Shamanism is our ancient roots wherever we live and whatever sort of culture we have grown up in. It is our spiritual heritage. Look back far enough in time and all of us come from shamanistic cultures. Long before such historically recent concepts as organised religion, humans sought understanding and knowledge of the wider Universe using a variety of experiential ways and tools which are just as applicable today as ever. These practices are still in use in a surprisingly large number of places in the world and many shamans of indigenous cultures are now teaching Westerners.

The shamanic journey, trance-dance, the vision quest, the purifying ceremony of the sweatlodge, these are ancient but eternally relevant ways to contact the timeless reality that exists parallel to and just out of sight of the world we so mistakenly call the 'real world'. It is here in the everyday that we experience the reflections of who we are, of our actions, our deepest beliefs, our 'dreams', but it is in the non-manifest world of the spirit that the hidden causal interactions take place. Hidden, that is, until we begin to open the doors and 'see'. And that is the ultimate purpose of the path of shamanism.

The revival in the West of shamanistic ways since the 1960's is reflected in the proliferation of alternative psycho-spiritual books, workshops and courses which has flourished into, in effect, a vast grass-roots University. Although most of these are not shamanism per se, they are nevertheless largely shamanistic in their approach in that they reflect the ways and understandings of the ancient cultures of oneness and connection rather than separation and isolation. This movement towards self-development and spiritual awareness, and potentially a more community oriented way of living, represents a step forward for those cultures which have been the most predatory towards others and towards the earth in the recent past centuries.

Shamanism, 'good medicine', is like tapping into a vast fund of ancient timeless knowledge which can be practiced anywhere under any conditions. It is about helping us humans to heal the effects of past traumas, to live in an inner state of balance and harmony while dealing with the challenges and vicissitudes of life, to develop the best in ourselves no matter what comes our way, and it is about the quality of how we relate to each other and to the earth. All this is as important now as it ever has been or will be.

My favourite description of a shaman is someone who walks with one foot in the everyday world and one foot in the spirit world. It sums up so adroitly the union of living with spirit connection but firmly in the ordinary world as an ordinary person. All things, to the shaman, are energy in form, - temporary form as everything changes all the time. It is worth remembering that diesel oil was once living beings that died and became fossilised in rock strata.

'The World Is As You Dream It'

How we live our everyday life depends on how we 'see', understand. frame, or 'dream' our world internally. In other words, the stories we tell ourselves of how it is, the mythology we hold of ourselves, the vision we have life, will largely determine the life we experience.

As we see the world, so we 'make it up' for ourselves. When we see a beneficent world of loving helpful people, places, happenings, 'spirits', so it is likely to arrange itself for us. When we 'see' a world of enemies and fearsome possibilities aggressing against us, so we influence its manifestation and our experience of it. When we 'see' a world run by a terrifying god-figure with hell and damnation at the end of the road if we do not do and believe as we are told, we tend to manifest a world that supports that view.

A culture lives by it's mythologies, the stories people tell themselves of how it is and how it works. In the words of Casteneda's don Juan, we are taught to agree to the way the consensus sees reality. From the moment we are born a deep process of hypnosis begins as we are taught - with live or die emotional pressure - how we are to see and feel the world in order to be an accepted member of society. This process is politely called education, religion, growing up, maturing etc, and we have to learn to agree with the consensus for our very survival. All of life's goodies are given to those who fit in, who become acculturated, 'normal', and those who dare to 'see' otherwise and not conform are deemed mentally unstable and put away - 'for their own good', or at best they become society's outsiders and get a very small share of the goodies.

So how do we set about tackling the 'dream' we have imbibed from our family and culture? In Toltec teaching the first step is called 'Erasing Personal History'! It means to erase the effects of one's personal history on the present, to heal past trauma. This is both an emotional and a mental issue - to heal the emotional wounds we all pick up along the way, and to heal the mental beliefs and concepts that do not serve us in our evolution. This, in our culture, is the realm of psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and all such disciplines, and it is very much a part of the shamanic path. This is the stuff of the RED ROAD, the healing path of the heart and mind.

Along with the Red Road it is necessary to walk the BLUE ROAD, the path of opening up to multi-dimensional reality, to the spirit powers that guide our world and keep the balance of the Universe, the ultimate justice of all that happens on Planet Earth. Walking the two roads together helps us to evolve and grow. Neither road on its own brings fulfillment as why go through all the pain of the Red Road if not to evolve spiritually and to walk the Blue Road without healing the wounded child within leaves the old traumas festering away inside, ready to suddenly appear and put you off your intended path.

The Red Road.

The south-north axis of the Medicine Wheel is the Red Road and is the arena of our emotional-mental everyday selves. The north represents our functioning adult persona and the south is the emotional inner child. At any moment it is worth looking at who is boss. Health is a nice balance between the two but when the emotional child gets upset and runs over the adult, we can lose balance and all hell can break loose, whereas when the adult dominates and the child doesn't get a look in, our emotions become stultified and frozen and we lose life energy.

Facing South we see the element of water - the oceans, the rivers, the rain - all that flows - and inside ourselves we have water and also blood which carries nutrients around the body. When we face the South of ourselves, we face our emotions and our past. This is the medicine of Little Mouse, the 'close-to' place. Our emotions are formed out of everything that has happened before the moment of 'now'.

The first 'enemy' we all have to work with is emotional fear. This means shyness, inhibition, fear of not being acceptable, fear of ridicule, fear of emotional insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of being put-down, laughed at, made to feel small, belittled, derided, dimwit, donkey, goose, dolt, imbecile, nincompoop, oaf, blockhead, bonehead, ignoramous etc. I am going on a bit because this is the fear that is stultifying, dis-spiriting, emotionally crippling and extraordinarily destructive in many peoples' lives. It is important to recognise that it only hurts because of low self-esteem. A person who truly values themselves will have no problem with this and realise it is a reflection of the other person's issues. Unfortunately low- self-esteem tends to be the norm for Western people.

The 'ally' as taught by the medicine wheel is 'Trust and Innocence'. This means the ability to trust, to have faith in the Universe, to trust in existence, in Creation, and one's personal right to exist. This means embracing fundamental self-esteem and self love as one's right. To live with trust and innocence is to live as a rightful part of Creation, of Creator. To hold at the deepest level of one's being that one is integral with Creation, with All-That-Is, and thus is utterly entitled to be, to express, to act in the world, to have a life of one's own, to be free of the internal bondage to other people's beliefs and dogmas, to live one's own choices and take responsibility for one's self.

The North of the wheel is the place of the element of air - the winds - and for us this is the place of mind, of thinking and calculating, rationalising, working out. This is the place of 'knowing'. The mind looks to the future to work out what's next and how to create the kind of future we want - unless our self-esteem and sense of worth is screwed up in which case we are likely to subliminally be working to create a lousy future because our inner hidden saboteur says is that is all we are worth!

The 'enemy' of the North place is usually called the enemy of 'clarity'. There is a lovely piece in one of Casteneda's works -The Teachings of don Juan, I think, when don Juan talks about the first enemy as fear and the second as clarity - 'the moment when a man thinks he knows and understands is a dangerous moment because that is the moment he closes his mind' - is the gist of what he says. When teaching this wheel I have found misunderstandings creeping in as to the advantages as well as disadvantages of 'clarity', so I have chosen to rename it 'bullshit' so there is no question or doubt about the meaning whatsoever!

The 'ally' is knowledge and with it, the quality of wisdom. Knowledge is that which one truly knows. Not from belief, conjecture, conditioning, training, wishful thinking, brainwashing, not from anywhere outside oneself, but from inside. And tested by repeated experience. Our life is only experience anyway - that is all we have - all our life happens inside. Not outside - only the effects happen outside for us to see and respond to. Life itself is an internal experience, and knowledge can only be found inside. Other people's knowledge can be found in books but it is not your knowledge until you actually know it and experience it as living truth for yourself.

The Blue Road.

The West of the wheel is the place of the element of Earth and the physical Earth Herself. We place our body here and as the physical only knows the moment of now, so the time of the West is the Present. It is the 'Looks Within' place and our personal work is the struggle between life and death, Ultimate death is called by the medicine wheel teachers - 'death-death' - but there are many 'mini-deaths' to be died along the way. Every pattern we change is a death of something old which makes way for something new. Every dispiriting pattern we fail to change is a nail in our energy body which reduces and deadens our available life force. From an everyday point of view, the negative pattern of the West, the tendency towards 'death' which we struggle with, is most easily labelled 'inertia', and the 'ally we have at our disposal to assist us in this great work is 'introspection' - the willingness to look deep within ourselves, warts and all.

The East of the wheel is the place of the element of fire, of the non-physical energy of spirit, of timelessness, of imagination and inspiration. It is the 'Sees-Far' place, where we can 'see' an overview of things. The quality of the East is power but the issue of whether that power becomes an ally or enemy is a monumentally important one. Healthy power brings with it a feeling of illumination and a sense of lightness and lovingness with others. Power used to dominate and control leaves no loving space, only heaviness and it leads to grief.

The inner aspect of ourselves is the Magical child, that part we connect with in play and fun, in dance and celebration. This part has no future and no past, no bonds and no allegiances for gain, it is ourselves when free and fully in-spirit. The magical child can only use power for the good of all, and wouldn't know a manipulation if it fell over one!

http://www.shamanism.co.uk

About the Author

Leo Rutherford had a twenty year career as an engineer and business manager. This was followed by a mid-life crisis leading to an eight year period of life-changing experiences. Living in California doing his MA in Holistic Psychology, he came across Native American Shamanism and found an earthy magic which felt like 'home'. His book 'Shamanic Path Workbook' is published by Arima Publishing. Website: http://www.shamanism.co.uk