shamanism – Akasha Shamanka

What is a Shaman & Shamanism?

January 28, 2017January 28, 2017 by Akasha Shamanka, posted in Uncategorized

“Because it is not an organized religion as such, but rather a spiritual practice, shamanism cuts across all faiths and creeds, reaching deep levels of ancestral memory. As a primal belief system, which precedes established religion, it has its own symbolism and cosmology, inhabited by beings, gods, and totems, who display similar characteristics although they appear in various forms, depending upon their places of origin.”

~John Matthews, The Celtic Shaman

What is shamanism?

Shamanism is a spiritual practice found in cultures around the world from ancient times up to the present day. First and foremost, shamans’ practices are practical and adaptable. These practices coexist over millennia with varying cultures, systems of government, and organized religious practices.

Many formalized religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, came from ancient shamanic roots and still bear the shamanic threads of deep connection to the divine in all things. But shamanism itself is not a formalized system of beliefs or an ideology. Rather, it is a group of activities and experiences shared by shamans in cultures around the world. These practices are adaptable and coexist with different cultures, systems of government, and organized religious practices.

Individual practice

Nowadays, in non-indigenous cultures, shamanism is studied and practiced as a life path. Following a shamanistic perspective, individuals seek to be in relationship with the spirit in all things. They seek to use information and guidance from non-ordinary reality to intentionally form their own life experience.

This perspective is not inherently contradictory of any religious practice that allows a person to be in direct relationship with whatever they perceive as a higher power.

Consulting with shamans

Just as in ancient times, contemporary people consult with modern day shamanic practitioners for practical and pragmatic solutions to problems in everyday life-from personal illness, professional challenges, or family discord to ancestral issues.

Shamans work in voluntary, ecstatic trance states, which alter their consciousness to travel to the realms of the invisible worlds. Their ability to gain information and make changes in the invisible realms is dependent upon the working relationships they develop with spirits there. In this sense, shamanism is a relationship-based practice of making changes in invisible realms to impact healing, of individuals or communities, in the realm of ordinary reality.

For some peoples, such shamanic practice is part of their dominant culture, for others it is directly contradictory. Some individuals are intuitively guided to seek help from a contemporary shaman, often when other options have been exhausted, without even understanding what a shaman is or how they work.

What is a shaman?

According to famed American psychologist and consciousness pioneer, Stanley Krippner, shamans are “community-assigned magico-religious professionals who deliberately alter their consciousness in order to obtain information from the ‘spirit world.’ They use this knowledge and power to help and to heal members of their community, as well as the community as a whole.”

Krippner describes shamans as the first physicians, diagnosticians, psychotherapists, religious functionaries, magicians, performing artists, and storytellers.

In shamanistic cultures, all adults are responsible for their relationships with spiritual energies, including those of their home environment (geography, animals, and plant life,) their ancestors, their own personal helping spirits, and Spirit, the creator force.

However, the shaman is unique in that he or she not only has increased facility for traveling in non-ordinary realms, but also uses their spirit relationships to create changes that will manifest in the physical world, for the healing of individuals or the community. This definition differentiates shamans from other types of practitioners. For example, mediums use altered states of consciousness, but they do not take action in those altered states. And sorcerers take action in altered states, but not necessarily to heal.

Abilities of shamans

According to Christina Pratt in The Encyclopedia of Shamanism, a shaman is a practitioner who has gained mastery of:

Altered states of consciousness, possessing the ability to enter alternated states at will, and controlling themselves while moving in and out of those states.
Mediating between the needs of the spirit world and those of the physical world in a way that can be understood and used by the community.
Serving the needs of the community that cannot be met by practitioners of other disciplines, such as physicians, psychiatrists, priests, and leaders.

A shaman is therefore a specific type of healer who uses an alternate state of consciousness to enter the invisible world, which is made up of all unseen aspects of the world that affect us, including the spiritual, emotional, mental, mythical, archetypal, and dream worlds.

Categories of healers

There are three categories of contemporary shamans, including those who:

Come from an unbroken shamanic tradition and continue to practice in that tradition, usually in their native culture.
Come from a shamanic tradition, but serve to bridge between that tradition and the modern Western world, often by adding ceremonies and rituals that were not necessary in their indigenous culture.
Are called by Spirit to serve the needs of their community as shamans, though they may be long separated culturally from their original shamanic roots.

How can shamanism benefit your health and wellbeing?

White datura plant Individuals may seek shamanic healing for many different maladies. If they are living within a shamanic culture, shamanic healing is typically part of a multidisciplinary approach used for any disease or imbalance, in partnership with physical healers, botanical medicines, changes in diet, and other therapies.

In contemporary western society, shamanic healing is unfamiliar to most non-indigenous individuals. Despite that, people are finding their way to contemporary shamans for all types of health challenges, but especially when they are not making satisfactory improvements with conventional approaches.

Shamanistic perspective on disease

The perspective on individual disease is different in shamanism than in the conventional medical view. In a shamanistic view:

Similar symptoms or diseases do not stem from the same underlying root energetic problem.
Community disharmony often manifests in individual illness.
Any illness may have a significant underlying spiritual or energetic issue, regardless of the form in which that illness manifests – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or relational.

Certain illnesses are more likely to have a spiritual component that may respond to shamanic healing techniques. These include psychological diagnoses like depression and anxiety, ADD/ADHD, autism, and addictions.

Illnesses that manifest physically may still have significant spiritual underpinnings. This is especially true for illnesses that have atypical or premature presentations, such as a degenerative illness that normally occurs in elder years occurring in a young adult.

The sense that something is “missing” or that “I haven’t been the same since…” can often be indicative of an energetic loss of some type, including soul energy loss. Shamanic healing is often part of a multi-pronged approach to an illness, and is fully compatible with both conventional medicine and other integrative treatments, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, and others.

Shamanistic healing

Shamanic healing work requires two distinct phases:

The accurate diagnosis of the seen and unseen energies at the root of the problem.
Carrying out the specific choreography of energies needed to resolve the problem.

The shaman may serve by removing energies that are inappropriately present, or by returning energies that have been lost. This includes soul recovery to accomplish healing via the return of lost parts of the soul.

When an individual is living within a community that supports such work, there is time and support for the integration and processing that an individual must do to complete most healing processes. In contemporary society, the shaman and the client must create the resources and structure for the individual to adjust to the shift in internal energies.

Shamans direct and move energy to restore the harmony within the individual, between the individual and the community, and between the community and the spirit world.

You can find this full article at:

https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/explore-healing-practices/shamanism

How Trauma Created The Shaman in Me

February 2, 2016 by Akasha Shamanka, posted in Experiences, General Articles

It is not always easy to give up your old ties to the world and fall head first into the spiritual side of life. Not is it always right for everyone either. I was continuing with my day to day life quite happily, or so I thought, not wanting to give up the many things that I felt were important to me. A part of me knew that I wasn’t quite on the right path but I remained content to continue with healing at a healing centre and giving psychic and mediumistic readings to an audience once a week. I knew that I was so close to where I should be. The final sacrifice of leaving your old world behind, stepping out of the ‘9 to 5′ materialistic world, is such a hard thing to do. When you do, you find yourself grieving not just for your old life but for the things you thought were important, and sometimes the poeple you thought were important too.

The knock for me came when I got ill. I have had M.E,/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for about 10yrs but have learnt to live with it. My final blow came 7yrs ago. This time my life was under threat from a little known foe. I turns out I have a very rare genetic illness called VKH, it stands for Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome. The immune system attacks all pigment in the body, the eyes, the inner ear, the lining of the brain and spinal cord, the digestive system, and so on & so on. One morning I woke up with only half of my vision. All I could see were colours, light and shapes. I was terrified. I went straight to eye casualty centre where they battled to save my sight. My retinas were detatching, quickly, which required injections of steroids into the eye itself. I had 3 injections into my left eye and 4 into the right. I had to be awake at the time too. Ick! The doctors then took me into another room where they took lots of photos and scans of the eyes. Luckily for me, a locam from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London happened to be there, it was meant to be his day off. He was a malaysian man, his name was Mr Kok. Nobody else knew what was wrong and my eyesight was getting worse by the minute. He asked me hundreds of questions about my childhood, my ancestral line, whether I ever found pigmentless hairs or not. I was so confused. It turned out that the recessive gene that causes the VKH came from my Grandfathers line. We have latin blood in the family and the Spanish ancestor we traced had shipwrecked in Scotland when the Spanish Armarda came here. How bizarre. A gene that hadnt shown up in the family since Marc O Polo times just happens to switch on in me. I couldnt believe it.
The syndrome is only usually found in the poeple who used to travel the old ‘Silk Trade Route’. Why I dont know, but thats how it turned up in me. So, im one of about 25-30 poeple in the UK with this crazy illness.

In the first year that it struck my life became a living hell. I had Meningitis 6 times over three months, this happens when the lining of the brain becomes swollen and is a part of the condition. The pain was truly unlivable. I would lose consciousness quite alot due to the pain, thankfully it means I dont remember very much about the worst attacks. The first attack was one of the worst,my bloodpressure went nuts at 255 over 160, I really thought my head would explode. I couldnt talk due to pain but luckily, as I said, I kept passing out.

Over the next 3 months I went from 8 1/2 stone to 18 stone because of the medications. I had to go on a type of chemotherapy to stop my immune system attacking my body which left me with numerous health problems and I had to start using a wheelchair. I had stretch marks appearing so fast that some of them would actually split and bleed. I was a mess. Within a year I was 80 percent bedbound. I couldnt gig with the band anymore, that part of my life had gone and it was the thing I lived for.

Eight years on and im about 70 percent housebound which is much better than I was. I still have to use a wheelchair when I am very fatigued or have to go any distance, and still have to walk with a stick for short distances. I still need strict rest periods through the day but I am coping better. It would seem that the VKH is now in remission but could easily come back. It usually attacks poeple in their twenties and poeple in their fifties, causing various inflammatory problems throughout the body in between.
My eyes are now healed and, although I have been left with some blank spots of vision, my sight is almost back to normal and all the scarring has gone. Months of sitting in hospital beds taught me alot about life. I got the crash course on what is truly important in life.

So many of my beliefs or ideas on how you should live your life were blown apart. I started to listen to what my body was telling me, and what my subconscious was trying to say. I was already spiritual but now I explored my own personal beliefs instead of trying to fit in with someone elses. I thought I was alone in my ideas until I came across the Toltec shamans of meso-america. All their ideas and beliefs fitted with mine rather than me trying to fit with them. The Mayans came after the Toltecs and some chose to continue with their religion (for want of a better term) in the form of the priests and priestesses. Thanks to them the Toltec way of being was rescued and is still practised. The only famous known followers of Toltec ways I can think of are Don Jaun Matus, the man who trained Carlos Castaneda, and Victor Sanchez who has written many books, also Florinda Donner, a female shaman and author, and Don Miguel Ruiz who has written books such as Beyond Fear: A Toltec guide to Freedom and Joy. Teotihuacan, “the place where men become gods,” is the sacred center of the Toltecs, thirty miles northeast of Mexico City. The Toltecs retained and passed down through oral tradition secret knowledge of healing and spiritual transformation which has remained intact for thousands of years. Traditionally the word Toltec defined a group of poeple who achieved a rarified level of spiritual enlightenment. They became known as The Toltecs.
Most who follow a path akin to Toltec shamanism have been through a major trauma of somekind, and in the fifth year of that trauma the person becomes aware of the Toltec way. No one quite knows why but it has been long documented and even researched. I was in the that fifth year and it was this year that I found the Toltec way. Life has some strange avenues, twists and turns, most of which are meant to be. Some we can change and some are our destiny.

Most of us sleepwalk our way through life but some of us, if we choose to ‘wake-up’, get to open our eyes and really see the world and its energies.

My friend. My drum!

October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 by Akasha Shamanka, posted in General Articles, Rituals, Meditations

I want to introduce a friend of mine. A dear and very special friend who means a great deal to me.
Meet my drum!

We go on many journeys together, just the two of us. She was hand made for me two years ago by a wonderful couple who live in the New Forest. The skin is Reindeer with a cedar hoop. They also made a rattle from the same piece of animal skin so its lovely to have these twinned tools.

This drum is not just a musical instrument, although it does very well in that role. My drum is also a tool of healing, of reaching beyond the veil and journeying through the tunnel to other worlds. Interestingly the rate of the drumbeat that induces journeying is also the same as the vibrational pulse of the universe. Interesting huh?
Continue reading “My friend. My drum!” →