Your calling happens when the spirits choose you. Now STOP! This doesn’t mean you can say “Oh, the spirits chose me! I feel them around me!” Because that is not how it works! The spirits choice is indicated through an absolutely horrible experience called “shamanic illness” which you can read about in this link. A shamanic illness is an extremely severe, horribly painful experience that will continue for a very long time, often years. It is so severe that people have died from it. In addition to the previous example, one of my ongodtengertei (with spirits, which is to say: future shaman) friends is often crippled and unable to walk when she has an episode. Another friend who is now a shaman described her as like being constantly stabbed with knives. Almost every shaman and ongodtengertei person I know has contemplated suicide as a way to solve the pain of this illness. That includes me.
Doctors cannot diagnose it, priests cannot cure it
I like this article and it annoys the shit out of me, too. The title of the article needs to be “Are You A Mongolian Shaman?” rather than “Are You A Shaman?” Because the author is solely talking about Mongolian Shamanism, which in an of itself is an umbrella term that encompasses several peoples and traditions, which may or may not overlap entirely. One could point to the fact that the word “shaman” comes from that area of the world and was then generalized to all indigenous medicine peoples, but the author is STILL generalizing, because if the author wants to remain specific, then the author needs to stick with ONE people -- the Tungus people from which we get the word “shaman” (”saman”). The author manages to negate Korean shamans, Sami shamans, Hungarian shamans (Taltos), Sei∂r from the Norse tradition, and there’s a basic thread in the comments and throughout a lot of communities that state that if you’re white or of European descent, then you cannot be a shaman, which is patently false. So:
STOP! IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!
Why? Because Spirit chooses and you don’t get to say who can or cannot become a shaman by your own definition, dear author.
The part I quoted here is the salient part. This is what distinguishes the Shaman/Medicine Person from the Shamanic Practitioner. I can call myself a Shamanic Practitioner because I’ve been through Michael Harner’s Shamanic Basics Weekend Workshop back in May. But I’m also eyeball deep in my own shamanic crisis/shamanic illness, which yes, has made me suicidal at times.
I spent this past weekend at a ceremony led by an actual Siberian shaman and when I told her what I was going through and when she saw me in the state I was in this weekend, it solidified for her that I really WAS going through something special -- it cannot be exorcised or extracted, I cannot be cleared. I’ve tried over 5 times to get this off me and to free me from its grasp so that I can move forward.
The spirits are calling on white people because we need white people to transform themselves and their culture from one of despondent complacency to one of conscious action. Spirits are working on white people as much or more than on people of colour because we white people have lost our way. We’ve been colonized by the Church. We’ve been colonized by Rationalism. We’ve been colonized by the same poisonous thoughts that tell us we’re not able to be connected to the Land, and the Land needs All People of All Colours.
My Shamanic Crisis is Psychosis and this past weekend marks my 2 year anniversary of when the voices came to me and never left, even though they’d visited me before and I’ve been in this crisis for three and a half years now. I channel spirits, which I’ve partly done in this post. I do not lose consciousness when I channel -- it’s a co-conscious collaboration. This is how we work together, and this is how we will continue to work together until something else changes because it wasn’t always like this.
The shaman this weekend told me that shamans heal themselves and that the lineages are there in order to help give guidance and a framework for helping the shaman through their crisis -- they’re not there to heal the shaman. They’re not there to protect the shaman from what they must endure. The shaman has to survive it and then shamanize when it’s time to do so -- that is, when spirit tells them to.
It is the spirits who pick the shaman, rather than the person deciding to become a shaman themselves. If the spirits don’t work with you, then you got nothing. If you’re not broken down in some way in order to know what it feels like to BE broken down in some way, how can you possibly know or understand what that process is like for your clients? for your people? the people who will come to you for guidance and insight? You can’t. Simply put, you cannot. And this is what the spirits are doing to me -- have been doing to me.
The Shamanic Crisis is an ordeal to test a would-be shaman’s mettle. Becoming a shaman -- becoming a healer for your people -- is no small task, no small chore. It is vital for the community, vital for the Land, and vital for the people of the Earth. Earth wants people to wake up to what they’ve done to her body. She wants people to know that it’s time to stop abusing their Mother and to work again towards honouring Her and all she does for us. We are here by Her graces, we are sustained by Her body and her grace, we live within Her field of grace and the more conscious we become of that, the more connected to Her we will become and the more harmonious our own lives will become.
The Shaman works as an intermediary between the world of spirit and the world of consensual human reality, between the world of Nature and the human world. The Shaman is a walker between worlds and it is spirit in concert with the shaman’s own higher self, who facilitates that process rather than by the conscious act of the shaman. Honestly, if more people really truly understood what it meant to be a shaman and to go through a shamanic crisis/shamanic illness, they’d run like the wind in the opposite direction. This is not anything undertaken lightly. The spirit will knock the ego right out of you and spin you into delusion where you will be trapped indeterminately if you are not able to get your shit together enough to realize how you need to walk in this world. And people will be able to tell whether you’re wrapped up in your own masturbatory need to rescue others and be some “powerful” jackass. This isn’t shamanism. A shaman is humble and has presence, carrying herself through this world with grace.
