In traditional shamanic cultures, the shaman stood at the threshold between the known world of form and the great, mysterious world of the formless. The shaman's role was to be a mediator between these two worlds: one whose job was to help maintain well-being between the people in their community, between people and the animals, people and the earth, people and their Ancestors, people and the dead, well and unwell; and between people and the spirit world as a whole.
To maintain a certain level of balance in this way, while recognizing that unavoidable forces of natural chaos are always present, was essential to survival. In the past, there was no GPS, no news reports, no instant communication, no mass media from which to gain information. There were no "public resources", hospitals, grocers, schools, etc. If you were nomadic, and were planning the next hunt, you knew you couldn't count on the roaming herd to necessarily take the same path it took last year because perhaps this year was a drought; and so the watering places had moved and so had the animals. If it was a long rainy season, more of your tribe might develop health issues, and so you needed to know what plants were in the area that would help and what spirit forces would bring needed healing power to the ill. You needed to know all sorts of things that we take for granted these days and there was no written data-collected way to know. You had your finely tuned animal senses which were so developed they themselves were portals into the spirit world, you had your daily maintained relationship with the Earth and Ancestors which fed your intuitions, you had your carefully maintained oral traditions based on past experiences, and you had the shamans who could use their very focused relationship with the spirits to get information or channel the spirit power of the animals or the elements, or the weather, in order to heal imbalances. This has always been one of the fundamental roles of the medicine person.
Today we have different circumstances, but we have even greater need. So many of the difficult issues we deal with today are complexly layered and have roots in very old, toxic histories and debilitating and at times insane beliefs. We need those people who can effectively relate to the spirit realm and retrieve information about our course--what's workable, what's not. We need a non-human point of view. And this is where I want to emphasize something that most shamanic people know. Our human minds are idea generators. They're always forming new ideas for this and that. We don't need to fight that. What we do need however is to understand that ideas rise from personal and collective cosmologies that often have life-alienating thought forms, and these particular thought forms will be destructive to the well being of life on earth. And so in response we need to have a relationship with the Earth..... with the Spirit of the Earth, and be able to go to her and ask about our ideas... to ask things like “Is this workable? Can you support this in a good way? Will it harm any of my relations? Is now the time? Is the place here? What are the obstacles we need to watch out for? Who are our companions?” Etc. And we need to enlist the different spirits of the Earth as allies to lend their power so we can continue to evolve in ways that enhance all of life. We create now mostly through objectification and from the use of will which in our culture is founded on a dread of helplessness that we cannot control everything and that all life is impermanent. We create from subject to object. And we need to make the great shift in relating inspirited Subject to inspirited Subject; Conscious being to Conscious being; divine intelligence to divine intelligence. This has to be at the core of our activism in the world. And we need those who can disentangle us from inter-generational trauma and dysfunction and who can help the unwell dead, those who will guide and participate with others in how to begin relating to the Earth as the alive, sentient, powerful being She is, as well as with the other creatures. We can no longer simply enact our misguided will and our isolated, autonomous intelligence on our planet without experiencing more disastrous results. We need to learn what the Earth can support, how she can support it, and what our part in that is. We don't have all this information ourselves. We have to be able to communicate with the spirits of land and place, with the Ancestors, with the elements, with those of the hidden kingdoms, with a great, unified intelligence that we are part of if we would simply participate.
However, some people now use their spiritual practice as a way of buffering themselves from a world in crisis. There is a lot of transcendence sort of spirituality that tends to remove people from a full, embodied, heartful, active engagement with the issues of racism, sexism, violence, colonization, war-mongering, greed, poverty, starvation, brain-washing, addiction, objectification, abuse on all levels...and more. Others use spiritual practice for heightened stimulation... peak experiences that enliven for some moments before the return to habitual comforts. But anyone calling themselves a shaman or medicine person that you see doing this, is not following the older ancestral traditions which was to actively participate in the big, daily mess and beauty of the world, fulfilling their purpose by doing what they can to effect beneficial change on behalf of all beings.
Which brings me to what I see as one of the failings within contemporary shamanism. Here is the more standard process for entering this practice and this is when it's trying to be useful; I'm not even going to describe the others:
1. You read some books, you go to a workshop or something serendipitous happens that incites your interest. You learn how to go into a trance and journey to meet a form of disembodied consciousness or spirit.
2. If you're sincere and stay with it, you develop a beginner's relationship with the spirit world and you use that relationship for personal insight and healing. Which is good..... it's good to become a more conscious human. It has beneficial effects on you and your world.
3. You form a journey circle. You get together with others and you journey together on matters related to personal healing and guidance. This is good too. It can form good community and create more beneficial change. And you get to practice your discernment about what's really going on.
4. And here is where it usually takes one of two routes; You stop evolving and stay only with this small, personal journey practice, continuing to focus on yourself and not the needs of Life, OR if you want to grow more, you feel you need to become a shamanic healer and you go start taking courses in the different types of healing that are traditionally offered, whether you have actually been called by the spirit world to do this or not. And this aspect of being called is very important yet hugely ignored within a culture that is always plowing ahead with its isolated human will.
5. If you are called, and you immerse yourself in the necessary initiations and work with the spirit world to be a healer, you might become a very good healer. However, this is also where the role of medicine person tends to come to a halt. And this is where I feel it needs to change. In this culture, someone who is truly following the path of medicine person needs in some way carry the imprint of an activist.
Consequently, modern medicine peoplre as well as those who live shamanic or animistic lives must truly be activists who will engage heartfully in this world in some way on societal, political, ecological ground, and must be willing to work collaboratively with those who don't believe in spirits, with those who don't give a shit about talking to the stone people or winged ones; we must engage in any way we can with concerned, ethical people who love the life of this planet, whether they work with the spirit world or not, and exemplify through our behaviors the values we hold and their effectiveness.