply I imagined it would never end, but just kept listening each day, ignorant and clueless; and I did this not from any kind of inspired plan or intelligence but because I was simply quite alone, pathless and really didn’t know what else to do with my tattered self. Everything felt unknowable, far beyond the concepts and language I’d always lived with and poised on the edge of a type of mad chaos. More and more unusual spirit presences I had no words or understandings for continued to come and I found myself pulled to walk in the fields and forest at night to be among them and to listen to a great thrumming rising from the ground, all while being surrounded by a wide circle of light to easily see by in the dark that went everywhere with me, emanating from I don’t know where and although I didn’t know what was happening, these experiences and presences eventually, after several years, began to seed in me a type of calm, a sensual reverence, dissolution of familiar ambitions, a warmth of companionship, increasing sense of humor about myself and my situation and very great Beauty as well as a strange remembering that was coming from what seemed like other times, orientations and places. And eventually, fortunate circumstances led me for a short while to some old ones of this land who helped me better contextualize my experiences and discipline my perceptions, patterns and assessments and so the journey continued.
But right now I’m writing to introduce you to he shamanic initiatory experience of dismemberment and to give you a chance to possibly feel it through a personal accounting in case you are experiencing anything similar that confuses you and you think you might be crazy, as there is very little space or tolerance for this in our modern, soul-lost world. Any serious exploration of shamanic practice calls for rigor in becoming impeccably honest with one’s self, for allowing continual deep personal dismemberment and healing, for increasing one’s knowledge of the patterns, limits and voices of the personal conditioned mind, and in being willing to die to one’s self-image repeatedly for the rest of one’s life. And so, on this path, a grounded, informed perspective on trauma is an active element of inquiry and experience, as is the nature and need of catalysts for change, the characteristics of inner and outer harmony and balance, the power of intergenerational thoughts-forms to shape a culture, and the over-arching call to re-align ourselves with the wisdom and spirit of the natural world who can teach us all about being fully human and to also connect with and support the knowing as well as the struggles of the indigenous humans who have never lost their fundamental connection with the Earth. You possibly have no idea just how much we need them and their wisdom and how much we are in troubled debt to them and must stop casting a net of invisibility over them and the terribly wounded nature of our relationship.
Thus, dismemberment is a primal reorientation and restoration as it is an act of both deep shedding and then healing into new form initiated and accomplished by the Ancestors, the heart of the Earth and other loving spirits in tandem with your willing soul. Unlike many modern modalities of healing which can move slowly and take many years to affect change, the spirits aren’t messing around. They’re here to help us bring balance, embody our true nature Now—which is wilder, more passionate, more dynamic, more courageous and more sane and coursing with love and creative power than either the very controlled, rigidly careful lives we tend or certainly the chaotic hells we often create and languish in, calling it civilization. And unlike other humans, they have the kind of power to do so.
This process of dismemberment strips away attachment to and over-identification with form as being the initiatory, primary mover of life—as well as to the consensual limiting beliefs about physicality—and also to one’s personal identity, perceptual filters, needs, agendas and biases, With this stripping away, the individual gains more freedom from the restrictive, conditioned belief systems and inherited energies from limiting ancestral and cultural thought-forms, and also can embody more conscious energetic knowledge about the ways of both wounding and reintegration; the nature and origin of pain and loss, and how, where and when it can be transmuted. Another outcome of a dismemberment is that a person will be transformed in such a way as to be able to provide space for more of their own innate spiritual power as well as increase their capacity to apply the great power of the spirits not merely on behalf of their own lives but especially those of their community, the Earth and those to come.
Dismemberment in traditional shamanic cultures can be violent and scary(by Western standards) and is often an acted-out ritual "killing" or wounding performed in real-time by the community to ground the person's other-worldly and psycho-spiritual abilities into physical reality. In modern culture however, this most often happens in a dream state, an intentional journey state or ceremonial trance state, and it tends to occur once a person has already begun a shamanic or other spiritual healing practice, developed some relationship with helpful spirits and has some knowledge of what to expect. However, since I've been finding that dismemberment is occurring with novices at an increasing rate, especially during this time of deep transition, I feel moved to note this trend so it can be approached with the benefit of some awareness.
Dismemberment also occurs through ordinary reality experiences of illness and injury, loss of loved ones and relationships, loss of familiar abilities, loss of home or work, etc. Sometimes many of these both in and out of ordinary reality will occur, especially if the spirits have called you to do healing work on behalf of others. However, even if you're simply interested in a personal animist orientation with some overlap into trance-based spirit relationships ---which is certainly the most common path--- it is useful to know that dismemberment is a process of change into deeper alignment with your own spirit through the shedding of what’s familiar and seemingly safe, a deeper love for the diverse communities of Earth, and with attuning to what creates/restores balance within earth communities through more conscious relationship with those of the intercessional spirit realm as well as with the bodies that take form. Dismemberment is one of the holy gifts that drives and seats this alignment.