Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Courageous Heart Series—Part 3 of 4: The Power of the Teacher You have the gathered the love of your path (Healer) and the wisdom to guide you along it (Warrior). But where is the power to make it real? The power comes from the Teacher’s ability to see through his/her own stories to the deeper truth to the soul and it’s longing. The shamanic skills of the Strong Heart are used to transform all aspects of self that have become righteous, positional, judgmental or controlling. Walking the path of your soul’s purpose demands passionate commitment to the process without attachment to the outcome. Teacher cultivates a robust relationship with the Unknown and the fundamental truth that All is One and there is no separation. Having exposed the lie of separation, the Teacher brings Balance, Wholeness, and Trust to the life expression of the Authentic Self. The strong heart of the Teacher gives us access to our power to step into our own self-mastery and sovereignty.

Courageous Heart Series—Part 2 of 4: The Wisdom of the Warrior So what does it take to live your life with a courageous heart? To choose to live fully and completely, to disconnect yourself from the seductions of the day, and to surrender to the call of your soul is nothing short of an act of spiritual warriorship. And not one act, but the ongoing actions of a person oriented in life to face his/her fears willingly and then do whatever it takes to walk the path. The path of the Spiritual Warrior moves in the Emotional Body and cultivates mastery of self through the willingness to look honestly at what lies in the Shadow. Shamanic skills allow us to transform the enemies we find there into an ally. These allies return to us bringing our humor, sensuality, innate gifts, sexuality, and other passionate aspect s of the self we have judged harshly. “What would you do today if you knew you would die tomorrow?” If the answer is “nothing,” your courageous heart awaits.

Courageous Heart Series—Part 1 of 4: The Love of the Healer So what does it take to truly and fully live a life of Authenticity and Purpose? It isn’t enough to start focusing your intention now and using your mind to make a new life happen. There is a place for the mind and its clarity. However the much more powerful organ of manifestation is the Heart. This week we begin a four part series exploring the four aspects of the self that must work together for you to discover your soul’s true purpose and life it. The heart offers powers to clear out of addictive patterns. This gives us access to shamanic skills to work with Life—Death—Rebirth intentionally to clear the way and create energy for the new. As we manifest the new, fear, resistance and Shadow always arise. We will explore the many ways that looking at fear and shadow from a shamanic, not a psychological perspective, can make the path through that scary place obvious, probably challenging, but ultimately joyful.

Our children are inherriting vast challenges to their future played out in the environment, the ecomomy, family dysfuction, and heightening social devisiveness. What if we taught our children the basics of shamanic life: that we can co-create our life with spirit and that spirit help can guide us to do what feels impossible. What world would they co-create? This week much loved, shamanic teacher and author, Sandra Ingerman, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new young adult, novel, “The Hidden Worlds” co-authored by Katherine Wood. In this story the middle school protagonists deal with their self doubt, insecurity, and puberty while the navigate hidden worlds and finding the help and magic needed to deal with a toxic disaster in the middle of their lives. This story is seamlessly packed with lessons about everyday, practical shamanism in the real world of contemporary teens.

Shamanism is misunderstood, occasionally maligned, and still considered to be on the fringe even in alternative circles. Yet contemporary practitioners remain undaunted and the range of resources on shamanic practice continues to grow in books, gatherings, podcasts, and classes. What was a solo path for many only a decade ago, often filled with frustration, doubt, and reinventing the wheel, can now be shared with mentors, peers, and viable community. A new resource for teens has been published by author and shaman, S. Kelley Harrell, called “Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism: A Beginners Map Charting an Ancient Path”. Join us this week as we continue our exploration of shamanism and children. Kelley shares her book and ways to make learning about shamanism less about acquiring techniques in how to do it and more about learning how to incorporate and deal with the changes it brings to everyday life.

Humans have an amazing capacity for change if they choose to access it. Even transformation, which is change we cannot go back from, is accessible when we risk engaging our hearts in the process of changes and allow inspiration to take over our minds. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores the elements required to create a crucible of transformation in our hearts and why our vulnerability as our great super power. Straight up, humans hate change… and they really hate transformation. But shamanism, with its robust relationship with the Trickster, offers us skills to be clever in the face of fear, to risk the Unknown when faced with the certainty of repeating patterns, and to be vulnerable so that we can engage the wisdom of our courageous hearts.

The point of our practice, whether spiritual or shamanic, is the Celebration of Life. What is a shamanic view of life if it is not about the interconnectedness of all life and the celebration of the sacredness and beauty in that energetic reality? Whether it is an ancient hunting practice that celebrates the power and attributes of the bear after the kill or a contemporary Hmong shaman in Minneapolis celebrating the passing of a soul from the realm of the living, celebration is used to communicate with the spirit realm. It is the means by which we communicate completion or reconnection. Celebration is also used to mark, ground, and integrate a significant life transition or initiation. Without celebration of “the journey”, it is as if the story never happened and we cannot harvest the gifts gained; or the story never ended and we cannot move onto the next great adventure. Celebration is critical in the dialogue between humans and spirit that honors the sacred miracle of all life.

Ceremony allows us to bring the sacred into ordinary life. Ceremony has been used by cultures around the world for tens of thousands of years to help people navigate change and help communities welcome new cycles of life in, even as they release the old. Ceremony, skillfully designed and performed, creates a bridge between the ordinary everyday of life and the world of the unseen power of the universe. In short, it’s a way to get help. World-renowned shamanic teacher and author, Sandra Ingerman, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new book, “The Book of Ceremony: Shamanic Wisdom for Invoking the Sacred in Everyday Life.” Join us to explore how we can use ceremony in our time to manifest our passions and to grow beyond the limiting beliefs at the heart of many of our shared cultural systems.

We all experience stuckness at some point in life and there is an art to getting out of it. You can become the person who accesses the latent power in your mess and effectively redirects it into living your deeper purpose. But not if you persist in lying to yourself. There is an, unconscious lie being propagated in our inner narrative about our capacity for healing and transformation. In part four of the “Getting Unstuck” series, host and shaman, Christina Pratt, draws on 30 years of successful trauma healing and deep-state transformation to exposes the lies that are alive and well and growing in the contemporary healing dialogue. She shares how the crazy logic of Trickster thinking teaches us to hear our own lies as messages from our fragmented self.

We all need to learn to swim in the black water. It is the deep water of life where we are no longer in control. We must surrender ourselves to life on its own terms and learn to swim. The blue water is the shallow water of life, where our actions simply maintain our status quo. So if we are to create change in ourselves, we must actively gain those skills and learn to apply them. What then is required of us if we are to change our world? In the spring of 2018, host and shaman, Christina Pratt, asked this question and begin a new series of online courses designed to be an answer. Where are we in this exploration into the deep water of what it means to be human in this time of constant change, great challenge, and infinite opportunity?

In a culture that can barely sort out the distinction between wants, needs, desires, addictions and obsessions, the power of Joy remains strong, but largely untouched. Joy touches us when we are accountable to our true selves, even our darkest most challenging selves. Joy touches us at the core of our well-being. “Not that we need to be well to experience joy. Serious illness, a sudden turn of fate that exposes us, or the clean cut of truth can bring us to joy,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “We must be willing to be accountable to our true self, no matter what we find there.” To cultivate a long-term relationship with joy we must reforge that original relationship with our soul’s purpose. We must shape our character, our appetites, and our longings with the wisdom of each of the four bodies: the physical, the heart, the mind, and the spirit. In doing this we accept the energetic reality of our world: We are energy beings first. We live in the Tao. If we want joy—and not the cheap or the expensive imitations—we must choose to live in a way that tends the essence of joy. We must cultivate our energy, the expressions of our soul’s purpose, and the accountability to self in all of its many manifestations. When we live in this way our joy travels in our thoughts, words and actions, cultivating heart and inspiring joy in others.

For those of you interested in shamanism you can experience a shaman finding her shaman legs, reshaping the workings of her mind, and awakening her courageous heart in the re-release of Gift of the Dreamtime. For the rest of you this is a story of healing. It is an inspiration for those who have suffered great trauma, like incest, chronic violence, or the soul loss induced by the daily, normal horrors of war, and refuse to be hobbled or accept anything less than the life you came here to live. Join us this week as author and neoshaman, Kelley Harrell shares her experiences and insights with host, Christina Pratt. Kelley has served her local community in North Carolina and an international client base since 2000 through Soul Intent Arts. In her own words, “My path of shamanism is original and claims no culture other than the one of my creation. I do not seek to teach a branded path of shamanism, but to present the map for you to create your own. Through private sessions, classes, and Distance Mystery School, I'm here to create a new tribe of support for children and adults whose lives are blessed with an uncontainable inner knowing. This is The Tribe of the Modern Mystic.”

“Our most challenging task as humans is finding meaning in our self and the world around us,” says Kelley Harrell, author of Runic Book of Days. This means, how do we stand, fully conscious in our personal power in our everyday actions of life? In her new book, Harrel offers the runes as a contemporary tool to assist us in answering that question. The runes are an ancient, deeply revelatory oracle that captures the essence of the process of the soul embodied and then delivers the wisdom needed to live it in small, relatable morsels. Join us this week as modern shaman and author, Kelley Harrel, joins host, Christina Pratt, to explain that to work with the runes systematically through the seasons, allows a cycle of initiation to emerge.

As the wild fires rage throughout the western North America for another season, how do we respond? The destruction is real and truly devastating, and, at the same time, we are the creators of this scenario. Where is our responsibility and how to we exercise it? From a shamanic perspective a human is one of billions of organisms that inhabit and make up the planet we call Earth. To the elementals and nature spirits we are all part of the community of living things. Our most effective actions will be as part of that larger community. Join us this week as practitioner, Ana Larramendi, joins host Christina Pratt to explore how we can use our shamanic skills to assist nature in doing the corrective measures needed to balance what is out of balance. How do we ask the permission from the land spirits to intervene? And what do we do when we are told “no”?

Blessings are the way to give life to that which you value, to give it strength and help it to survive and to thrive. Through blessings we can give life and protection to what is new and uncertain. They are a way to give strength to that which doesn’t have strength yet, like a new story for a new world, and to give it time to take shape and build resonance. Blessings can be a formal, complex ritual process or a simple act of love, like calling on the spirits of the family totem to protect a child as she leaves for school. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the power of blessings and how we can use them with intention to create change in these challenging times. Blessings call on energies of the invisible world, like elementals, nature spirits, and angels, and ask for their participation in our lives in specific ways. Whether simple or grand, our blessings are most powerful when they are an expression of a deep relationship with spirit, one that we have already cultivated with our faith, gratitude, and practice.