Shamans: Lords of Time and Space

* Bum yn lliaws rith

Kyn bum kisgyfrith.

Bum cledyf culurith.

Credaf pan writh.

Bum deigyr yn awyr.

Bum serwaw syr.

Bum geir yn llythyr.

Bum llyfyr ym prifder.

Bum llugyrn lleufer

Blwydyn a hanher.

                                                                         ‘Kat Godeu’, Llyfr Taliesin VIII

From a purely shamanic perspective time and even age do not exist in any ordinary sense. The experience of many who journey is that time and space can be both compressed and conflated while in an altered state of consciousness. This can also happen in everyday life while day-dreaming and of course, in dreams. Humans, it seems, are hard-wired to be in more than one place at a time.

Traditionally, shamans have been both the Walkers Between Worlds – those aware of Essential Time – and the keepers of the community calendar, guardians of seasonal cycles and Material Time. This dual role reflects the dual nature of humanities’ relationship with time and age. Paradoxically we are both in and beyond time, part of the cycle of life and death and simultaneously outside and beyond it. Shamans have always been a bridge between material time and essential time, which we also know as non-ordinary reality time. Part of a traditional shaman's role is this merging of interior/spiritual and exterior/material histories.

Since The Fall, The Flood, the end of the Dreamtime, the stories suggest that we have lost connection to the origin of Time and now are left only with an awareness of material time. This in turn affects the ways in which age and ageing are perceived; mostly, in the West at least, as a inevitable, and even frightening, decline towards death and non-being.

Time v. Age

Surrounded as we are currently by a cult of youth, age and ageing are becoming increasingly taboo subjects, as death already is. However we regard time, there is something impersonal about it. Age on the other hand is very personal, affecting each woman or man differently and having different implications.
What is it about age or the prospect of ageing that affects us? Is it a loss of youth, a loss of physical beauty, the end of childbearing, an increase in infirmity and weakness, the onset of ill-health that will gradually drag us towards the grave? Most people will experience anxiety about one or more of these things. Shamans are as much part of this process as anyone; unlike most people however, the true shaman has always known that time and age are merely perceptions. This knowledge is a privilege, but one that is gained by making a journey that only the dead ordinarily make. By leaving this world and returning to it with knowledge and power the shaman proves that she is spirit, because she is able to transcend time and space and exist in a place where these things have no meaning.

Time, Age and Myth  
 

Festivals around the world Eid, Passover, Easter, Chinese New Year, mark human time. Some, like Samhain, mark no-time, the time between the old and the new year, between life and death, when anything is possible. This can be seen in the trick or treating of Halloween – the modern Samhain - where the underlying premise remains uncertainty or surprise.

Many creation stories from around the world refer to a golden time, an era before material time was first measured. Then, all humans could do naturally what only shaman's now do, that is, pass between worlds. After this era ended humans were left with an awareness of life and death and age and material time were born. However, there is a long history of humanity aware of its own immortality. In many cultures, poet/shamans claim to have been present throughout history, existing beyond both time and age.

 

Early Irish and Welsh myth and literature are filled with semi-historical/semi-mythical characters who through shapeshifting and a continuous cycle of existence, claim to have experienced all history in a variety of forms. Tir na n’Og, the mythical Irish Otherworld that lies westward with the setting sun, means ‘land of the ever-young’. Age and time are particularly powerful influences in Celtic myth and literature.

* I have been in a multitude of shapes, before I assumed a consistent form.

I have been a sword, narrow, variegated, I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a   tear in the air,

I have been the dullest of stars. I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book in the origin.

I have been the light of lanterns, a year and a half.

I have been a continuing bridge, over three score Abers [river mouths].

I have been a course, I have been an eagle.

I have been a coracle in the seas:

I have been compliant in the banquet.

I have been a drop in a shower;

I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand.

I have been a shield in battle.

I have been a string in a harp, disguised for nine years.

                                                 The Battle of the Trees, The Book of Taliesin VIII

In his book ‘Fire In The Head’, Tom Cowan explores the shamanic roots of Celtic myth, including the stories of Taliesin and Tuan mac Cairill. Welsh poet/druid Taliesin, an historical figure thought to have lived in the 6thC, claimed to have witnessed all history and in one poem described some of his many forms:Irish seer, Tuan mac Cairill, who lived in the same century as Taliesin, reputedly narrated his life as a man, a salmon, a boar, and a stag, to the Christian holy man, St. Finnian. Each time he aged and prepared to die, he was transformed into another shape. Finally as a salmon he was captured and eaten by the fisherman's wife, who then gave birth to him as Tuan mac Cairill.

Core Shamanism seldom explores the issue of reincarnation, in the eastern esoteric sense of literal rebirth, but the Celtic tradition offers a very different glimpse of immortality, a shapeshifting existence that does not have humanity as its goal, but offers experience of everything that is, of an eternal consciousness of which we are both a part and, paradoxically, all. 

As well as tales of humans aware of their existence outside of time, there are many Celtic-origin stories of humans suspended in alternate reality.

Grail legends and the medieval Arthurian romances are full of characters who become lost in time and space, and for whom time passes either very slowly or very quickly, and space/place become confused or irrelevant. Castles are discovered after many years of searching, only to vanish never to be found again. In the image on the right, Sir Perceval, a tiny figure dwarfed by the towering landscape, arrives at Castle Carbonek where he will be tested in a vacuum of time. Ordinary time and space, become meaningless, as Arthur’s knights search for the ineffable within the unmeasureable.  
This ancient Celtic experience is still alive in the 21stC, in digital recordings of ballads like the 13thC, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ which tells the story of an historical Scottish lord taken by the Queen of the Elves to an unseen world and returned home after many years, physically unchanged but with the gift of prophecy. Even more modern tales, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White contain these elements of the suspension of time and youth.

Time – Keepers

It was not just as a bridge between worlds that shamans explored time for their communities. Traditionally shamans were keepers of the calendar.The Chukchi people of north-east Siberia have a myth about how the Moon was captured, by a shapeshifting woman he’d pursued but failed to catch, and obliged to mark the passing of time by repeatedly changing his shape. In the sub-arctic regions of Siberia shamans had great social power until the Soviet period because of their connection to both material and essential time. Their opinion was sought before any seasonal activity; such as hunting or fishing. Shamans of the sub-arctic, being particularly subject to lengthy periods of light and dark, understood the power of time. They knew that what we now call the biological clock and circadian rhythms, affect judgement and perception in the same way that fever and hallucinogens can. Some shamans doubtless used this knowledge of time in a less than scrupulous way. Presbyterian missionaries who tried to convert Siberians away from shamanism in the 19th-century, found themselves unwillingly participating in out-of-body experiences along with the locals because they had underestimated the shaman's knowledge of time and showmanship!

Time and The Time Lord

At a seminar looking at time and age my students journeyed with the intention: ‘Show me what meaning time and age have for me and how I can bring their positive power into my daily life".

Discussing this journey on the phone a few days later with an attendee of the seminar, we started discussing BBC TV’s ‘Dr. Who’. We decided that, though not exactly a shaman, the Time Lord is indeed a shapeshifter in the Celtic tradition, passing from one form to another, never actually dying; in fact Dr. Who has not aged but ‘youthed’ as the series has progressed.

The Doctor ‘journeys’ between worlds and eras, looking and learning and often dropping hints about his experiences in other times and dimensions to listeners he knows can never fully comprehend him. The character’s strength, and his burden, is his awareness of never belonging to any one time or place. He (almost) never carries a conventional weapon, but wields his trusty Sonic Screwdriver which, like a rattle or drum, can open any closed door. His TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space) is a craft, grown, not made, which draws on all the power of the universe for its life and actions.


Even today, it seems, we have our contemporary time- travellers and shapeshifters. Taliesin, Tuan mac Cairill and the old Chukchi shamans would, I think, feel perfectly comfortable in the company of Dr. Who, and vice versa. Perhaps, as you read this, they are together somewhere swapping stories.   

Shamanism, Society and the Natural World

Shamans seem to be increasingly visible these days: in mainstream newspapers, on the shelves of conventional booksellers, in children’s TV shows, and even on Radio 4. Shortly before the recent royal wedding The Sun newspaper got in touch and asked me to perform a “Shamanic Sun Dance” to celebrate the event. I declined. However, despite, or maybe because of, increasing media attention it’s not always easy to discover what shamanism really is and what it can offer us in the 21st century.

Ask any passer-by on any street to describe shamanism, and the result will probably be a blank stare. Most people are surprised to learn that shamanism is not a religion but the oldest spiritual and problem-solving technology on the planet. Even more surprising is the discovery that it’s the precursor to most major world religions, including the Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist traditions, and that it has been practised on every inhabited continent on Earth for at least 40,000 years and possibly very much longer. Historically, shamanism was a significant survival tool of prehistoric humans.

'The Shaman of Trois Freres', France, 15,000 years

Our hunter-gatherer forebears decorated the stone walls of caves and cliffs around the world with carved and painted images drawn directly from shamanic experience. We no longer live in caves or in very small communities whose members are all known to us. Most of us live far longer, healthier lives than our ancient ancestors, but the part of us that is capable of fearing the dark and asking for help from things unseen hasn’t changed in almost a quarter of a million years. What made the uncertain lives of prehistoric people easier still works today because, although the world may have changed, fundamentally we have not.

Ask what a shaman is, and the question may evoke a few words about Native American ‘medicine men’ or perhaps the words ‘witch doctor’. Such attributions can be offensive to native peoples as this article on indigenous North American spirituality entitled 'We Do Not Have Shamans' clearly states. 
In fact, what a shaman is and does is simply explained. In the Siberian Tungus language from which it originates, shaman means ‘the one who sees’ or ‘the one who knows’ and refers to a person capable of making a ‘journey’ to the world of spirit while in an altered state of consciousness in order to meet and work with personal spirit helpers and teachers. What the shaman ‘sees’ and what she or he ‘knows’ during this experience of meeting with spirit is that there is no separation between anything that is: no separation between me writing and you reading these words, between a dog and cat, between life and death, between this apparently material reality and the non-material realities of the spirit worlds. This idea of ‘oneness’ is common currency in contemporary culture and is increasingly given credence by certain quantum physicists working with sub-atomic theory, though of course it is a predominantly physical rather than spiritual oneness that such scientists are attempting to describe. However, where most of us can only think about the notion of ‘oneness’, shamans actually live it through the experience of the shamanic ‘journey’ and direct, personal interaction with spirit.

Described as a ‘breakthrough in plane’, it may be that in physiological terms the journey begins as the shaman voluntarily redirects the primary cognitive process from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain to the right, through the corpus callosum, that is, from the predominantly structuring, organising hemisphere to the predominantly visualising, sensing one. Many journeyers experience passing through a tunnel, en route to the Lower World,  or a 'membrane', to the Upper World. It is intriguing to consider if these experiences represent the passage through the literal corpus callosum within the brain.

In the overwhelming majority of traditions around the world this ‘breakthrough’ will be assisted by the use of percussive sound, such as drumming, rattling or clapping. Although hallucinogens such as ayahuasca are widely advertised in the West as a means to help alter consciousness, in fact fewer than 15% of traditional shamans around the world use plants in this way.

Greenland shaman

Metaphysically, the journey begins when the shaman’s consciousness shifts from the here and now and enters worlds visible only to him or her. These worlds, which vary with each culture and tradition around the world, have many names, including ‘the realm of the spirits’ and ‘non-ordinary reality’. Some traditions call shamans ‘walkers between the worlds’ because they are the bridge between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Although often considered primitive or seen as a ‘religion’ of less developed peoples and cultures, shamanism is both subtle and paradoxical. The ‘worlds’ of shamanic journeys are utterly real – they exist and can be felt, smelt and experienced as clearly as this ‘ordinary’ reality. At the same time they are qualitative spaces, states of being that reflect and support the reason for the shaman’s journey – to ask for help, healing or information from spirit. Unlike many esoteric practices and religions that aim to ‘raise the consciousness’ or elevate the spiritual above the physical, shamanism focuses on travelling to ‘heaven’ in order to return to ‘earth’ with the means to change material reality for the better, to increase the sum of human happiness and wellbeing.

Contemporary research by cognitive scientists such as David Lewis-Williams suggests that the modern human brain is hard-wired to see the ‘unseen’ and the mystical; even the Lower, Middle and Upper Worlds of the shaman – translated into Hell, Earth and Heaven in later tripartite cosmologies – are seemingly a natural part of human perception rather than cultural projections.

Self in Spirit Mask

Not surprisingly, one of the questions most frequently asked by students being introduced to shamanism is, “What are spirits?” Perhaps because Western society has mostly avoided thinking about spirituality for many generations, we lack a clear, objective understanding of such things as spirits. These days it’s a one-size-fits-all word encompassing entities, energies, ghosts, angels, ancestors, the undead, elves, fairies; the list is seemingly endless. Personally, I have two understandings of the concept of spirit, and though the two coincide they are not the same and yet they work for me. The Core Shamanic or Western tradition, which underpins my own practice and teaching, describes spirit as part of all that exists. I am a spirit currently inhabiting a physical body in order to have a human experience. The spirits I meet on my ‘journeys’ are disembodied and therefore have an existential overview unavailable to me, but we are essentially the same: particles of infinite universal energy, fragments of all that is. We all come from this energy, exist within it and return to it. It is actually living this perspective that allows a shaman to experience the absence of separation between things that ordinary reality considers very separate indeed, such as life and death, or health and disease.

My second understanding of spirit is more psychological and archetypal and was described with great clarity and simplicity by C.G. Jung in his autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Referring to personal experience of his spirit teacher, Jung wrote, “Philemon … brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” This is a beautifully lucid explanation of how it can feel to interact with spirit during a shamanic journey. More prosaically, I describe to my students the process of journeying as having one’s imagination harnessed and directed by something external or as attaching to a larger, impersonal consciousness, which can then be accessed.

So what is the purpose of all of this, and how can shamanism help us, here and now? What can it contribute to the sum of human happiness? What is the shaman’s intention when he or she sets out to make a journey for man with cancer, for a young woman needing to make changes in her life, for a river whose spirit is dying because of pollution, or for an animal grieving the loss of its mate? For the shaman, all disease and distress is caused by dis-harmony and dis-order and all physical and mental ill-health is caused by one of two things: something being present that should not be, such as a spirit of depression, or something that should be present being absent, such as part of the person’s own soul or energy. Virtually everyone I work with has some kind of power loss, most as a result of simply living their lives. A large part of any shaman’s work will be Extraction, the removal of intruding spirits, or Retrieval (such as Soul Retrieval or Power Retrieval) – finding or replacing missing parts of the sick person’s own soul or power. Soul Loss, described by Jung as “the scattered self”, can be experienced by anyone or anything, including animals and the natural environment.

Relationship with Nature is a vital aspect of all shamanism. Hundreds, even thousands, of years of Western thought has placed humans ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ Nature. This perilous illusion underpins all that is done in the name of ‘progress’, from the destruction of forests to the use of animals in experimentation. Nature is not something separate, not something that we can stand back from and damage without thought, or even something external we can work to nurture. Nature is us and we are it, and this very different way of seeing the world and all it contains is, I believe, key to a new relationship between humanity and the rest of the planet. Of course, for most Indigenous peoples who have always understood their place in Nature this is not a new idea at all. Tragically many of these same peoples are now as threatened as the land on which they live. But it is this deep ‘knowing’, this way of ‘seeing’ who and what we are in relation to what is around us, that is most needed at this time if the sum of human happiness is to increase rather than shrink, along with the resources on which we all depend.

When I started on the shamanic path nearly 15 years ago I enjoyed Nature greatly but felt little personal connection to it. Now, as a result of journeying and knowing my own spirit helpers, many of whom are animals and plants, that perspective has completely changed; even a walk in a London park can be a magical experience. Finding the magic in what we once thought was ordinary is a gift that the practice of shamanism offers the planet at a time when it is sorely needed. It would be a difficult thing to poison a lake or cut down a forest if you felt that in doing so you would be directly damaging yourself. Fortunately there are still shamans walking between the worlds as they have done since the earliest days of our species, and every day more of us are rediscovering how shamanism can positively affect our own lives and the world around us through its unique blend of practical support and true enchantment.

(This post first appeared in 'Resurgence Magazine' online.)

Shamanic Counselling Part Two

‘The goal of the shamanic path of initiation is to broaden and deepen the normal emotions that we all know. Shamanism is thus not a somehow obscure or incomprehensible or mysterious magical path, but the simple heightening of the emotional experience of the world. If we want to understand shamans, we really have only to penetrate into our own emotions.’

Holger Kalweit, " Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men', (p219)

Part One described the context of Core Shamanic Counselling and touched on its relationship to psychology and psychotherapy. In Part Two you will discover how the relationship between emotion and altered consciousness, that is the heart of the shamanic journey, is created in a practical sense. Journeys can be undertaken for individuals or groups.


What Happens in a Counselling Session?
Clients visit me for wide range of reasons: for help with personal development, relationship issues, self-healing, sexuality issues, soul retrieval, career development, addiction and fertility, to name just a few. Because shamanism is such an incredibly flexible approach to healing, problem-solving and spiritual development it’s easy for me as a practitioner to feel that it can remedy almost any problem, but of course this is not true. For example, a prerequisite to beginning shamanic counselling, or any shamanic work which involves the client/student learning to journey for themselves, is that the person be fundamentally grounded, with a clear sense of self. In order to safely leave ordinary consciousness behind, 'journey' using shamanic consciousness and return with clear and useful information that can be practically applied in everyday life, a person requires a solid ' self' from which to go out and come back. While shamanism can be powerfully helpful for people with mental health problems, I encourage clients with such problems to choose options other than learning to journey, options such as healing, or soul retrieval.

It takes a minimum of six sessions to be able to clearly formulate the intention of a journey, 'travel' competently to the Upper and Lower Worlds, meet and interact with personal spirit helpers, and returning, be able to reproduce the experience as a narrative that helps/heals the problem stated in the intention. Before agreeing to work with a new client I do a journey to my own spirit helpers to ask, ' How, if at all, should I work with X?' I have never, as yet, been told not to work with somebody, but I have been given advice and guidelines. Consulting with my spirits in this way almost always gives me insight into the underlying nature of the person's problem, even before meeting them. If a client brings difficult, or particularly intransigent, problems I may do a short journey alone before every session to ask, 'How can I best work with X today?'. After discussing the matter that has brought the client to me I take notes and the client fills in personal information forms, as with any new practitioner/client relationship. Many of my clients know little or nothing about shamanism per se so the next stage is to have a short introductory discussion about it and about Shamanic Counselling. I explain that, unlike psychology and psychotherapy, in Shamanic Counselling the counsellor is merely a facilitator of the space and the technique required for a client to meet and interact with his/her own spirit helpers in order to obtain the help or healing. My objective, as a counsellor, is that the client establishes and builds an intimate and trusting relationship with his/her own spirit helpers as soon as possible, so that I become redundant for all but occasional guidance.

Why It's Possible To Work Deeply, Fast?
The process can give access to the deepest memories and emotional states in literally the blink of an eye. While in some therapeutic practices this might be considered potentially difficult or problematic for a client, in my experience as a shamanic counsellor I have yet to experience such problems. Why? Because as I tell each client with perfect confidence: the spirits never present us with more than we are able to handle. I have been pushed, prodded, literally torn apart, even died, on shamanic journeys and whilst it wasn't always pleasant, easy or what I would have chosen, it was never more than I could handle and invariably proved an enormous step forward in my own personal development (for which I thank the wisdom and compassion of my spirits and the skill of counsellors and teachers I have worked with in the past).

A first shamanic counselling session almost always involves the client relaxing while I do the work, guided by my spirits. Whatever immediate crisis or problem a person has come with, loss of personal power will invariably be involved. In order to begin the restoration of the client’s personal power I journey, usually to the Lower World, meet with my own spirit helpers and ask for help. 

 This may be a healing of some kind, such as a Soul Retrieval or an Extraction, but it is most commonly a Power Animal retrieval. During this journey I may ask my own spirits for specific advice for the client: What can they do to help themselves? Is there anything further they need to know at this time? When I feel that I have all the information and help available I return, carrying the client's Power Animal with me. The traditional method of giving the Power Animal to the client is by blowing into the upper chest and the top of the head. Because I am speaking out loud as I journey with the client lying close beside me, they are able to follow everything that I say. After the Power Animal has been internalised by the client I may rattles or sing to welcome it, to seal it and to thank my own spirits for their help.

The Counselling
All sessions with clients are recorded digitally and reproduced on a CD. When the journeying part of the session is over we listen to the recording and then discuss the experience. I may give details of my feelings during the journey or expand on the things that I saw or heard. The client may describe their thoughts and feelings as they listened to me speak the journey out loud. They may have felt some particular affinity with the animal spirit that has come to them; some clients 'follow' me on my journey as I describe it and involve themselves directly. Some people see or feel nothing until the animal spirit is blown into them, at which time they may have a powerful physical or emotional reaction. A careful, almost word by word, assessment and assimilation of this story, using the heart rather than the head, is where the counselling aspect of shamanic counselling comes in. A good shamanic counsellor guides their client to see the healing relationship between their feelings during the experience, the story that has been created by my journey, and the initial problem or question that they came with.

After this first session clients leave with instructions to listen to the CD in their own time, to write out word for word everything that was said and to read it carefully, looking for what are called 'the points of power', i.e. those moments during the experience which resonated most strongly with them, either positively or negatively, and to consider again where the journey is answering their intent. The power of the shamanic journey, of any shamanic journey, lies in two things: the actual interaction with one's spirit helpers in alternate reality; and the narrative, the story, of that experience which is brought back into this, ordinary, reality.

Some time ago I saw a film called 'Inkheart' that reminded me of the relationship between narrative writing and the creative power of storytelling. The film, made for adults and children, is about the way in which stories, told by particular storytellers, can give independent life to character and plot. In the same way, what happens in alternate reality reflects and can re-create what happens here, in ordinary reality. The things we are capable of doing there are the same things we are capable of here, simply because we are the same person wherever we go, and because here and there are separate only in our limited human perception.

Preparation for the next session involves my client thinking of somewhere in this ordinary, everyday reality, an access point that will allow them to enter the Lower World: a hole in the ground, a cave, a hollow tree. In that session the client will be doing the work for themselves, shifting their consciousness through listening to drumming, entering the Lower World through their chosen access point, meeting the spirit helper that I brought back for them in the previous session, getting to know it, asking again for help or advice or healing. For many people, this is the beginning of a powerful and often astonishing experience that can last a lifetime.

Why It Works
Despite initial ‘performance anxiety’, clients are invariably surprised and delighted by the ease with which the shift from the here and now occurs. Only very rarely in my personal experience of teaching is someone unable to  journey and this may be for a variety of reasons, including extensive recreational drug use in the past/present, or simple fear of any kind of letting go, which is relatively uncommon. I believe increasingly, and scientific research supports this, that we are all, as human beings, hardwired to alter consciousness, perceive the numinous and to go beyond the limitations of the physical senses.
 
Recently, at the end of our work together, a young client said to me that the most astonishing thing about the entire experience of journeying was the realisation of how much her spirits loved her. I found this simple observation very moving, because although the love of my own spirit helpers is something I have always felt and appreciated, it was wonderful and humbling to hear someone who 6 weeks before had never even considered spirits as helpers or shamanism itself, to be so clear about what the experience of Shamanic Counselling had given her. 

Shamanic Counselling Part 1

Egil Paulsen, Norway, www.egilpaulsen com

One of the remarkable things about working with contemporary shamanism is its extraordinary flexibility.  Healing, Soul Retrieval, Extraction, Ceremony, and one of my own main ways of working, Shamanic Counselling are just some of the many techniques that an experienced shamanic practitioner will have at her command. 

One of the main differences between Core Shamanism and traditional shamanisms is that traditional shamans usually functioned - and function - within a social context which recognised and approved their work. In the West of course, this is almost never the case and women and men practising whatever form of contemporary shamanism they choose, will be operating in a cultural and social vacuum.

What It Is and What It Is Not

“I practice shamanism myself, not because I understand in OSC (Ordinary State of Consciousness) terms why it works, but simply because it does work."

Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman 

Anthropologist Michael Harner, who devised Core Shamanism (see sidebar) in the 1970s, was keenly aware of the contextual differences between traditional shamans and those wishing to re-engage with shamanism from a non-traditional, contemporary perspective. In the century of psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry, it was unsurprising perhaps that Harner Method Shamanic Counseling should choose to focus primarily on the individual, on personal healing and the one-to-one situation familiar in the therapeutic process.  So, what is the distinction between shamanic counselling and psychological counselling? Harner's US-based Centre for Shamanic Studies puts it clearly and simply -  ‘Since this is a spiritual rather than a psychological system, it is not necessary for a shamanic counselor to be a professional psychotherapist or other type of counselor.’ In other words, the shamanic counsellor is not offering any psychological insight into the client’s situation, but rather is a facilitator of the client’s own spiritual and emotional experiences. What I have come to realise over the years that I have been working with shamanic counselling is that shamanism is, by its nature, transpersonal and psychological, in as much and as it transcends the boundaries of ego and uses the psyche itself to permit a broader range of experience, experience that has the specific function of restoring balance.

I learnt Shamanic Counselling with Jonathan Horwitz of the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies, who was taught by Michael Harner . It was not an easy process.  Part of the training involved being both client and counsellor and making that switch required great focus and a glimmering of how much compassion the work would demand.  Initially I intended to use my training simply to deepen and extend my own practice, but the difference between how I understood journeying before the training and after it was so marked that I decided this was a skill I should offer my own clients so that they could expand their awareness of the journey experience.


The Practice

Put simply, Shamanic Counselling is a means of teaching clients to: a) make journeys to the Lower and Upper World's for themselves, b) understand the importance of ‘intention’ when deciding on the nature and purpose of each journey and to create a coherent and focused question or request for help, c) make a recording of each journey which is also transcribed by the counsellor d) to listen, with the emotions rather than the intellect, to the recorded journey with the counsellor in order to extract the teachings and/or the answers to the stated question or request for help. This last aspect, listening with the emotions, is perhaps the most difficult thing for the shamanic counsellor and her client to learn.  Used, as we are, to judging, observing and rationalising, viewing experience through the eye of emotion rather than the mind does not come easily to most people. In his book Shaman's, Healers, and Medicine Men (p.218), ethnologist and psychologist Holger Kalweit describes the relationship between emotion and consciousness.  He describes how moving from 'normal’ consciousness to an altered state of consciousness can be viewed as an intensification of emotion, how by intensifying emotion the ego sense of self diminishes and ‘the separation between self and the environment can temporarily disappear’ in an identification phenomenon described by Grof (1986) and Maslow (1973) in which the individual ceases to exist and becomes ‘merged’ with everything from individual cells to the evolutionary process itself.  

At the ‘highest level’, perhaps the ‘nirvana’ described by meditation training and esoteric philosophy, Kalweit describes an 'unconditional consciousness, free from all concepts and human concerns.'  Nirvana is not, however, of interest to shamans whose main concerns are human ones: the restoration of harmony within and without the human mind and body in the context of its environment and the relationships between these things. Unlike those religions and esoteric traditions which seek to 'rise up, or to 'rise above', our humanity, our current condition as human animals, shamanism seeks to create the greatest harmony for things as they are here and now, while simultaneously engaging with the numinous.

Egil Paulsen, Norway, www.egilpaulsen com

‘The goal of the shamanic path of initiation is to broaden and deepen the normal emotions that we all know.  Shamanism is thus not a somehow obscure or incomprehensible or mysterious magical path, but the simple heightening of the emotional experience of the world.  If we want to understand shamans, we really have only to penetrate into our own emotions.’  H. Kalweit, (p219)

Shamanic counselling can plunge people into previously unimagined worlds and states. On the surface these worlds and states have little to do with the traditional shamans of the Amazon or Siberia; since the so-called Enlightenment, the Western mind has sheared off in new directions, which whilst wondrous in many ways, have effectively robbed us, as a society and as individuals, of our sense of belonging and association. And perhaps that is all spirituality is after all, just a cell-deep sense of not being alone.

Although I may never understand how an Amazonian shaman sees his world, shamanic counselling both as a client and practitioner, has allowed me to step closer to that world, whilst maintaining a firm foothold in post-modern London.  

Thanks to Norweigan artist Egil Paulsen for the use of his extraordinary 'shaman' images.

Shamanism: Sex and Gender

"An individual socialised in such a way as to straddle the gender boundary ought to be able to span all boundaries … We are here at the heart of the shamanic mediating of relationships and probably all religious forms of mediation."

                                                           Bernard Saladin d’Anglure

My interest in this area of study comes not from anthropology but from having authored three books on sex and sexuality and been an academic researcher in the area of sexual behaviour. While writing my PhD on Aids and civil rights I worked as a research fellow at a large Central London hospital investigating bisexuality for a government-funded behavioural project. It was a fascinating experience and led me to think deeply about sexuality and sexual desire in general. Now, many years later, sex, gender issues and sexual relationships are things that frequently occur in my clients non-ordinary reality lives and which are brought into the experience of shamanic counselling in order to get a spiritual persepctive on these things.

Gender is an issue that recurs in many people’s relationships with their spirits as specific forms of teaching. While researching in this area for the seminar, I was interested to discover that evolutionary biologists have discovered more than two genders in hundreds of animal species including, to my surprise, the Red Deer, which has one female and two male genders. The White Throated Sparrow, pictured below has several genders, each with distinct functions. Of course a vast number of species on this planet, such as plants, fungi and single cell organisms reproduce asexually.

One of the main topics discussed during a seminar was the idea of duality, of separation and the division of things into male and female, night and today, hot and cold, which can seem a peculiarly Western way of thinking, though eastern esoteric practices also describe polarities, through for example, yin and yang. This kind of separation and division encourages the notion of gender, sex, sexual desire, sexuality as a fixed and unchanging, despite the invaluable work of researchers like Alfred Kinsey more than 60 years ago which 'shocked' the world into the realisation that there was no such thing as 'normal' when it came to human sexuality. As someone who followed in Kinsey's large footsteps during the AIDS panic of the late 80's and investigated male bisexuality (as part of a much larger study of male sexual behaviour in terms of HIV and the transmission of disease), the word 'normal' very quickly vanished from my vocabulary.

Separation and division are also linguistically defined. The English language has clear gender structures, though lacks gendered nouns, unlike French, for example, in which language even the chair you sit on and the knife you use is clearly defined as masculine or feminine. The Algonquian languages of the first peoples of the northeastern USA and southeastern Canada, such as the Ojibwe, have no male/female genders, instead distinctions are made between animate and inanimate objects. As an English speaker, with marginal French and Spanish, I would find it difficult to think only in terms of ‘it’ or ‘one’, though no doubt I'd get used to it! Words used as names can also affect gender in the sense of social roles, French ethnographer Bernard Saladin d’Anglure in his book sub-titled, ‘Masculin, Feminin ou Chaman?’ he describes the Inuit tradition of naming a child regardless of sex and the child accepting the gender of the name. Saladin d’Anglure also describes the Inuit belief that their children choose their sex shortly before birth and that the genitalia adjust to the decision.

These things are tiny examples of what is a vast world literature of gender change, sex change and cross-dressing throughout human history and from around the world. Almost all cultures have gods, goddesses who can change form at will or have multiple natures. The Hindu god Shiva is often depicted as Ardhanari, the synthesis of Shiva and Parvati, and the word ‘hermaphrodite’ describes a form of the Greek god Hermes and the goddess Aphrodite. Having read several years ago about the year-long, gender-swap training of apprentice shaman's among traditional peoples of subarctic Siberia, I was struck by what I imagined to be very expansive and forward-thinking learning. What a pity, I thought, that general practitioners in the UK didn’t have to undergo a year of cross-dressing and transsexual living, in order to have a better understanding of the problems of opposite sex patients. On further exploration it became clear that I’d missed the point. As with Shiva and Hermes/Aphrodite, the change traditional shamanic apprentices experienced had little to do with patient care, and almost everything to do with developing a ‘third sex’ identity, a spiritual androgyny. And the purpose of this? As Saladin d’Anglure notes in the opening quote above, “An individual socialised in such a way as to straddle the gender boundary ought to be able to span all boundaries …”. In other words, if moving between male and female roles and identities is unquestioned, moving between realities as a shaman should be just as straightforward. Many traditional shamanic societies value multi-gendered/genderless shamans as being spiritually more identified with non-ordinary reality and so better able to mediate in the world of the spirits. Such persons are seen as having the potential to contain and reconcile all opposites.

Among the Chukchi people, a traditional shamanic culture of northern Kamchatka, in Siberia, multi-gendered states with many permutations of dress and behaviour, alongside ‘virtual’ sex changes, were considered the natural way of things for shamans. Male shamans who became female experienced natural muscle loss, developed female social speech patterns, were believed to give birth to animal spirits and even to human offspring. Female shamans who became male carried weapons, dressed as a man and often married young girls, performing their ‘marital duties’ using a dildo made from reindeer muscle. The young girls might also have sex with male partners, but any children born from these liaisons were considered by the entire community to be the children of the shaman.

And what about the significance of androgyny and genderlessness in contemporary shamanism? In our highly sexualised world the idea of spiritual androgyny isn’t an easy one to contemplate. Even within spiritual practice there are clear gender boundaries and these days everyone seems to be looking for their "inner masculine", or their "goddess within." What my own spirit helpers have shown me over the years, and which they clarified for me during a long and wonderful journey of exploration prior to the seminar, is that spirit – which includes myself – has no gender. What I am learning through my spirits is that everything that is, is energy whether that is the Big Bang, kundalini rising, a nuclear explosion, intention, or orgasm. Shamans work with energy, with power, calling on the power of the universe through the power of intention. Quantum physics and shamanism are slowly coming together, though not all scientists and not all shamans would accept this view, and agreeing that we are not just in the universe, the universe is in us.

In my own journeys and in those of my clients, sexual activity or gender changes either of the person journeying, or of the spirit helpers, are very often a teaching; something is being pointed about about behaviour, energy, attitudes or relationships. The journey that I did to my spirits to ask about the nature of sex and gender in shamanism was wonderfully explicit. It’s rare for all my questions to be answered and so fully. What emerged were several key teachings about sex, gender and spirit of which these are a few:

• What moves between individuals during sex is a part of their life force, which is part of all that is. It appears that male and female come together, but really one spirit comes together with another spirit to create a third, and all are one and all are the same.
• Biology is important because it continues that exchange of life force and creates the vehicle for embodied spirit.
• In response to the Q “Are shamans the third sex?” I am told, “love has no gender and no sex.”
• In response to the Q “What about duality, yin/yang, M/F … ?” I am asked “Do you want it to have meaning?” I say “No, it divides”. I am told “It’s important to look for the heart of the thing. The time for taking apart has passed, it’s about bringing together now. Differences are only of the shell.”
• When we engage in any way with spirit in alternate reality we are changed by that experience, and spirit is also changed through engaging with us.

I was very moved by the power and directness of this particular journey, I re-entered ordinary reality feeling that I had been offered insights that were invaluable, mostly because of how they had been given. Sex, it was revealed is just another aspect of quantum possibility and love, love is about the exchange of hearts, which have no sex and no gender.