Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

The suicide rate for first responders is reported to be 20% higher than the general population. Can we please stop acting like we don’t know why? Soul loss is real and devastating and always a part of violence, war, and life threatening emergencies. And people have known for 40,000 years how to deal with soul loss in simple and direct ways, given the right tool for the job. Why are we so afraid to acknowledge the reality of the soul and to deal directly with the need to tend it? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she confronts the willful, cultural blindness to the wear and tear on the soul that comes with the work of first responders. When we exhibit the skill to engage the soul and the courage to engage the heart we can change the fundamental cause of PTSD induced symptoms like anxiety, depression, and mental illness.

There are deeply unresolved ancestral patterns at play in the world today. They keep us from seeing reality accurately and the fullness of possibility. They are at the root of the anger and vitriol spread on social media in reaction to children who simply want what we all have taken for granted—literally: air to breath, water to drink, and solid earth to live on. “What if you could address that unresolved ancestral burden instead of passing it on to your children?” asks host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “You can! And we don’t yet know the scope of change that can be created when we assist the unresolved dead in reconciling their lives and clearing their undue influence out of our minds and hearts. Join us this week as we explore how our greatest gift to the future may be to reconcile the past.

There is an art to creating a life you love, one that reflects your deepest values and a future that nourishes all. We all know how very important it is to embody a vision for the future and to be the change we want to see in the world. Our guest, author and shaman, Alida Birch knows that you must have a system for holding a vision and inviting the universal powers to join you in creating a world that nourishes all. Each of us has the ability to manifest a life that is more joyful for us and transformative for the world. Join us this week as Alida extends an invitation to her masterclass, The Shamanic Craft of Co-Creation. She joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss the principles needed to get started, how to orient your energy and your vision, and how to use shamanic skills to make it all real in the world.

Where do we begin to heal our ancestral lines? What is the first step when we do not have traditions that guide us? How do we address the interface between empty-feeling old ways and a very real need to change the family’s status quo? “First we cultivate a healthy working relationship with our ancestors to create good, true, and beautiful helping spirits,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “only then will we be able to stop giving new life to the old answers of our unresolved relations. Then together, we can take the next steps.” Join us this week to explore why we must deal skillfully with the past to create truly different answers for healthcare, war, economics, our relationship with our environment, education, homelessness, joblessness, child poverty, and other painful issues of today.

We all have ancestors. They are with us in our blood. We do not all have traditions that guide us in dealing with our ancestors. Some ancestors are true helping spirits. These ancestors bring us medicine, protection and belonging if we know how to let them. Some ancestors are deeply unwell, carrying the open wounds, personal and cultural, of history unreconciled. Nonetheless, they are both moving in our lives and, depending on how we choose to relate to them, they either bring us harm or bring us blessings. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as we explore where to begin with your ancestors, why to begin, and most importantly how to cultivate right relationship with your ancestors to create good, true, and beautiful helping spirits.

Modern curanderismo has roots in indigenous Mesoamerican shamans and curanderos, specifically the ancient Yukatek Maya and Mexica (Aztec). This week author and practitioner, Erika Buenaflor, M.A., J.D., shares her work and research into this rich healing history and practice. Buenaflor shares the cores of these practices, explaining that they are “practical and incredibly effective shamanic cleanses to heal, purify, and revitalize people and spaces with herbs, flowers, eggs, feathers, fire, and water.” Join us as we explore modern curanderismo as a “powerful tool for self-empowerment, spiritual growth, soul retrieval, rebirth, and gracefully opening up pathways for new beginnings.”

There is a fundamental element of internal energy exchange at the root of every process that helps us to create lasting change. Lasting change is rare in a time with bypass is so common. There are many healing processes that create new versions of the old pattern, new insight without new engagement, or instant intensity that slowly wears off, leaving us where we started. “Lasting change is always accessible to us,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “if we are willing step into our inner world, find fulcrum, and use it.” Join us this week as we explore how we use our will to create fulcrums for lasting change, where we have to travel to find them, and what to do when you get there.

A bully victim pattern is surfacing publicly as we begin to confront the reality of internalized and unconscious patterns of marginalization. When we are unconscious of our own deeply internalized patterns of sexism or racism, for example, we often bully others unintentionally. Then, when our behavior is addressed openly we feel unjustly accused and collapse into victimization. However, if we are to heal personally and create social change, we must move out of this looping pattern. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares recent discoveries in how to create lasting transformation of the bully victim pattern through supported shadow transformation, ancestral healing, and precise, proactive soul retrieval healing. This practice moves us from healing to feel better into healing to make medicine for the community and the future.

The shamanic altered state of consciousness and being a “hollow bone” are not necessarily the same thing. All over the Internet contemporary practitioners are claiming that the altered state they enter to work with Spirit is, by definition, being a “hollow bone.” Becoming the Hollow Bone is an ancient practice in Zen Buddhism, shamanism, and many native peoples of North America. It takes years of dedicated and disciplined practice to create this inner state of consciousness and freedom. In contrast, entering a shamanic trance state, or journeying, is relatively simple to learn, usually allows immediate and useful access to one’s helping spirits, and is basically every human being’s birthright now. In our efforts to explain to a contemporary world what shamanism is and how it can help with pretty much all that ails us, let’s not get carried way. To become the Hollow Bone is to dedicate oneself to the tireless discipline of clearing your inner energy Velcro. This requires first noticing that you have been hooked by something in life. Then looking within at what Velcro loop within you has just been snagged. Then to move deeper within, for the process has only just begun. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the deeper truth of becoming the Hollow Bone and the freedom that arises from this ancient and worthy discipline.

Today being “the wounded healer” has become the excuse for poor discernment in contemporary practitioners around boundaries, responsibility, and personal healing. In western thought the concept of the wounded healer began with Karl Jung who used the phrase to refer psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepius, the sun-like healer” and to assist healing. However before Jung, before Asclepius, and even before western thought there were shamans, the first wounded healers. Shamanically speaking the wounded healer is the initiated shaman, the person who has entered her own death, illness, or madness and found the path through it with the help of Spirit. And in that journey the wound is healed for the shaman and because of that journey the shaman is able to work with the spirits to assist the healing of others. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as we explore the concept of the wounded healer, bust some myths, and consider the reality through the eyes of spiritual maturity.

Spiritual Warriorship is more than a metaphor that your therapist drags out every time you are challenged to take the actions necessary to change. Our attitudes and behaviors of self-denial and self-aggrandizement are challenging to change precisely because they have become habits of thought, feeling and memory. It is the internal realm of these habits within each of us that is the perpetual battleground of the spirit warrior and the insidious, enemy-within. Our everyday actions in the outer world are also potentially actions of the spirit warrior, but they are a direct reflection of our actions in this inner world. Without change in here, we can’t change out there. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how the basic shamanic relationship between human and helping spirit brings precisely the support your spirit warrior needs today. Humanity has offered many paths to support the conscientious dedication and skills need by the spirit warrior, but most of these paths are unreachable by the ordinary contemporary individual. Your helping spirits—if engaged regularly and skillfully—offer the flexibility, creativity, and clever persistence to bring the path to you.

"The shamanic path is not a path traditionally intended to achieve enlightenment,” explains Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. “It has been a path followed because people…wanted to help (others) through healing and alleviating their suffering. In following that path, gifts were then given them that were totally unexpected…This then changes them, and they are never the same again; they are indeed enlightened. But that was not the intention; it was just a result.” Shamanism is and isn’t a path of transformation and enlightenment. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores this interesting state of affairs. Shamanic trance states are task oriented. They are not focused on gaining enlightenment. However, an ongoing working relationship with Spirit is one of the most efficient and effective paths of transformation, waking up, and growing up for shamans and for lay people. Join us and discover all the side benefits, like enlightenment, of becoming a spiritual adult.

Why would the spirits bother to teach us about love? Because love is all there is. Think you’ve heard that before? We don’t think so. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores Love as you’ve never heard it before. What is it love really? Why do you need it? Where do you find it? And, most importantly, how do we cultivate this most powerful essence energy in our lives? Let’s face facts: couples are not necessarily in love, love is fleeting, and love always seems to show up where it shouldn’t. Perhaps we don’t really understand True Love as well as we think we do. From the beginning of our lives the very human flaws of the adults around us shape what we believe about love. Love is shaped, contorted, limited, and defined by our childhood experience. One of the most valuable uses of a contemporary shamanic skill set in every day life is to learn to live in love. When we are in love everything feels possible, we find humor in the quirks of life, a song in our heart and lightness in our step. And through shamanic skills you can be in love in any moment whether or not you have discovered the love of your life or even want to..

“Sex is meant to be a mainline to Spirit for anyone,” explains shaman and host, Christina Pratt. “Spirit is constantly teaching that being in right relationship with others requires a robust and healthy sex life—at least with your self.” Join us this week as we continue the summer “blockbuster” series by looking into what shamanism has to teach us about the big issues—death, life, love and sex. In some traditional cultures the shaman or the diviner has a literally sexual relationship with his/her helping spirits in the spirit world. In all shamanic cultures a true working relationship with Spirit is at least energetically and spiritually intimate. While this is an interesting fact to throw around at cocktail parties, what is more interesting is “why?” What are the spirits trying to teach us about interconnection, Oneness and the transmission of energies? First, that the capacity for intimacy is essential for mental, emotional, and physical health. Second, that the path to a robust and fulfilling sex life can be lead by Spirit. And finally, that a path to Spirit can be found in the paradoxical grace of the intimacy found at the heart of orgasmic pleasure.

“The things we learn about life from working with the dead,” says shaman and host, Christina Pratt, “are timeless and priceless.” One of the shaman’s traditional roles is the psychopomp, or guide of souls. A psychopomp escorts the newly deceased souls to the afterlife, providing safe passage and often comfort or guidance in reconciling life and letting go. And on that journey the dead do tell tales... We are precisely who we have crafted ourselves to be with our lives. Nothing changes at death. The dead teach us that is critically important to live well and to live fully now. What ever you are cultivating now with your time and attention will be your legacy. Will your legacy be one of depression, shopping, and chasing tail? Or will you hand on something of meaning and purpose to your descendants? When the dead do not receive the guidance that they need to complete the journey or they simply can’t let go, their unresolved energies remain, plaguing their descendants with a legacy of the same habits and addictions. Working to clear the energies of the dead teaches us that everything matters, everything can be changed with the help of spirit, and there is always hope. This week we begin a summer “blockbuster” series as we look into what shamanism has to teach us about the big issues—death, life, love and sex.