Every person participating in a ceremony is an intricate part of the evolutionary process. It is the community’s unity and focus, together with the ceremonial host, that produces healing.
One of the most ubiquitous and overused words in modern times is “shaman.” So before we try to unpack the concept and better understand why it seems to be such a relevant and sticky idea, I would like to propose the following distinctions within the terminology.
A person born into an indigenous society, who has the gift of communicating with the Spirit world in an altered state, using an array of techniques. A shaman directs and moves energy to restore harmony within the individual, between the individual and the community, and between the community and the Spirit world.
A Western, conceptual construct developed to describe an understanding of the noticeable parallels between modern practices and the practices of a traditional indigenous shaman.
An adjective used to draw attention to noticeable cultural elements such as myth, folklore, art, and spiritual activity that can be associated with various motifs found among the diverse peoples of the world.
An authentic tribal healer would not consider that he was practising a thing called “shamanism,” a word invented by Western academics to classify the least comprehensible practices of indigenous peoples. Very few modern healers will define themselves as “shamans” simply because they are aware of the historical and socio-cultural background the term carries.
However, they realise some equivalence between their practices and shamans from ancient times. They realise that they are the grandchildren of their early ancestors and may access the same knowledge pool through what Rupert Sheldrake called the morphogenic field, or what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.
Sangomas on pilgrimage to Mautse Valley, South Africa
Since shamanism is not a religion but a spiritual practice or method, it cuts across all faiths and creeds, reaching deep levels of ancestral memory. As a primal knowing system, which precedes all established religions, it has its own symbolism and cosmology, inhabited by deities, gods, and totems.
Shamanism is not a belief system. It is based on experiential ceremonies conducted to heal, get information, or do other things. It is a knowing or knowledge system. The shaman works with what he knows and experiences, not what he is told to believe. He interacts with spiritual deities. He does not have to believe in them; he knows them and co-operates with them to bring healing to a specific situation.
Ceremony — the tools are timeless, handed down through many lineages
My introduction to shamanism was through a series of dramatic events, which cracked my belief system and opened me to understand the world from a different perspective. It was more a journey of unfoldment than an introduction. Self-knowledge is achieved through experience and effort.
Having participated in many ceremonies and rituals, I can speak from experience that these types of ceremonies are helping to shift the consciousness of humans, non-humans, and the planet at large in significant ways. One of the most important ways this happens is through the healing and balance that the ceremony brings to the community or group of people who gather together.
The shamanic group also grows in strength with experience. As members of a particular shamanic group grow to know and trust one another, their healing ability for one another in ceremonies increases. Relationships and reciprocity of relations are integral to this cosmology and way of life.
Rather than approaching the shaman as the sole healer, it is the community’s unity and focus, together with the ceremonial host, that produces healing, as the group achieves heightened states of awareness with the support and assistance of their peers. This is the core of Communal Shamanism.
Shamanism has a way of making complicated things quite simple. The solutions to many of our seemingly complicated problems, both collective and personal, are very simple: take care of your body, take care of the Earth, take care of your family, friends, children, and relatives, honour your ancestors, be useful, be generous, accept abundance as the nature of things, trust the universe, and strive to be conscious and aware of the fact that we co-exist on this planet with a multitude of other beings on the physical and spiritual levels.
Take care of your body. Take care of the Earth.
Take care of your family, friends, children, and relatives.
Honour your ancestors. Be useful. Be generous.
Accept abundance as the nature of things. Trust the universe.
“We are all carriers of an ancient way of knowing that is increasingly being remembered, one community at a time, with every ceremony and with the calling of every sacred circle.”