Shared Transformation
Shamanic Ordeals
I posted this to the Internet K-list. I've decided to repeat it here for the sake of those who might find it
meaningful in regard to their own experiences.
Shamanism isn't a religion but a term to describe a particular spiritual mission which is a combination of mysticism
and service to life, often in the form of healing. Michael Harner has written: "In shamanism everyone is
his or her own prophet, getting spiritual revelation directly from the highest sources... The shaman is not trying
only or mainly to achieve self- enlightenment. Shamanism is people directly helping others. It is a kind of spiritual
activism in which one works with the powers that connect human beings to the incredible power of the universe --
a work that involves journeying back and forth between realities." The awakening of Kundalini seems to be
evident in most instances of shamanic calling. According to an Eskimo shaman, "Every real shaman has to feel
an illumination in his body, in the inside of his head or in his brain; something that gleams like fire, that gives
him the power to see with closed eyes into the darkness, into the hidden things or into the future, or into the
secrets of another man." (reported by Jeanne Achterberg)
The relationship between suffering (especially physical pain and crisis) and the shamanic seems to be even less understood in modern times than the phenomena of Kundalini awakening in general. Speaking of her calling as a shaman, Evelyn Eaton wrote: "I had not planned this sort of role. I was not fitted for it, it was disconcerting, it went against the grain. I had a notion, it was more than that, a conviction, that sages, healers, helpers of any kind, should be full of radiant health themselves, and I was not. I had never been. In this life, for this time around, I had not earned the blessing of a strong and healthy human overcoat. From birth, through childhood, adolescence, on through life, accidents, illnesses, operations, setbacks, were the accepted norm for me."
Eaton goes on to say: "The second basic lesson I was shown was that since the cancer was there and growing within me long before I began to be used as a healing channel, physical weaknesses and what I had thought of as Karmic justice and in moments of dimmed understanding as punishment... were no barriers to the work of the committed in the Company of Light. On the contrary, they could and would bring increases of power. This was later brought home to me when I met a paraplegic healing others from his wheel chair, and a chiropractor who had severed his left arm in a seeming this-plane accident, which he and his family and friends resented, until he found other, better way of healing through his maimed and useless arm."
"A crisis of a powerful illness can also be the central experience of the shaman's initiation," writes Joan Halifax. "It involves an encounter with forces that decay and destroy... Illness thus becomes the vehicle to a higher plane of consciousness." Serious illnesses and injuries are often part of the shamanic path. Halifax gives the following examples: "Matsuwa was terribly maimed in accidents. Ramon came near death when he was poisoned with snake venom. The Tungus shaman was dying of smallpox and fever. Uvavnuk, a Netsilik Eskimo woman, achieved her great power in one extraordinary dramatic instant... a ball of fire came down from the sky and struck Uvavnuk senseless. When she regained consciousness, the spirit of the light was within her." Says Halifax: "Among Samoyeds and many other Siberian peoples, the election of the future nga (shaman) involved not only his shaman ancestors but also many deities and spirits, malevolent and benevolent, that were associated with elements in nature as well as powerful diseases. The future nga was chosen by these entities to pursue his profession, but the central event directing the novice was, inevitably, a severe physical illness or psychological crisis that opened the gate to worlds of nonordinary experience." Halifax also shares the following: "The famous Kam (shaman) Kyzlasov from the Sagay village of Kyzlan was very old when [his wife] gave this account of the fierce experiences that plagued him during his initiatory illness many years before... Sickness seized him when he was twenty-three years old, and he became a shaman at the age of thirty. That was how he became a shaman. After the sickness, after the torture. He had been ill for seven years. While he was ailing he had strange dreams; he was beaten up several times, sometimes he was taken to strange places. He had been around quite a lot in his dreams, and he had seen many things."
"The threefold sequence of illness, self-healing and the development of healing powers is a universal, transpersonal pattern that we are still far from understanding," says Holger Kalweit. "Evidently illness can unleash fundamental forms of psychic knowledge that far surpass the normal expressions of intellect and feeling." "The idea of the wounded healer is ubiquitous throughout the more traditional or native health care practices," Jeanne Achterberg tells us. "It implies that some kind of personal transformation or inner work or crisis was encountered. This event then directed a mission and imbued the healer with unusual knowledge about the way of things. In particular, the notion of the wounded healer has been associated with the shaman. By the term shaman, I do not mean the tribal medicine man or woman, nor the herbalist, nor the bone setter, although the shaman might well practice those skills as well as shamanism. Primarily, though, the shamans are those individuals who have the gift of great insight into the human condition, and who have attained wisdom concerning the realms of the spirit."
Achterberg warns that "the mission of the wounded healer is difficult, the path is treacherous. The shamans know full well that their intense involvement in healing challenges their own lives. They are frequently ill, full of "poison" from their own work... There is no indication that they are particularly conscious of physical health -- attending more to the inner life, no doubt, than the exterior. This forms an interesting contrast with the preachments of the holistic medicine movement, which, like modern medicine, prescribe elaborate rituals for protecting oneself from the energies and emanations of one's patients. It is a difference in healing philosophy to ponder carefully, and one that ultimately has great influence over the lives of both healer and healed." "In the traditional shamanic cultures, healing bears little relationship to the remission of physical symptoms," writes Achterberg. "It refers, rather, to becoming whole or in harmony with the community, the planet, and certainly one's private circumstances. When this happens, physical healing may or may not be observed, and the patient may well die... From the shaman's point of view, however, the course of life or death is irrelevant, for these are only different experiences along the one continuum of existence." Holger Kalweit goes so far as to proclaim: "The way of suffering is at the same time the way of knowledge. The more of the former, the more of the latter. Our Western philosophy of an absence of suffering, of happiness, and of high spirits -- is that not a flight from reality? If we were to try to call our most fundamental illusion by name, would it not be the quest for painless pleasure?" "The idea that loneliness and suffering are the anvil upon which great shamans are forged runs deep," says Robert Ellwood. "In shamanistic cultures, one finds time and again the notion that the greater the preparatory suffering, the greater the shaman, and the initiations some have passed through are indeed horrendous. This is the case whether the sufferings are from outward causes or appear to be only subjective, passed through in fevered dream or vision, and characteristically we are at a loss to know on which level to impute them.
Larry Dossey argues the case of mystics from all traditions who "are frequently a sickly lot -- their physical health sometimes appearing in direct disproportion to their spiritual health." He contrasts this to the observation that "many spiritually bankrupt persons seem to live enormously long and illness-free lives." Thus, he concludes: "It is not the business of spirit to supervise our physical health, and spiritual health is no guarantee of physical well-being."
And finally, from Holger Kalweit: "The sicknesses that arise as a result of a calling are surely the highest
form of illness -- a sacred illness which by its power makes it possible for mystical and metaphysical insights
to arise... this frequently happens without regard to the feelings and wishes of the chosen one, who, in most
cases, is not aware of the fact that his body is undergoing an initiation.
-- El Collie
Quotes in this article were taken from the following books:
Shaman's Path, compiled by Gary Doore (quotes by Michael Harner, Jeanne Achterberg)
Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax, Ph.D.
The Shaman and the Medicine Wheel by Evelyn Eaton
Shamanism, compiled by Shirley Nicholson
(Eskimo shaman, "Every real shaman has to feel an illumination..." quote reported by Jeanne Achterberg; quote by Robert Ellwood)
Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men by Holger Kalweit
Beyond Illness by Larry Dossey, M.D.
Spiritual Emergency, edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof
("The sicknesses that arise... quote by Holger Kalweit)