Walking Between Worlds: Shamanism and Media Representation

Recently there has been a growing media interest in shamanism here in the UK. A few nights ago BBC television broadcast the documentary 'The Horse Boy' and journalist Rupert Isaacson's book of the same name, about taking his autistic son to Monglia to find help from traditional shamans, appeared earlier this year. The film was quite fascinating, though it would have been good to see more detail about the shamans the family visited and about shamanism itself. The family's journey was long and arduous and the tents of the reindeer-herding shaman who performed the magical healing on the autistic boy, seemed almost impossibly remote. Given this remoteness it's interesting that even traditional Mongolian shamanism isn't independent of consumerism. The image above is of a Mongolian Shaman Doll available from the 'Mongolian Shop'. He looks rather nice, quite wise and cheerful!

As media interest grows, so it continues to grow, feeding on itself and on the consqequent public interest. This is an interesting time to be involved with shamanism; it's possible to feel the tide of things tipping and shifting away from cynicism and fear, towards a genuine interest and a desire to know more, not just about shamanism of course, but about spirit in general. This is not to say that cynicism doesn't remain deeply rooted among us, just that it is starting to become a less fashionable position.

The positive side of this is that public awareness of shamanism is expanding exponentially. Just a few years ago it would have been hard to find anyone in the street who had ever heard of shamanism; now at least people know the word. The down side of this growth of interest is that it's not always possible for a reader to judge what is fact and what mis-represented nonsense. Shamanic practitioners have different problems. From a practitioners point of view it's not always possible to judge who will represent your words faithfully and who has an agenda of their own which may involve scepticism, challenge or even ridicule. In the past both myself and fellow practitioners have turned down invites from the media because the agenda was unclear.
Having said that, there have been some interesting and productive interactions with journalism and film recently. A few days ago an article on shamanism for the ethical living magazine 'Lifescape' appeared. I was pleased to be invited to write the piece as it's the first general interest magazine that has asked me for something on shamanism and 'Lifescape' is a wonderful means of spreading the word to a young and receptive readership. The magazine has offered me a column to write about shamanism in an ongoing way and the first of these will appear in early 2010. I'm really looking forward to having some space to cover the many wonderful things that this path offers!

A few weeks ago a London newspaper wrote a piece on my teaching of shamanism in Islington. It was a phone interview. The pleasant young journalist admitted that he knew nothing at all about shamanism and it occured to me, even as I was speaking, that what was being said and what appeared in print might be quite different, simply from misunderstanding. In fact the result was almost entirely accurate. A friend got a copy of the paper and kept it for me; I immediately lost it.

In October I took part in the filming of a documentary based around the work of a client of mine who is a GP here in London. She has links to traditional curanderas, both as a student and as a film-maker herself and has been a shamanic counselling client of mine for a number of years. The documentary features the ways in which her work straddles several, quite different worlds. We were filmed doing a shamanic counselling session and I was interviewed more than once about contemporary shamanism and my own work. The experience was fascinating. Even though, or maybe because, the film-makers were students, there was a great sense of agenda and pushing towards results that often threatened to tip over into lack of authenticity. It's impossible to gauge what the results will be, or how my client and myself will be represented in the final cut. It's now a question of trust.

What strikes me about interaction with the media, of whatever kind, is that it is itself a kind of walking between worlds: between the world of spirit and the result-driven world of public information/entertainment. The line of separation is actually more of a yawning crevasse, but it seems that, with care and sensitivity on both sides, it needn't be filled with predators.


To read the article 'Walking Between Worlds' just click to enlarge the images above.

Shaman UK: Autumn 2009

It's been over a month since the last post here on Shaman UK and although, from time to time, it seemed something really should be written, this period has been what creatives refer to as a 'fruitful silence'. In fact, this has been the busiest time of year so far with new courses, workshops and seminars happening, often spontaneously, and with new opportunities appearing for developing and expanding knowledge of shamanism. To some people, Autumn feels like the beginning of an end, the closing down of the year, the cooling off after summer, the death of vegetation and long hours of daylight. For others, including myself, Autumn always seems like a new beginning, a time of sudden expansion, followed by the brisk gestation of Winter. Perhaps the feeling is particularly strong among people of Celtic heritage, Samhain, this Celtic festival of death and rebirth being held in the darkening days of autumn.

What's Been Happening

The busy time started back in July with the first Summer Gathering of the ISC (an international shamanic community of students and former students of Jonathan Horwitz and the Centre for Shamanic Studies). Held in a wood just south of London, some deep work on community took place, as well as a great time being had by all.

Courses and Conferences

The first Shaman UK Taster Day 'Experiencing Shamanism' was held early in August followed by several weeks of planning new courses and workshops to be held from September to November. In late August I attended a fascinating residential conference at Kent University on consciousness, the brain and what lies beyond death, organised by the Science and Medical Network and the Spiritual Interest Group of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists. Academics and writers from around the world presented evidence on reincarnation, near death experience, visions, voices and visitations from the deceased. From the material presented at this conference it appears that far from being "that bourne from which no traveller returns", the space between life and death is a busy six lane highway. On the second day space was made for personal presentations and in keeping with the theme of the conference I offered an hour's seminar on Shamanism and Death. Rattling the circle was an interesting experience and felt very different, as the individual energies present were quite different to those normally encounter in purely shamanic groups. Afterwards, a number of people commented that the sensation of being rattled was quite unique for them and had had a powerful impact.

In mid-September there was a new full day workshop on Shamanism: Life and Death which drew people from London and the southeast together to discuss the relationship between life and death from a shamanic perspective and to meet and ask help from the spirits on the subject. This workshop in particular was a new step in my own teaching practice, as it deliberately brought together shamanically experienced and completely inexperienced people to journey together and contact their own spirit helpers in whatever way they were able. I journeyed about this and asked my own spirits if this was an efficacious way of approaching shamanic work and was reminded me that everyone is a teacher and that those present who are unable or unwilling to journey can benefit from the wisdom and experience brought back in the teachings of those who have done so.

A few days later the first Autumn seminar was held at The Open Centre on the topic of Shamanism: Sex and Gender. This was a fun occasion that turned into a lively discussion on sexual practices among certain traditional shamanic societies. We explored the idea of gender and sexuality within a worldview which holds that all is one, and that there is no separation, and went on to consider the role of gender and sex relations with spirit helpers. These are issues that appear repeatedly in shamanic practice but are rarely talked about.

A second seminar on Soul Retrieval took place in mid October followed a week later by the start of the ongoing introductory course, Adventures in Shamanism. There are now only two remaining sessions of this course which has been a fresh and moving experience for those taking part, as well as a privilege for me to teach. This evening, in the penultimate session, there will be a ceremony to explore and enhance our connectedness to all things, attended by experienced shamanic as well as course members.

Shamanism As Art

In terms of connection and spreading knowledge of shamanism to the wider population few things could have been more dramatic than the opportunity offered by shamanic practitioner Adam Hearn who generously invited others to take part with him in his hour on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in September as part of Anthony Gormley’s ‘one and other’ project. Laura Valenti, a friend and shamanic student joined in, along with some of Adam’s friends and family, to drum around the base of the plinth in accompaniment, or sometimes not, as over the roar of the buses and other traffic it wasn’t always easy to hear other people’s sound! There was a lot of interest from passers-by in what Adam was doing and questions about shamanism. Best of all, it didn’t rain until he was leaving the plinth!

Last month I was invited to take part in a documentary film about the relationship between Mexican shamanic healing practices and the contemporary western shamanism I practice and teach. It was an interesting insight into the rather gruelling nature of film-making but the results should be interesting as student director, Carl Harrison, interweaves the two quite different styles of shamanism into a whole, using animation, interview, filming of Mexican ceremony and Harner Method Shamanic Counselling.

Coming up in 2010

One of the most the interesting and exciting aspects of working with shamanism is the sense of endless possibility that it engenders and there are many new things being proposed at present, working within academia being a significant one. In January I will be teaching a workshop on shamanism and sound at the Sydney De Haan Research Institute in Health and the Arts at Christchurch University. I am particularly pleased that Middlesex University, where I taught writing and journalism in the past, has invited me to teach courses in shamanism at the Summer School in July/August next year. Details of these will be available here on the blog when they become known.

Over the last months a number of new collaborative projects have been underway and in the New Year, Shaman UK will be offering courses and workshops for performing artists in collaboration with opera singer Alexandra Rigazzi-Tarling M.A. Throughout the summer Alexandra and I have been exploring ways of bringing shamanism to singers, actors and dancers in order to enhance and support their professional and personal development and address the many joys and difficulties seemingly inherent in a performers life. We are currently considering places to pilot the workshops, so please get in touch if you have any ideas on this.

(All images in this post copyright Zoe Bran.)

Healing London: Soul Retrieval in Practice 2

In March this year I posted on Soul Retrieval in London. It seemed an appropriate time to write about the pressures of living in a vast city and how soul can be both lost and found here in the metropolis. Not long after writing the post I facilitated a seminar to explore soul loss and how it can be healed. During the evening I did a retrieval for a friend and colleague, which was a profound experience for those who took part and also those who witnessed it.

Of all the many aspects of shamanism available to people discovering this work, soul retrieval is one the best known. Very few, if any, other practices offer to re-unite parts of the self and for reasons that aren't hard to understand, many people feel broken or fragmented in what is a very alienating culture. Many of the calls and emails directed to Shaman UK are from people asking for soul retrievals; it is one of the most common reasons for people to begin working with shamanism. This fascinating with this aspect of shamanism is due in part at least to the ground breaking work of writer and practitioner Sandra Ingerman whose seminal book Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self was first published eighteen years ago.

Shamanism works by seeking to re-establish harmony; by restoring what is lacking or removing what should not be present. It probably says quite a lot about our urbanised society that many people feel themselves to be either lacking key parts of themselves, or to be harbouring parts of someone/something else. The latter problem is also an important part of shamanic work and calls for an Extraction by a practitioner skilled in the removal of intrusions. Retrieval and Extraction are some of the most powerful tools a shaman has for healing and restoring harmony to individuals, organisations or even regions and nations. This is powerful work, a kind of magic which can be life altering in its scope because it offers the opportunity for integration and wholeness.

Shamanism: Sex and Gender

An individual socialised in such a way as to straddle the gender boundary ought to be able to span all boundaries … We are here at the heart of the shamanic mediating of relationships and probably all religious forms of mediation. Bernard Saladin d’Anglure

The recent seminar held here in London on shamanism, sex and gender was one of the most interesting seminars to date, with attendees ranged from those with no experience of shamanism at all, to experienced pagan practitioners and writers. The discussion covered topics from consciousness to Siberian reindeer-muscle dildos.

My own interest in this area comes not from anthropology but from having authored three books on sex and sexuality and been an academic researcher in the area of sexual behaviour. From a shamanic perspective, sex and sexual relationships are things that frequently occur in my clients non-ordinary reality experiences.

Gender is an issue that recurs in many people’s relationships with their spirits as specific forms of teaching. While researching in the area agenda for the seminar, I was interested to discover that evolutionary biologists have discovered more than two genders in hundreds of animal species including, to my surprise, the Red Deer, which has one female and two male genders. The White Throated Sparrow, pictured below has several genders, each with distinct functions. Of course a vast number of species on this planet, such as plants, fungi and single cell organisms reproduce asexually.

One of the main topics discussed during a seminar was the idea of duality, of separation and the division of things into male and female, night and today, hot and cold, which can seem a peculiarly Western way of thinking, though eastern esoteric practices also describe polarities, through for example, yin and yang. This kind of separation and division encourages the notion of gender, sex, sexual desire, sexuality as a fixed and unchanging, despite the invaluable work of researchers like Alfred Kinsey more than 60 years ago which 'shocked' the world into the realisation that there was no such thing as 'normal' when it came to human sexuality. As someone who followed in Kinsey's large footsteps during the AIDS panic of the late 80's and investigated male bisexuality, the word 'normal' very quickly vanished from my vocabulary.

Separation and division are also linguistically defined. English language has clear gender structures, though lacks gendered nouns, unlike French, for example, in which language even the chair you sit on and the knife you use is clearly defined as masculine or feminine. The Algonquian languages of the first peoples of the northeastern USA and southeastern Canada, such as the Ojibwe, have no male/female genders, instead distinctions are made between animate and inanimate objects. As an English speaker, with marginal French and Spanish, I would find it difficult to think only in terms of ‘it’ or ‘one’, though no doubt I'd get used to it! Words used as names can also affect gender in the sense of social roles, French ethnographer Bernard Saladin d’Anglure in his book sub-titled, ‘Masculin, Feminin ou Chaman?’ he describes the Inuit tradition of naming a child regardless of sex and the child accepting the gender of the name. Saladin d’Anglure also describes the Inuit belief that their children choose their sex shortly before birth and that the genitalia adjust to the decision.

These things are tiny examples of what is a vast world literature of gender change, sex change and cross-dressing throughout human history and from around the world. Almost all cultures have gods, goddesses who can change form at will or have multiple natures. The Hindu god Shiva is often depicted as Ardhanari, the synthesis of Shiva and Parvati, and the word ‘hermaphrodite’ describes a form of the Greek god Hermes and the goddess Aphrodite. Having read several years ago about the year-long, gender-swap training of apprentice shaman's among traditional peoples of subarctic Siberia, I was struck by what I imagined to be very expansive and forward-thinking learning. What a pity, I thought, that general practitioners in the UK didn’t have to undergo a year of cross-dressing and transsexual living, in order to have a better understanding of the problems of opposite sex patients. On further exploration it became clear that I’d missed the point. As with Shiva and Hermes/Aphrodite, the change traditional shamanic apprentices experienced had little to do with patient care, and almost everything to do with developing a ‘third sex’ identity, a spiritual androgyny. And the purpose of this? As Saladin d’Anglure notes in the opening quote above, “An individual socialised in such a way as to straddle the gender boundary ought to be able to span all boundaries …”. In other words, if moving between male and female roles and identities is unquestioned, moving between realities as a shaman should be just as straightforward. Many traditional shamanic societies value multi-gendered/genderless shamans as being spiritually more identified with non-ordinary reality and so better able to mediate in the world of the spirits. Such persons are seen as having the potential to contain and reconcile all opposites.

Among the Chukchi people, a traditional shamanic culture of northern Kamchatka, in Siberia, multi-gendered states with many permutations of dress and behaviour, alongside ‘virtual’ sex changes, were considered the natural way of things for shamans. Male shamans who became female experienced natural muscle loss, developed female social speech patterns, were believed to give birth to animal spirits and even to human offspring. Female shamans who became male carried weapons, dressed as a man and often married young girls, performing their ‘marital duties’ using a dildo made from reindeer muscle. The young girls might have sex with male partners, but any children born from these liaisons were considered by all to be the children of the shaman.

And what about the significance of androgyny and genderlessness in contemporary shamanism? In our highly sexualised world the idea of spiritual androgyny isn’t an easy one to contemplate. Even within spiritual practice there are clear gender boundaries and these days everyone seems to be looking for their "inner masculine", or their "goddess within." What my own spirit helpers have shown me over the years, and which they clarified for me during a long and wonderful journey of exploration prior to the seminar, is that spirit – which includes myself – has no gender. What I am learning through my spirits is that everything that is, is energy whether that is the Big Bang, kundalini rising, a nuclear explosion, intention, or orgasm. Shamans work with energy, with power, calling on the power of the universe through the power of intention. Quantum physics and shamanism are slowly coming together, though not all scientists and not all shamans would accept this view, and agreeing that we are not just in the universe, the universe is in us.

In my own journeys and in those of my clients, sexual activity or gender changes either of the person journeying, or of the spirit helpers, are very often a teaching; something is being pointed about about behaviour, energy, attitudes or relationships. The journey that I did to my spirits to ask about the nature of sex and gender in shamanism was wonderfully explicit. It’s rare for all my questions to be answered and so fully. What emerged were several key teachings about sex, gender and spirit of which these are a few:

• What moves between individuals during sex is a part of their life force, which is part of all that is. It appears that male and female come together, but really one spirit comes together with another spirit to create a third, and all are one and all are the same.
• Biology is important because it continues that exchange of life force and creates the vehicle for embodied spirit.
• In response to the Q “Are shamans the third sex?” I am told, “love has no gender and no sex.”
• In response to the Q “What about duality, yin/yang, M/F … ?” I am asked “Do you want it to have meaning?” I say “No, it divides”. I am told “It’s important to look for the heart of the thing. The time for taking apart has passed, it’s about bringing together now. Differences are only of the shell.”
• When we engage in any way with spirit in alternate reality we are changed by that experience, and spirit is also changed through engaging with us.

I was very moved by the power and directness of this particular journey, I re-entered ordinary reality feeling that I had been offered insights that were invaluable, mostly because of how they had been given. Sex, it was revealed is just another aspect of quantum possibility and love, love is about the exchange of hearts, which have no sex and no gender.



For those readers interested in finding out more about shamanism for themselves, please note the changed dates on upcoming courses and workshops. See sidebar above.

Shamanism, Consciousness and some thoughts on the Origins of Art

Last year, after reading 'The Mind in the Cave' and 'Inside the Neolithic Mind' by David Lewis-Williams I wrote a post about the limits of academia, or rather the limits academics impose on their own thinking. In these wonderfully informative and well-written books Lewis-Williams does some remarkable detective work and pieces together the links between rock art, both prehistoric and 'modern', and spiritual/shamanic experience. In establishing the similiarities between the 16,000 - 30,000+ year old European art of Lascaux and Altamira, and the San rock art of the Drakensburg Mts. - the most recent of which it is thought was produced only a few hundred years ago - Lewis-Williams proposed that both forms were a result of the same kind of spiritual experience. Initially excited by the books' exploration of prehistoric spirituality I was finally surprised and disappointed by the author's conclusions.

A few days ago I was reminded of this reaction on seeing, 'How Art Made The World', a 2005 TV programme based on the books. Watching Lewis-Williams discussing his work with fellow academic and the programme's narrator, Nigel Spivey, I re-experienced disappointment. Again, I was struck by what an enormous opportunity for the advancement of knowledge had been lost because of unwillingness to consider possibilities beyond the scientifically acceptable. Professor Lewis-Williams is an exceptionally well-regarded academic of international standing. All the greater then was my sense of missed-chance, on reaching the end of 'The Mind in the Cave' and reading the following:

'Shamanism and visions of a bizarre spirit realm may have worked in hunter-gatherer communities and even have produced great art; it does not follow that they will work in the present-day world or that we should today believe in personal spirit guides and subterranean worlds. We can catch our breath when we walk into the Hall of the Bulls without wishing to recapture and submit to the religious beliefs and regimen that produced them.' (p 291, The Mind in the Cave)

Reading the book there had been a sense that the author was walking an anxious tightrope: on the one hand, delighted to have cracked a 'code', a visual language so long misunderstood by archaeologists and others who had interpreted the images of men and animals as hunting scenes; on the other, limited by the constraints of academic discipline to simultanously reveal and repudiate the true value and nature of the spirituality that produced the art works on which whole careers have been based. There's something in the language above, in the militaristic terms, 'recapture and submit to', which says it all really: our culture, the predominantly Newtonian, materialist, culture, is vastly superior to the benighted, spiritual superstitions of our ancestors, remote and modern, and no intelligent person could possibly find any value in them today.

I might have had greater understanding for Lewis-Williams' position on this had there not been an increasing range of scientific study on the nature of spirit, consciousness and cognition - on precisely what Lewis-Williams wrote about in 'The Mind in the Cave'. His conclusions ignore decades of work by quantum physicists such as Amit Goswami, Ludwig Bass and Casey Blood, who proposed the 'non-locality' of consciousness, and astrophysicists such as Arne Wyller, who suggested in 1999 (The Creating Consciousness) that consciousness, not biology, played the key role in evolution.

As a result, Lewis-Williams' otherwise fascinating research is fatally flawed: everything that the artists who painted on rock experienced happened exclusively within their heads, from which it follows that the only link between the art of the San and the artists of Altamira and Lascaux, is the physiological and chemical similiarities of their brains. The possibility that the similarity in the work might be a result of shared spirit, or shared consciousness is not even considered. This kind of reductionist thinking is becoming rapidly out-moded; it is 20thC thinking. Had the author of The Mind in the Cave taken a step along a new path and considered that:

The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. […] quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. […] the new paradigm resolves many […] paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data." Healing Journeys, Interview with A. Goswami ...

... he might have come to a more expansive, more remarkable conclusion, one that could have freed his own mind from the small cave of biological materialism. A conclusion, dare I say, that would have been more satisfying, for me at least.