Shaman Training
The Seeker and
The Teacher
by Joe Mullally - traditional shaman healer & teacher
scroll downThe path of partnerships
Shamanic workshop programs, good shamanic teachers and patient mentors are a huge help to all of us on the shaman path. Yet not withstanding the ongoing importance of such companionship and instruction, we must not forget that fundamentally each of us relate and work with spirit in our own unique way, and so much of our progress depends on developing this individual intimacy with spirit through our private daily practice. Group activities then, must not distract us here or become a substitute for the work we need to do by ourselves.
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The traditional way of validation
If you were visited by your spirit guide tomorrow and told that you could cure cancer by rubbing your spittle into a person's scalp and you did it... AND it worked - then the roads would be jammed for miles with people wanting to see you. They wouldn't wait for any scientific explanation, all the rationalists in the world wouldn't deter them coming, and no matter where you fled they'd follow you and seek you out. Your practice would be based singularly on your successful results. This is the traditional way
Shamanic books are invaluable for the insights and so forth they give into various intriguing practices and ancient rituals in all the indigenous cultures they describe. My own shelves are full of them, I read them avidly and I treasure and love them all. And I've learned something new from every single book. However, when a writer takes to distilling out 'the definitive' shamanic routines, or 'the core' techniques and 'the universal common practices' of shamanism from their collected material, what results must be seen as the author's own conclusions. Strange then, how often we find the same familiar theories repeated time and agian in later books as though they were absolute facts. -
Living tradition embraces mystery
Why is there such a passion for reductionism, for distilling everything down to a shortlist of confident declarations on how shamanism does and does not work. What is so wrong with leaving all the possibilities still open, with leading the reader instead to an understanding of how truly vast the subject is, and with encouraging all the mystery, ambiguity, contradictions and diversity to go on living for us long after we have put down the books. Isn't that how shamanic traditions constantly challenge us in practice, and isn't this the way the work changes and evolves continuously in real life!
Precious little will ever be known of the most ancient practices now anyhow, and even if it were all known and if everything was meticulously thumb-nailed and deftly catalogued, none of it might still correspond to our own personal experience. Shamanism is constantly moving and changing in time with the way each generation relates to the earth and the way the earth responds to them. The work continues to be informed today by the living working experience of all it's many modern day practitioners everywhere, just as in bygone days it was informed by the experiences and results of the people living then, who practiced it their way.When a shamanic teacher puts forward their system of rituals, worldviews or routines - these represent that teachers work in practice and reflect the heritage to which they are aligned. Such training will indeed prove very powerful in informing our own work, and yet our own path may yet remain distinctly different from that of the teacher. On occasion we may very well travel to places and levels within a few months that the teacher themselves has never reached and never even heard of after twenty years of their own travels. Conversely, other areas which are vital to the teacher for their own work, may have little relevance to us in ours. Sometimes it does happen unfortunately, that a mentor, sensing their own position questioned, feels compelled to steer a pupil back to to do things their way. This is very wrong in my view. It is also a great pity too, for at least two opportunities are lost - the opportunity for the pupil to celebrate freely and grow their own unique ability from the experience they have openly shared - and the opportunity for the teacher themselves to learn and grow through exploring something different, or through looking at something already familiar in a completely new way.
