Why Journey? 

In ancient times, shaman masters had a rigorous training regimen for their charges.  Some of the methods they employed were extreme, even brutal, such as regular beatings, or forcing the student to undertake a quest which seemed to virtually guarantee their death.  Later on, as we can see from the Meso-American record, they used methods like the sun dance, a grueling ordeal that included skin piercing and exhaustion.  Also cave sitting, in which the shamanic apprentice would sit in a cave, known to have high, yet non-lethal, levels of CO2 in it.  I’m sure there were hundreds more besides, but the point of these trials was not to test the determination of the student, but instead to break down the student’s ego.  Or more accurately, to introduce the apprentice to what’s underneath it.

      Now, we all need an ego.  It is the sense of self that helps us to navigate the physical world.  But for shamans, it gets in the way.  It is a hindrance to shamanic performance.  Everything that gets in the way between the soul and the world, everything that presents a barrier between the shaman and the Spirits, is a problem.  Conventional wisdom refers to a competent shaman as “a hollow bone”, a clear conduit between the world of spirit and this world. One of my close friends had a Native American teacher who asked, “How can you be a hollow bone if you are full of shit?”

      It will help to understand how we get so full of it, and why it’s so hard to get free.

      When we are born, we are a pure soul, uncluttered and pristine.  Psychologists call this the Tabla Rasa, the blank slate.  For the first fourteen years or so of our life, parents, siblings, school, church, extended family and peers fill us full of behavioral programs, opinions, indoctrination, trauma, emotional responses, and all kinds of other things.  All that stuff from all those sources sits right on top of our pure soul.  Just like a computer, we are loaded with those behavioral programs that dictate everything from how and where to pee, to how to relate to elders or how to act professionally.  Pretty soon, the programs loaded into us by the world are what is expressed by us as we operate in the world.  The programs themselves run our lives.  The pure soul, quietly slumbering underneath all this, whispers so softly it cannot be heard above the drone of the world and our own mental chatter, or if it is heard, it’s message is garbled as it passes through the resident programming.  Even more simply put, until we get underneath the programming, we are not ourselves, quite literally.  We are little more than programmed responses to familiar stimuli.

      The only way we can get to the soul, our true self, so that it is able to express in the world, is to get underneath all the stuff that sits on top of it.  Piling more indoctrination on top of everything else certainly can’t accomplish that.  What we need to do as shamans is to learn a way to get around the ego.  But in this day and age, we can’t beat our shamanic apprentices, or pierce them, or send them out on a glacier to fend for themselves for a week in order to get underneath the programming.

      This is why we journey.

      Journeying is the foundation of modern shamanism.  Simply put, what journeying does is allow us to push the everyday ego/reality aside.  It propels us deep into our own psyche, bypassing much of the programming that lies between us and our pure soul and the spirits.  With practice, we can come close enough to these clear energies with journeying so that they can vividly express through us.  In certain more advanced shamanic training, aspirants forge a link with their soul so that the soul itself expresses constantly and unfettered in the world, unobscured by personal history or ego.

      In the early stages of shamanic training, it is very important to journey as frequently as possible so as to get familiar with the process of setting the everyday mind aside.  On those days in class when we journey all day long, like this last time, we are pushing you further and further into the deep trenches of your being.  You may have found that at the end of the last session you were tired, in need of stimulation, or mildly irritated.  These are all manifestations of the ego.  Remember, your ego thinks it is the one in charge.  It’s been running the show all these years and it is highly resistant to any change that could put it out of business as the King or Queen of your world.  The greater the struggle, the higher the level of irritation, fear, frustration, tiredness, or discomfort you experience on these marathon journey days, the more likely it is that your ego is wrestling with you so that it won’t get sent to the corner.

      In this instance there is only one answer.

      Journey.  Journey. Journey.

      Even if you don’t have any other intent than to explore non-ordinary reality, try to find at least 15 minutes each day to journey.  This practice will ease your discomfort by repeatedly immersing you in the clarity of the energies of the spirits and your own soul.  The more you do it, the more programming you can get underneath, and the clearer and more effective your shamanic work/experience will be.  If the goal is to get in touch with the soul and the spirits so that you can make a difference to your clients and the world, then the means to get that done is to practice the methodology that allows you to accomplish that.  That methodology is journeying.  It is the center of the shamanic universe and the foundation upon which we build the rest of the teachings.  Embrace it with joy and dedication.  You and your shamanic practice will be the better for it. 

Blessings,Colleen