Shamanism: It Is You (Not Someone Else),

Steve Serr, Ph.D.

More and more of us within the cultures and regions of the world that have slipped away from our original, primal, indigenous relationship with our world have increasingly been driven by the consequential pain from this separation to try to recapture our ancient Earth-centered ways. Increasingly cerebral, dreaming our way through a brain-full of ideas rather than living in direct contact with the world, many are starting to realize that this separation is turning us into a species alienated from not just the Earth, but from each other and even from ourselves. The primordial and essentially human wisdom of shamanism offers hope to those who are seeking for reconnection.

Without one's own living shamanic culture to turn to, it would be natural to reach to those cultures and regions that somehow kept a better hold on their old ways than did our own. And, with world travel and the all the information available through books as well as the internet, opportunities to learn about the shamanic practices from different regions have multiplied: Hawaii, Korea, Mongolia, Africa, the Amazon... the list goes on and on. Where does one turn? 

For better or worse, we do our best. We study what other cultures have been doing because we seek to know what we could be doing, even if the shamanism from another culture and region does not seem to accurately fit with our own. We look to what others in different parts of the world have to share as we strive to understand what we need to know in our part of the world.

In our quest for reconnection with ourselves and the Earth, we are understandingly tempted to try to duplicate the knowledge, practices, procedures and tools of other regions, cultures, and teachers, and try to make these our own. It makes all the sense in the world. If we avoided learning from the experiences of others, we would miss a wealth of understanding that may have taken lifetimes to gather.

I remember as a young boy having the unique opportunity to not just learn from, but feel real excellence through one of the most respected masters of her age - Billie Jean King - who was gifted not in shamanism, but tennis.  One sunny summer afternoon and for a few precious minutes, this world-recognized expert guided my tennis stroke through the process of hitting a tennis ball.

Here was a true master of her craft, trying to share with a thin, young kid, her deep and hard-won expertise. As she guided my arm through the motions I was able to feel what it was like to be truly skilled. However, it wasn't until years later that I realized that she was showing me her skill. The way she struck the ball, though divinely perfect, was her arête, which is the ancient Greek word meaning 'excellence.' What she was passing on to me was her fantastic, over-the-top power, her unique way of being really good at what she was doing.

It wasn't mine.

Now just to be clear, I do not, nor did I ever, play any kind of tennis like Billie Jean King. Neither did I, beyond those prized moments, ever worked very hard to either duplicate her tennis excellence or develop my own.

However, through an unanticipated, curious and quite circuitous path I did end up becoming a shamanic practitioner, and later, a teacher. As a practitioner, reaching for my own excellence became hugely important to me, so I was initially baffled when my understanding of shamanism seemed to differ from those brilliant and capable people from whom I was learning and whose shamanism I strove to duplicate.

Shamanism is necessarily a person, culture and region specific manifestation. It grows out of the person, place and time in which it arises, within whom and with which it is connected. It arises from the soil.

Ability in shamanic practice is always a consequence of an individual practitioner's ethics, relationship with their spirit helpers, sincerity of practice, and personal experience. Shamanism negates even the possibility of a single universally accepted reference book about itself. There is not even a single shared understanding of how or why shamanism's fascinating practices are effective. Unlike a religion, there is no shamanic Sutra, Bible, or Koran.

This situation is intellectually challenging to anyone who wants to get shamanism 'right'. But take, for example, the animal spirits. There are those that are culturally and regionally familiar in North America, yet these are not the same animal spirits that would be found in, say, South Africa. On the opposite side of the globe and in an opposite hemisphere, should a young, searching, South African shaman-to-be look for North American animal spirits during his or her initiatory journeys?

Of course not. Shamanism is a product of a particular time and place. This is one of the reasons why different shamanic practices around the world differ! The range of animal spirits found throughout the world is huge, each thriving naturally in their particular region.

Shamanism is, as I like to say, something that springs from the soil in which it manifests. Every region or shamanic culture arises within whatever it is amidst. Shamanism is an indigenous growth.

Moreover, Shamanism is very much a 'we do what works' sort of spirituality. In this sense, there is no particular form to shamanism about which a teacher or practitioner can say with any kind of credibility, "This, and only this, is shamanism." However, because humans develop familiarity and attachments to things and procedures, within certain cultures and even within particular shamanic lineages, there start to arise formally accepted tools, practices, or even specific spirits that become accepted as the ones to whom one should go.

Yet the underlying nature of shamanism is just the opposite of any kind of orthodoxy. People and cultures in different places develop different and sometimes unique shamanic understandings, tools and practices. Shamanism grows up and develops within a living world. It is an organic product of where it came to life.

This is the nature of shamanism: just as every culture and region of the world produces within itself its own unique shamanic development, every individual practitioner faces a personal course of growth. Everything a shaman comes to know develops from a combination of the form and nature of their personal experience and their living environment. Thus the excellence of a practitioner is necessarily a direct consequence of what is discovered inside one's own life, whether that be during a journey to a drumbeat or while stepping right outside one's front door.

What this means is that shamanic excellence is not realized by trying to duplicate the shamanism of someone or somewhere else. We do, however, benefit - sometimes enormously - from the experiences and skills that successful and ethical shamanic practitioners have gathered, no matter where they happen to live or what culture they happen to come from. We do listen closely to what others have learned from their experiences to help us navigate towards our own excellence. To ignore the experience of others, whether this be of an entire culture or that of a single person, would be to purposefully look away from perhaps thousands of years of accrued wisdom. It would be an exercise in intentional ignorance.  

Certainly, the shamanism of others can provide clues that may help us discern our own path forward, yet each practitioner's path is always and necessarily, uniquely one's own. Just as it is for a human child growing in the physical world, no matter what that child is told, it is through their own discoveries, whether they be happy or sad, that they learn to find their own footing.

The cultures that have lost much of their original indigenous wisdom have been looking to the distance to see what keeps the heartbeat of shamanism alive in different parts of the world. If you are from one of these floundering, searching cultures, by all means use the information you gather from afar, but use it wisely. Let the experiences of other shamanisms aid your exploration and discovery of what your shamanism is as it arises from your experience and within your culture, firmly planted in your own place on the Earth.

In shamanism, we are, just as our ancestors, part of the rich soil through which our natural, Earth-Centered spiritual practices and awareness spring. Once we accept ourselves as a living embodiment of this, our path is to let our shamanism arise within us.

Shamanism is not a conceptual exercise, nor can it be derived through the experiences of someone else. Plant yourself in your own living world. Dig your feet into your own soil, sand or snow that spreads out beyond your front door. Say 'hello' to the birds, fish, reptiles and mammals that fly, swim and walk around where you are. Acknowledge the sun that rises above your own head and call in the seasons that revolve in your hemisphere, not that of someone else.

This is shamanism. It is you.