Choose
My body can be an airport
or a sacred hall.
My soul can be a rock
or an eagle that can roam.
My mind can be a room full of voices
or the song of a single nightingale.
Heal: Pseudo-Spiritualism vs True Divinity
There are hundreds - thousands even - of spiritual traditions worldwide - abrahamic (christianity, islam, etc), dharmic (here comes yoga), indigenous (shamanism, aboriginal etc), esoteric (theosophy, ceremonial, eleusinian mysteries etc), and new spiritual movements (neo-shamanism, paganism etc)… Pick your poison. And again.. all created, by people for people.
Most carry good in them. Most carry healing power if respected. All abused to serve the deity of the dollar. By us of course.
How many of us own a yoga mat? Sage? How many of us own self-help books or the Bible? How many have we read from start to finish? But most importantly.. how much of their preaching do we practice daily?
Hard.. isn’t it. I don’t mean the tree pose…
All of those traditions touch on spiritual themes that are universal. All very different, yet all seek contact with the sacred.. the holy.. the divine.. harmony of the body-spirit-mind. Has anyone ever achieved it all.. consistently and all the time? I doubt it.
That, is indisputably impossible if you are a human on planet earth. So remember, no saint, no yogi, no shaman, no healer has ever reached and stayed a permanent and complete state of spirituality. Close enough? Maybe. 100%? Who knows.
Why? The flesh.. has needs. The brain is a flawed miracle. Our society - a dysfunctional beehive.
Even the holiest human being does not have an uninterrupted union with the divine. They too, wrestle with fear and ego, with the ache of separation. No-one holds steady love, unwavering purpose and perfect peace at all times. Even the holiest have felt conflicted. So please - do not punish yourself for slipping. Do not punish others for slipping. We are in this… together. Like it or not.
Feel free to research as many traditions as possible if you find this exciting. If you don’t, that is ok too. We are all healers one way or another… A musician, a nurse, a sanitation worker, a priest, a shaman, simply a kind person - they are all healers. They are also human.. and sometimes we also cause damage. It is that “damage” that we should be trying to limit and heal. Whether on us.. or others.
The question for today is.. do we tap into our healing abilities? Are we conscious of our healing, and therefore our humble contribution to the world? Because once we become conscious… our life becomes clearer. We start to appreciate our daily mundane lives. We start to feel kindness and gratitude, even in the presence of hardship. And that stops us from quitting, trying to escape or run from our trauma. We start to seek solutions like thirsty dogs looking for water.
Where am I going with this and why?
Neo-shamanism keeps creeping up lately.. so I’m going to pause here for a moment.
The word “shaman” is derived from the Evenki word šaman, meaning “one who knows”. Shamans in Siberia were mediators between the spirit and physical worlds through trance, drumming and ritual.. take your pick. What works for one, does not work for another.
In my own humble view, the journey to spiritual healing and connectivity to other worlds, is merely not one to fast-track. Opening channels for “fun”, “recreational” or in a fast-food approach through hallucinogens, can invite energies that we simply can not fully comprehend or handle in a safe way. (“She’s nuts” I can hear you think.. meh, I’m cool with that.. who isn’t?)
We may think we are inviting access to a world that can guide us, assist us in collecting the pieces of our wounded self… but all evil.. will be disguised as good too.
So in my humble and grounded view, hallucinogens are not for the western world to achieve enlightenment. They are merely a natural potential medicinal supportive treatment to unwire and rewire our brain, but all that we witness in the process… without the enlightenment, that comes through a hell of a lot more work than just downing a mushroom, is merely.. as the word states.. a hallucination. A manifestation of our fears, trauma and deep desire to find answers. Or a way to numb it all for a moment. If you can’t control it.. it controls you.
And if one is arrogant enough to think they can command levels of control by attending a class and experiencing “visions” through hallucinogens.. then I’d urge them to apply caution. If anything.. for their own physical and mental health. This isn’t judgment. This is a concern for the emerging “fashion”.. and the impact it can have on the children we leave behind as adults. The next generations.
You will never hear me preach psychoactive trance practices.. because I simply do not believe in them. What can I say.. I like things the hard way unless I’m getting stuck in traffic. We’d all love to teleport from A to B easily.
We can go into the “medicinal” benefits of this another time.. but emphasis on “medicinal”. Not enlightenment or any sense of reality. And of course.. I can hear the South/North American friends protest to such a statement. Calm down. The rest of us are entitled to an opinion too… and we are also entitled to change it as we move through our journey. What works for one.. does not work for another. (I’m on a repeat tape with this one)
Personally I chose - at an early age - the approach of regions that do not typically use hallucinogens, e.g. Siberia & Central Asia, Korea, Tibet and so on. Most of the world’s shamans do not rely on hallucinogens. Their practices are often oral (chants etc), ritualistic, or energetic rather than substance-based.
If anything, the journey to enlightenment benefits from deep cleansing of all that may block our judgment and energetic channels (fasting, no toxic substances, no loss of energy, practicing kindness)
What most shamanic traditions share however is entering an altered state of consciousness, healing of body-mind-soul, soul retrieval, various symbols and tools. You almost journey back and pick up your wounded pieces.. your lost child.. the person you were, before all the trauma. You get guided through a walk in the forest of your past. It can unlock memories that haunted you from a past life, and an opportunity to accept, forgive, and move on. Rid of all generational trauma. It's not about seeing fairies and constellations.
In the modern world - well.. we do like to cannibalise and fast-food all things, don’t we - it all starts to blend the indigenous with psychology, and energy work. So we borrow or adopt practices and rituals often without sufficient knowledge or context - and often profit from it or blur its meaning. Here come the dollars again… a deity for the faint hearted.
In the process of commercialising what is, our spiritual healing.. we risk losing divinity and exploiting historically and financially practices that are far older than us. The biggest risk however in doing so - we risk harming each other.
Many of these practices require diving into the unknown with highly spiritual and experienced guides. Instead, in the interest of “faster”, “easier”, “fashion”, we disrespectfully attempt to commodify and create trends. We have become an instagram “meme”.
Interlude:
Many find comfort in going to a psychologist. But have you ever filtered the words you hear from a psychologist? Despite multiple triggers and systems in place to remove their “ego” and their “hurt child” when they offer advice.. can we really be sure they are not projecting their own experiences or limited knowledge onto their “client”? You have good ones, and you have “less good” ones. And that’s ok.. everyone has to make a living. There is a myriad of people that are better than me. (No I am not a psychologist)
Back to our subject:
How can we think we will reach enlightenment, or find true comfort in a lesson, or a couple of classes therefore. I could be sitting in tree pose for half an hour.. if my mind is thinking about having to pick up the kids in the next hour.. I’ve done nothing other than stretch a little (an accomplishment in its own right and rather beneficial for balancing our body, I won’t refute that).
But try standing in tree pose in a silent room without any other human energies around you. Body strength may help.. but how long you last, ultimately becomes a game of the mind. And the mind is what will guide us in an every day scenarios, to walk away from a toxic fight, allow us to forgive easier and be patient with the people around us.. but most of all, be patient with ourselves. So you see, it’s not about the tree pose. It’s about being still in a testing moment, and allowing our mind and soul to align and inform our decisions with patience, kindness, awareness.
The water is usually thirst-quenching at source.. and cheaper too. Not to mention less likely to harm me.. no chlorine.
Instead of exploring our own spiritual or healing practices from our own ancestry.. we fall victims of fashion and modernism. We turn our back to our own ancestry.. in a western world where christianity (just for example purposes) is widely spread (in one shape or form), we forget the commonalities and how every single practice in the world seems to have the same principles at heart.
Christianity has a long history of visionaries, prophets, healers. Similar to shamanism and every other practice.
Every practice aims at entering altered states to bring back divine wisdom or healing insight.. through fasting, prayer or silence. They all act as a bridge to the spirit world. They all perform a ritual of some sort. They all offer transformation. They all encourage us to restore body-spirit-mind balance. Just a different network.. like Facebook vs instagram. Hmm.. almost the same. Just different coding.
All carry risks of opening channels one has to approach with caution however. Their differences are usually that some are “earth” and others are “transcendent” or “deity” centered.
So try what suits you. Try what makes you feel less lonely, but allows you to embrace solitude. Blend two or more with respect and knowledge. But my suggestion would be to steer clear of modernism and fast track spiritualism. Be the master of your divinity. Pray. Breathe. Read. Speak to your God. Your universe. Your spirit animal. Whatever rocks your boat.
But most of all… sit quietly. Hush the mind. Just be. Embrace nature. Listen to the trees. Talk to the birds, they answer back. Feel the earth’s heartbeat.. now scientifically observed. Let your heart beat at the pace it was meant to beat. Feel the love.
At the end of the day, we are all here looking for purpose. Meaning.
Choose your ways.
Whether it’s called shamanism, christianity, hinduism, dodecatheon.. the list is endless. And of course there are so many beautiful, kind, true, grounded, informed individuals out there that offer their guidance through their heart, with greed aside.
I come from a place of care. And I struggle with it every day. I know you do, too.
The work starts from within us. Only we can do it, for ourselves. For free.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” - Rumi
You may already be in touch with divinity.
Our body… tells us what is right, in a world of wrongs.
Our soul, heals when we erase our ego.
Our mind, calms when we align our body and soul.
Do not listen to me. I am merely another human finding my way through a sleepless world.
“I am not here to lead you - only to walk beside you, when your spirit forgets its way home.”
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