A little while ago I received a letter from a practitioner, who wrote:

"I had an experience yesterday that reminded me of yet another reason I have kept myself so firmly ensconced in the practical. 

I have a very vivid dream the other night of a man's death. I awakened feeling a profound sense of grief that I could not seem to shake off, even though I did not know the man in my dream.

Later in the morning, one of my coworkers got a call that his younger brother had died suddenly.   

This is not the first time I've had such dreams. A few weeks before hurricane Katrina hit, I had dreams where I was trying to rescue people from flooded areas. The other night, before Isaac made landfall, I was feeling uncharacteristically agitated. I actually lost my temper with my husband, which is completely out of character for me.  (I tend to be very even-tempered).  

The trouble with such experiences is that they don't seem very helpful.  I cannot prevent these things from happening, particularly as the information is so vague when it comes in. It's a sense of being unsettled or agitated or a dream with people or places that I've never seen. So...I've never understood the purpose of having these premonitory sensations. And, as I said, they tend to be disturbing to me.  Perhaps this is more because I don't understand their purpose.  In any case, it seems that this work is opening me up to such things again. I guess, in a way, this is a good sign that what I'm doing is working."

I bring this practitioner's experiences to your attention, because if you are a practitioner, you are bound to eventually run into some situation where you know something that may help someone's circumstances, but are either powerless to do anything about it, or ethically bound to not do so even if you could. This is the personally tough side of being aware.

This is also one of the reasons why people tend to shut their awareness down. When given the opportunity or encouragement to go study under a shaman, so many potential practitioners throughout history have run hell-bent in the opposite direction. Who wants to be sensitive! It is admittedly, far easier to shut it all down and spend the afternoon shopping in a local mall. Perhaps not as healthy, perhaps not as wise, but understandable.

However, if you are reading this newsletter, the odds are pretty fair that you are not one to shut it down or go blithely wandering through the numbing intoxication of shopping malls. You, have chosen to accept the awareness that your sensitivity provides, and are trying to find a way to live with it.

The practical issue is when we choose to accept what we see and not shut it down, we need to find a way to remain aware of the world that our open awareness shows us. And an open awareness is not selective.

And this can be tough. It is undoubtedly part of your experience to have encountered a dead animal or bird on the side of the road. We are compassionate and sensitive, so we feel sadness, perhaps pain. From this, we may feel anger at a society that forgets compassion for the other beings around us and allows a world to grow where such trauma can happen. But to close our eyes at the sight is seeking a fantasy, reaching for a delusion of a world where such things do not exist.

When I began working hospitals supporting the recovery of traumatized and extremely sad individuals, I became acutely aware of the amount of suffering that exists in our world. It occurred to me that even within a half-mile radius of wherever I happened to be, that if I were fully aware of the degree of suffering within this circle in which I stood, that it would likely be devastating, and bring me to my knees.

Should I shut that down and ignore it? Nope. The suffering is real. For those who prefer to live with their eyes open, the answer is not in finding a good - or even bad - reason to shut them, but rather, learning to cope with what we see. When it comes to the harsh, sad, and discomforting aspects of what we see and what we learn, we need to find ways of navigating with open eyes these parts of the world around us.

Fortunately, awareness does not show us only suffering. It also opens us up to the unbelievably tremendous miracle within which we are living: the afternoon sunlight filtering down between the trees, the submerged hovering of a tiny brown minnow in the creek, the angular tilt of the head of a raucous Stellar blue jay that paused just long enough to take in an eyeful of the human watching it.

Or the adoring gaze of an infant looking up into her mother's face in the line at the supermarket, the wag of a dog's tail, the long rolling crash of a thunderous wave, followed by the sucking and hiss as it pulls back in readiness to come in again.

This is the other side of awareness. For a practitioner, it will include the joy of a soul part's reconnection with the one who lost it, and the happy tears of the client who receives it. It is the unflinching observations and profound wisdom of a spirit teacher, letting us know all too clearly what it is that we have been ignoring. It is the delightful cavorting with an animal spirit helper, or spreading our own wings, and flying high in the nonordinary sky.

Perhaps, at least part of the answer to learning to live with the pain of what we know, rests in the very awareness with which we come to know it. Fortunately, awareness also opens us to the ever-unfolding magnificence, beauty, splendor and awe of our world, even though and as with the practitioner who wrote me, it can lead us to see something about which we can, or should, do nothing, even though it pains us not to do so.

Awareness is not the issue, but rather, being comfortable enough being aware. And not being selective, awareness opens us to the miracle of being alive and the gratitude that comes from this.

Awareness is the whole kit and caboodle. The Full Monte. This is what leads to wisdom. There is no other path.

The Shamanic Bar Exam

What makes a shaman or shamanic practitioner? One of my students recently asked me this question, and proceeded to elucidate:

"When a person begins study as a lawyer, he proceeds through a definite set of educational challenges and ultimately take a bar exam, and if all goes well, he is recognized and legal to practice law.  My wife is an RN, and in her case, she had to attend school, pass tests, and do many things to become a licensed RN.  I was a teacher, and to be a teacher in a school system, one has to complete certain steps before teaching certification is given.

... But I guess, at least part of what is in my mind, is "What do I need to do in order to feel qualified to do the kind of work I want to do?"  I never wish to stop learning, but I guess I have this idea that there is, somewhere in your mind, a threshold level that one must surpass before thinking of oneself as a shaman or shamanic practitioner.  

Maybe I am approaching this from the wrong angle.  Maybe I should simply be concerned with establishing my own shamanic relationships with the universe, and the Upper and Lower Worlds, and ultimately things will come together... but that seems to be so nebulous!

... Perhaps there is no relatively clear-cut point where you can say, "OK, now you have four (or ten, or twenty) more steps to complete, and you will be fully qualified as a shamanic practitioner!" 

Oh my goodness. I totally get what this feeling of wondering if 'Am I ready?' is like! It took me years of training before I began to feel qualified to practice shamanism with clients, and much longer before I felt qualified to teach.

There is no bar exam for shamanic practice, although undoubtedly teachers throughout history have waited to observe certain traits in their students before giving their 'nod' of approval and sending them out of the nest and into the world of clients. I also observe and wait, and watch my students over time. It is what I observe throughout each level of training that really makes my own determination as to whether a student has stepped into their ability.

But what I hear from this student seems to be more of a 'how does the practitioner know' that they are doing a good job at their practice. Which is as this student says, feeling qualified.

The short answer is simply practice, and see the results.

I really think all the esoteric blah blah about specialness of shamanism is a bunch of posturing. There is no one in the universe who cannot do this work well, though there are many who think they can't or don't want to, or don't even know about it. The work and the healing potential are in our genetics. Shamanic practice is simple, really, although what we have to do in order to get back to that is drop a lot of contemporary conceptual misconceptions. This is the only part of it that is hard for the contemporary world to do.

There is plenty of perplexity about shamanic practice out there today, and shamanic practitioners are usually the first to experience this. Setting up a personal practice, for instance, is more than perplexing, it's absolutely crazy-making. The contemporary world is simply unable to find the correct 'boxes' into which they can conceptualize our work, and hence, how to deal with us. Sure, there are workarounds for slipping closer into the mainstream and 'sort of' fitting in. Shamanic practitioners have been coming up with adaptive strategies over the past several decades, but one thing is for certain: a road sign advertising 'Shamanic Practitioner Ahead: late summer special: two power animals for the price of one' simply doesn't work, either for us as practitioners, or for the contemporary world.

How we face comprehending our shamanic work and how our societies struggle to comprehend our work, is in neither case going to be easy, for it necessitates an entire paradigm shift. Yes, a shift back to our original nature as human beings, but a paradigm shift nonetheless. It turns the world we came to know completely upside down, and that never makes for easy paths to navigate.

However, not to get too far off on a tangent, during the course of our development as practitioners, we will likely encounter periodic bouts of angst about our capability or achievement. However, that is pretty common while walking any professional development path. What I can say from my own experience is that the more we work through as we progress down our path, the broader and firmer becomes our foundation. All of this makes the occasional challenges no less challenging, but far less personally and professionally threatening.

There are no set number steps one must successfully take in order to feel qualified. In fact, one may even be the most capable practitioner in the entire course of shamanic practice throughout history and even into prehistory, and still not feel qualified. This is actually a fairly common secret fear of professionals in all sorts of fields, including those of wellness and healing. In today's world, we tend to harbor a nagging worry about our capability. However, feeling qualified and being qualified, are very different things.

As to either feeling, or actually being qualified, my advice is to simply stay practicing and learning. You will then keep growing and developing. Eventually, there will be a fair likelihood that you will feel qualified by your accumulated knowledge, your successful practice, and your relationship with your spirit helpers.

I guess there were plenty of shamanic practitioners who in the past, and still today, give a nod of assent to one of their students to indicate they are ready to go out and start working with others. That's what I do, only it is not a nod, but a certificate, which I only put my name to after watching them practice successfully over time and observing their ability.

Then again, there were - and are - shamans who never had another practitioner teach them at all, but who just felt drawn to listen, observe, and learn to talk with the spirits on their own, which may have been hard or easy. They certainly did not have a bar exam to pass. There is the anecdote of the shamans who failed at healing someone and were executed by an irate family or community because if it. And I guess that is something like a bar exam.