When personal crisis strikes our life and emotional turmoil becomes a steady companion, we reach out for help not only in the space of our family and friends, but sometimes also to a group we nowadays call the “professionals of the psyche”. Unfortunately, the common way of treating emotional and mental disturbances is in the form of behavioural therapy and medications. However, endless hours of depletive conversations seldom lead to a new perspective of life and living. Sadly, the contemporary professional of the psyche turned it into their profession to push away messages from the soul, to perfect distraction rather than connection, and to keep the sufferer in a state of dependency rather than leading them into autonomy.
However, on the other side we can find the shaman, eager to search for the often painful, but powerful truth and ready for real transformation. The knowledge of the shaman, who can wander between the worlds of madness and clarity, had been cut out of society to prevent the individual from deep personal growth and from a feeling of unity within a community, for free and independend-minded people threaten to collapse the system’s house of cards.
A shaman is a lot more than the healer of old times and old indigenes tribes. A shaman is an archetypal figure to whom we can all connect within ourselves. By accepting our present painful condition and indulging into its myth we can transform suffering into wisdom, and thus understanding the sense of our states and experiences. Entering the dark worlds within often causes fear and resistance, and the shaman, who safely leads in and out of these dimensions, activates courage and faith in the hearts of the hurt. They shatter the illusion of control and create an athmosphere in which conflicts are welcome. After all, the most disturbing tensions hold the strongest transformative potential.
Driven by the desire to reconnect to our own spirit, many people travel around the world to the most isolated places; hoping to find a healer, a teacher, or even an inspiration for a new life. While there is definitely a positive outcome of this stragedy, there is no need to travel anywhere outside. The only place in which we can find our personal shaman is within ourselves. When we are able to create the healing space in our own homes, it is unnecessary to have it be created by someone else. So, how do we find this very special atmosphere? How do we open up to our own power of transforming energy?
If we want to bring out the shaman within ourselves, we need to focus on two states of our mind and adopt these into our lives. The first one is the desire and the courage for self-exploration. Without fully being determined to get to know our true Self, we will never be able to activate the required will needed for this journey. So, first of all, know if you really want to step into the depth of your own soul. The second state that we need to wake up our personal shaman is one we know from meditation and other mind-expanding practices, which is being fully aware in the present moment. Those who have experienced this state of mind know its soothing and healing effects. If we look closely to the techniques of the shaman – rhythmic drumming, chanting, free movement, trance states, ritualized actions, painting, body art and other expressive explorations - we can see that we do have this kind of behavior within our society, usually manifested in the passion of the artist. Since we are all artists, in the sense of being destroyers and creators, we all have the portal to the divine inside of us. What people describe as “flow” in creative expressions such as dance, drama, paint and music, is the exact same space the shaman creates when entering the world of healing.
Shaun McNiff, who studied the resemblances between shamanism and creative therapy, wrote: “Rather than attempting to tranquilize eruptions of psychological tension by external means, the artist and the shaman go to the heart of the inner storm and enact its furies in a way that benefits the individual and the community. The end result is not just emotional carthasis but deepend insight into the nature of human emotion. The artist and the shaman see that struggle gives significance to existence.”
When time is lost, the mind is still and the body functions as a medium of higher spirits, then our lost souls find their way back into our being. Healing occurs naturally when we create the room for energy to be raised in its vibration. And it is the power of the present moment that transforms energy. By letting the soul express itself through artistic mediums, we can find ourselves in the “flow” that activates our energy, opens our heart and connects imagination with the physical world. Opposites dissolve and we become whole. The shaman inside of us awakens.
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