This morning I stood at my window as the sun filtered in through dew-sparkling, lichen-covered Blue Oak branches. The light changed from red-orange to gold to white-gold, surrounding my body, filling my cells.  In my hand a stone from San Bruno Mountain sparkled crystal veins. I became aware of the whole Bay—the waters, the mountains, the cities, the people I love—and thought, “This is my body. This is my being. Not just this small physical body, but the body of the earth. I am connected, all the time. All I have to do is open my awareness to this connection.”

One of the ways I shift my awareness is through shamanic practice. It’s this I want to talk about.

Stepping Between Worlds

We know the world around us is alive and inspirited, yet we westerners are too often focused on other priorities and forget to notice. By using the ancient practice of “stepping between worlds”—shifting out of purely visual and mental understanding into a kind of experiential, energetic awareness—we can broaden and deepen our connections to and understanding of this quantum world we inhabit.

For example, trees are living beings. When I greet a tree from my heart, ask for its wisdom, and listen carefully, it will share what it “knows,” giving me a chance to incorporate its wisdom into my life. Or, when I travel with one of my helping spirits with a question—such as asking for a prescription for dealing with a troubling relationship—that helper will show or tell me a specific action to take to shift the energy.

Beside the ordinary world we live, breathe, and dream in are parallel, nonordinary worlds of energy and spirit. It is to these parallel worlds that shamans travel in a visionary state to do their work. A shaman works in reciprocity with his or her spirit helpers, the elements, and the four directions. Combining intent, focus, and deep reverence, shamans use the tools of journeying, ceremony, song, dance, drumming, and rattling in their work of solving problems, developing relationships, and performing healing.

As indigenous peoples have for fifty thousand years, we can use shamanic practices to find our way back into harmony with the universe and our own souls, forging sacred, reciprocal relationships that nurture the planet.

Remembering What Is In Our Cells

Molecular anthropologists say that we are all ancestors of 12 to14 people who moved north from Africa into Europe, and across the Himalayas into Siberia, across the Bering Straits, and into the Americas (see map link). Knowing this DNA connection, the traditional native North American phrase “all my relations” takes on deeper meaning. Knowing this DNA connection, the prophesies of worldwide cultures regarding this time of change and opportunity take on new meaning. The worldview of shamanism is in our cells; what we need to do is re-member.

All of us who practice shamanism have remembered by learning experientially, by doing, by exploring. Rhythmic percussion—drumbeat, didgeridoo, rattle—is a good vehicle, because percussion shifts our energy and alters our brainwaves, allowing us to stop “thinking” and access different threads of knowing and “seeing in the darkness.” We talk of becoming a “hollow bone” to allow insight to flow through us and out again, bringing balance to the world. We “see with our hearts,” a crucial skill in this time of change. And we learn to “step between worlds” as seamlessly as a bilingual speaker switches languages.

Why Do I Love Shamanic Practice?

I have always found that my spirit helpers give me the exact guidance I need at any given time: they don’t push me beyond what I can do, and they keep me on track. They help me develop my own internal authority, and discover the divinity that lives within each of us. My job is to formulate specific questions when I am asking for help, to pay attention, and to maintain a reciprocal relationship with the beings who help me. That means I hang out with them; thank them; make them offerings; treat them as friends. In turn, they are always willing and anxious to help, and have taught me to experience deep connection and mystical vision as we work together.

“Spiritual work focuses on what is intrinsically right: how we have infinite resources at the core of our nature that we can cultivate in order to live more expansively. If psychological work thins the clouds, spiritual work invokes the sun.”--John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships