The drum begins. I begin my journey on a bluff, overlooking the Pacific. Rolling grassy hills, the coastline rippling side to side, and the big birds delighting in the marine updraft. There is an opening to a cave there, to my left. The first time I entered this cave, a wave of fear washed over me because it was so dark. Then I remembered: this is my shamanic journey! Turn on the light! And light flooded in from above, highlighting the massive space. A soft dirt floor, ferns and the distant sound of water. A lower world where everyone I meet has my best interest at heart.
For a couple of years, culminating in the past few months of the quarantine, I have been studying Shamanic Counseling with the teacher Isa Gucciardi. This path is a surprise in my life, and yet I also feel as though I’ve been making my way here the whole time.
Shamanism is the original spiritual practice of humanity, and evidence of its presence has been with us since the Paleolithic period. It can be called Earth-based wisdom, as it is a belief that the natural world has lessons for us. In a time when we are struggling with a pandemic that was born of an imbalance in man’s relationship to nature, it seems important to listen to the messages we are receiving about this imbalance. Nature holds the symptom and the cure.
On a personal level, we can use these practices to connect with our own knowing. The first thing we do is to connect to internal guidance, that part of ourselves that has our highest good as its sole intent.
The first journey is called a First Trance. Some profound transformations can occur just in this first connection. A person is led on an inner journey to meet with a manifestation of unconditional energy: a beautiful light, a being, an animal, and a relationship develops over time with this manifested best interest.
It can be remarkable to realize that beneath all the negative self-talk and the fear, there is a part of ourselves that knows and wants what’s best for us.
Feeling unconditional love for ourselves is more challenging than it seems. I imagine that during the quiet of the quarantine, many people have been confronted with the loud negative voices within, voices of judgment and lack running nonstop through our mind. For many of us, it sure doesn’t seem as though anything inside ourselves has our best interest at heart.
Our internal voice calls us to behave in petty, cruel, unsupportive ways, or lets loose a constant barrage of blame. We treat ourselves badly with our choices, and then berate ourselves for our weakness. We start on a program of improvement and mistakenly think there is a way to train the mind to behave differently. This sets up yet another battle.
While there may be the rare person who does not feel a sense of lack when contemplating themselves for the most part, our culture encourages us to feel this way. I guess the aisles of self-help books wouldn’t be as jammed if not. Our whole economy depends on a feeling of deficit in order to roll forward.
The shamanic journey introduces us to another energy, this one of unconditional love. Awareness of our own inner wisdom.
When I work with people, especially those new to the process of meditation or spiritual practice, the shamanic journey is helpful in locating this heart awareness. Our imaginations are so rich, and even if we’ve fallen out of the practice of using them, we can come back to doing so easily. We relax, and with the help of a drum to create the trance state, we follow a path to meet with this part of ourselves.
A drum as a tool to awakening. You can see why I’m so drawn.
For some people in their journey, they meet a specific being or animal who they knew when they were young. For some, it’s a light. For many, an animal. For some, a child. One person saw a big orange ball impeding her progress. As she wrestled with this ball to make her way around it to meet the guide, it occurred to her that this fight was something she was familiar with as well.
Once we find this guide, we ask, will you be here when I call? There is often laughter. I have always been here.
We connect to the physical feeling of this unconditional love and support, and often, it feels unlike what we have known. Our body feels lighter, or warmer, maybe with a feeling of spaciousness, peacefulness. There is a part of us that is not fighting or battling a basic negativity or base instinct. What a delight to discover a feeling of wanting what is best for our own dear self.
In my practice, I have now within me a world populated with a variety of guides. As consistent with the traditional shamanic view, my world consists of three levels, lower, middle and upper. We experience the lower and upper worlds as planes in which only beings that have our highest good as their sole intent meet us. It is only this middle world, the world of daily reality, that contains any questionable characters. We are protected in the upper and lower.
For me, the lower world contains guides that give me guidance on more concrete things, like love, money, body issues. The upper world has my most important guides, who assist me in doing this work with others.
Each morning in meditation, I journey to one of these worlds. I look forward to meeting with the guides as I look forward to meeting with people in my daily life. The guides can be stern and complicated characters, but they show me the most unconditional support and love imaginable. They don’t pull punches, but never waver in truth. They answer my questions, sometimes bluntly and sometimes in metaphors that take time to decipher. They always answer.
My drumming guides are there, eight women who stand behind me on stage as I play. Energy and power guides, sleep and manifestation guides, friends who have passed and the spirit of my father in the shape of an elk. These worlds have become remarkable in their realness, and the information given there I trust implicitly. My highest good is their sole intent. All of it guides me to the awareness of heart, to my own deepest knowing.
In this culture, these things are strange to write of, and I feel the judgment as the words fall out: a drum provides a trance state and I fall into a field in which I receive information and messages. It is an internal world from which I gain universal knowledge.
My path to connecting to the energy of unconditional love started by having to let go of my cynical nature. There is a great deal of fear in letting that go, since cynicism is one of the defenses we set up to hide our sense of being not enough, of our lack.
Cynicism can make for hilarious jokes, and I would say it’s a common language I have shared with some I love. Having lived in a cynical world view for a long time though, I recognize in it the self-loathing and despair that seemed to be at the core of who I experienced myself to be before letting it go.
Letting go of this energy and connecting to our heart is our power. In heart energy, we know we lack nothing, and nothing can disrupt us. In this awareness, truth rises, our knowing behind the desires and attachment of mind.
There is truly no other way for us to be in this moment in time, with the planet in crisis, and humanity in confusion and fear. It is only this energy of love and truth that will lift us out of our current state. We have been muddling about in the mind for so long we’ve lost our way, and no solutions come from this place.
Learning to love is the beginning, although I should say it differently. Learning that we are a field of love is more accurate. It is only in remembering this truth that our reality changes.
I thank all of the practices that keep bringing me back to the same message. We already have the answer. We just need to take the first step.
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Photo by <a href=”/photographer/claudmey-56827″>Claudia Meyer</a> from <a href=”https://freeimages.com/”>FreeImages</a>