Core shamanic practices are thousands of years old and are enjoying a current renaissance along with renewed interest all over the world today. For Westerners, it is often a stretch to not just consider but embrace this ancient healing art as legitimate. Part of this reason is because since the early 1900s, there has been a migration from the rural farming orientation that was this country’s foundation to the growing cities for factory work. This social trend was a significant shift away from what had been a centuries old relationship to nature that suddenly was becoming fractured. Most of us became “citified” as urban centers of commerce proliferated and the small family farm began its long decline. The reason this matters is because shamanism is really a nature-based relationship to life and the world. It presumes being connected to all things that revolve around the natural world. The ancients were deeply connected to the earth including the land, animals, weather patterns (no satellites) and the cosmos that predated the scientific revolution. For shamanic communities, everything was filled with and embodied spirit. It is such a very different way to think about the world and our relationship to it. We judge our ancestors as mostly ignorant only because we cannot imagine living in a world without technology such as central heat and electricity. Yet we still have much to learn about what and how our ancestors knew about different ways to interact with our world.
They referred to a different reality as “non-ordinary,” a dimension that could be accessed and interacted with. Humans who were able to do this were called shamans and acquired a specific skill set that made them very useful and important to their community. This skill set is something that can be learned today. It requires an open heart and a willingness to be open to new ideas and possibilities that our current cultural worldview seems to have lost touch with. Many of the ways that people solved problems thousands of years ago can be learned and applied today. If you are interested in learning more about “how” to acquire this particular skill set feel free to call me for one-on-one instruction.
Posted on June 23, 2013
Howard Brockman, LCSW
Howard Brockman
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