Core Shamanism: Everything Is Alive

Enjoy this 12-minute read, or have me read it to you via the link on my website.

Eighteen years ago, I walked into the cozy living room of a grand craftsman home on Holgate Blvd in Portland. Folding chairs were set-out auditorium style and a hot pot with fragrant homebrewed chai burbled on a brightly varnished wooden table. The walls were hung with ornate tapestries of fierce Tibetan dieties, all fangs and tongues. A white board was set-up at the front of the room with a collection of dry erase markers in vivid primary colors. They waited as expectantly as I did for the teachings that were about to come through us and change our lives.

It was no mistake that I was introduced to the Association of Gnostic Anthropology through a couple I came to adore at my very first real grown-up job, one I’d gotten in a circuitous and somewhat magical way. He interrupted my interview by pounding his fists on the window and flashing me the most playful sunshine smile that told me I was home. A few months later, she was my Secret Santa and gave me a white buddha statue, candles representing the five elements, and a copy of the Illuminated Rumi. They both listened warmly to my despair and my wonderings at after-hours house parties and kept inviting me to their school until I agreed.

It wasn’t just the transcendent delight of being shown the cross-cultural symbols and metaphors found all over the world, the sweetly exotic smell of incense, or the perfectly rendered Muslim call to prayer. As an anthropology grad, these things always speak to me as passing fascinations, but what set my skin alight was the core teaching: not to tell us what’s true, but to give us the practices we need to experience it for ourselves. These practices are ancient and have been used by countless generations of our ancestors across the globe to access direct knowledge. These had been kept in secret for millennia, reserved for only the most devout, because one must have great discipline and compassion to use power ethically. But eventually, they were withheld because it’s much easier to exploit someone who needs something they can only get from you.

At the gnostic school, we received rigorous meditation training, learning precise techniques to experience all the realms of consciousness in the Hindu tradition. We trained in dream yoga to explore the Tibetan Buddhist bardos in preparation for a conscious death. We studied Kabbalistic cosmology, sang Sufi devotional chants, and conducted ancient Hebrew and Egyptian rituals. We gathered several nights a week to drink our weight in tea, disclose the intricate self-reflections scribbled in our notebooks, reflect on extensive esoteric readings, and report back on what our practices had revealed to us. We became each other’s community.

As this work became my life, my inner world became startlingly alive. As I checked which dimension I was in every 30-minutes, I began to get lucid in the dream world and encountered both demons and guides who showed me things my teachers verified were spiritual truths I’d never come across before. As I worked with my vital energy and with elemental spirits, I began to shed life-long compulsions and neuroses. And as I began to teach and receive access to more profound practices, my life took on a sense of purpose that soothed all my anxieties around worldly status, achievement, and security.

But when my teachers told me they were just as asleep as I was, I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t understand until I was accused of trying to manipulate things because I was one of the school’s biggest donors. I didn’t realize what was happening until one teacher told me another teacher had a crush on me and he denied it, and then demoted me to an introductory level when I visited a rival school in response to seeing him in dreamtime conducting a satanic ritual. Despite everything I was learning about how to access what was real and true, I couldn’t tell who to trust. I couldn’t clearly decipher or deal with what I was encountering inside and around me. My career had stagnated, I had pushed all my other friends and family away, and the demons I encountered just laughed at the protective spells I tried to cast and slashed at my skin.

After five years of study, I left the school within months of getting married and fell into a deep depression. I got into counseling, committed to a new career, enrolled in graduate courses, took on volunteer board work, and enjoyed fancy dinners and holidays on the coast. But I was inwardly lost at sea. I started drinking again. I antagonized people in authority. I got divorced, got pulled into relationship drama, got super sick, and quit my job. I couldn’t bring myself to think about the divine. Trying to meditate felt like PTSD. But I could put my hands in the soil. I could feel the seasons, phases of the moon, and times of day cycle through a beloved marsh. I could talk to the animals and trees, and feel them in my body. So they were the ones who began to visit my dreams, and I found myself reconnecting with the divine through nature.

When I found myself in a 12-step program to save my life, I had to face my spiritual wounds and define what Higher Power meant to me beyond an indifferent nature-based cosmology. Nothing I tried felt real or trustworthy until I realized that shamanism had been whispering to me and nudging me my whole life. There was the ease and intensity of my first shamanic journey during a drum circle in my early 20’s. There was the person who heard me describe how my body was becoming trees and fields during my meditation and said, “That’s shamanic.” There was my consistently vivid dream life, the ease with which I shifted into altered states, and the intuitive way I’d always known the things around me were as alive as I was. When I put the pieces together and started looking for a community without New Age-y spiritual bypassing or presumptive cultural appropriation, I found Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies and experienced something akin to a spiritual renaissance.

Harner studied anthropology like me and was based in the San Francisco Bay Area where I was first exposed to cultural and spiritual studies, and where I found myself drawn back to totally unexpectedly when my life unraveled. After his own personal experiences of the other world, he began studying what all shamanic cultures had in common and distilled “core shamanism” – the basic set of practices human beings have developed across cultures for shifting consciousness to access spirit helpers for healing. Those human universals were what I sought in my study of anthropology, which only gave me cultural relativity. Those universals were what captured my faith and passion for the gnostic school, which left me unable to navigate betrayals and attacks. My copy of Harner’s book is riddled with dog-ears and crowded with notes as years of my life come flooding back and gather around these themes: what it means to be human, legitimate personal power and purpose, and communion with an animate world that extends far beyond our consensus reality.

Core shamanism, like gnostic anthropology, provides practices for individuals to directly experience truth. Some of those experiences were codified into religions and those who revealed them were named prophets. But shamanism itself is not a religion. It’s a method – an independent spirituality that stands in opposition to any spiritual authority telling us what is true or how to live our lives. These ancient practices free us from convention and oppression, and enable us to find guidance and healing for the practical challenges in our modern world just as they helped our ancestors navigate the challenges of their time. They speak to us in the nature-based, metaphorical language developed through the millennia of our evolution embedded in the land, and enable us to partner with purely compassionate spirits in other dimensions who provide healing through us. Core shamanism provides a vital complementary healing modality when illness is spiritual in nature, combats spiritual oppression by bringing individuals into direct communion with the divine, and supports a worldview founded in spiritual ecology. Everything is alive, interconnected, and deserving of respect.

Core shamanism also inspires my trust and enables me to re-engage with mystical practices because of the key ways it differs from gnostic teachings, as I learned them. Instead of isolating me from the world, it roots me squarely within it because the goal is not to transcend the world but to be more fully present as a vehicle of healing. Shamans are laborers by day, fully participating in the practical work of their community. Instead of focusing me on my own spiritual development, it puts me in a position of serving others because the spirits come to me to gain access to healing others (they need permission). And instead of relying on my own unsteady and limited power, everything is done through spirit helpers who have the strength, insight, and street-smarts to handle what I can’t, and keep me honest when my motivations waver.

On a more personal level, core shamanism is a vital way for me to begin to make reparations for the way my colonial ancestors have destroyed ecosystems, obliterated indigenous cultures, and oppressed wild ways of knowing. It is the threshold of my own healing by leading me back into intimate conversation with my body and imagination, to trusting my intuition and discernment, and to becoming a bona fide adult who can self-soothe and find my own way in the world. And it provides a precious sense of purpose. Even though I am limited by my health and by the psychic wounds that are still healing, I can be a virtual conduit for others. I can be part of easing the burden lost souls place on our planet and helping individuals access the clarity and belonging they need to be part of collective solutions.

The very best part is that I am willing to fail over and over again at this because I understand now that working in this way is simply in my bones. I have a curiosity and generosity of spirit around anyone who does this work because it fills me with awe and there is plenty for each of us to do in our own way. Each practice I do deepens my experience of the world as vibrating with life and brings me closer to my own helpers, to the tribe I truly belong to, to the only beings I’ve ever met who I can trust completely. I am beginning to understand that everything, everything that’s ever happened to me has been on purpose. It’s all been guiding me back to what’s always been my path.

Nancy