Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Traditionally shamans are activists. It is the role of the shaman to see where the people have lapsed in their ways for living well. Working with spirit the shaman proactively guides the necessary learning-from-mistakes and collective movement of the people forward to re-establish good relationship with all living things. Shamanic work has always been this work of transformation and rebalancing. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores this responsibility and challenge for contemporary practitioners. It remains our role and our responsibility to take action to manifest needed changes for the good of all living things, but how do we do that in our real world, real time?

We all experience stuckness at some point in life and there is an art to getting out of it. It begins with changing our chemistry, literally so that we can step out of our habit of being who we are. The next step is to have the courage and cunning to identify that thing we are doing that is too “normal” or “ordinary” to bother to see anymore. In the deeper “why” of that particular blindness is the vein of gold. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores how we find that vein of gold, the untapped resource that allows us to unfold the origami of our particular stuckness. In the resulting intimacy with self, we become the person who can access the latent power in our mess and redirect it into living our deeper purpose.

The wisdom of the body is an extremely complex system that translates and integrates multiple languages, including the language of your physical energy, emotions, felt-sense, and intuition into a language that can be interpreted by the mind. You gain access all of this information through your internal energy body only if you can keep it from being overrun by emotional patterns and limiting stories from your past. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the value in the regular practice and cultivation of Energy Body Mastery. There is more to your energy body than our trigger-warning culture leads you to believe. Anyone can gain the tools and practices to release stress and anxiety at their root, to disentangle from messy, complex relationships, and to redirect your energy into activities you value and enjoy.

Wind is an invisible force of nature that leaves an indelible mark on time and space. In ancient times the winds influenced our lives and showed us the path to success and happiness. The spirit of Wind has a rich mythology and diverse cultural significance that has been lost in modern times. This week Renee Baribeau, a long time desert resident, a practical shaman, and coach joins us to talk about her new book titled “Winds of Spirit, Ancient Wisdom Tools for Navigating Relationships, Health, and the Divine.” Join Renee and host, Christina Pratt, as they explore ancient shamanic secrets of the wind. Learn how the wind can be used to navigate the pathways of life, to connect with your true inner self (the spiritual magnetic north), and use your body to restore harmony and balance, heal the body, and inspire creativity.

In 1993 the new Pachacuti, a correction of Time and Space began for the Americas. For the Kichwa people of the Andes this is a time when the Condor –who represents the heart-centered people of the South–and the Eagle – who accounts for the mind-centered people of the North – will learn to “fly together,” to make the change necessary to live in harmony and balance in our everyday lives. Shamanic teacher and practitioner, Itzhak Beery, joins us to invite listeners to join him in Ecuador with 10 yachaks, teachers, shamans and visionaries for The Andes Summit in June 16-23, 2018. The yachaks, men and women, carry the sacred wisdom, passed down by their Kichwa and Otavaleños grandparents who are from these ancestral lands. They share this knowledge wholeheartedly in the hope that it will help us in these challenging times, to live in peace and harmony in our home countries.

Our personal focus and practice must move out from inner work into ever-widening circles of collective work for our personal/spiritual transformation to be truly effective as a force for change now. While it is essential that we begin with our inner work, multiple practitioners of shamanic arts have begun to experience worn out guides and depleted spirits of the land. Our daily acts of micro aggression, consuming resources without gratitude, and outright violence against the “Other” is taking its toll in both worlds. Kelley Harrell of SoulIntentArts joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to share how she is working in her community to effect change literally and directly on the world around her. Join us as Harrell shares ways to take personal and collective responsibility for where we stand in our past, present, and future.

We are born as an answer to the prayers of our ancestors. We are the medicine for our time. But what does that actually mean? How do we actually do that? If we are the medicine, what are the actually illnesses that we are here to remedy? And what does that mean for you in your mundane, day to day life and in the life most ecstatic? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, begins the exploration into the deep water of what it means to be human in this time of constant change, great challenge, and infinite opportunity.

There is an art to learning to get out of your own way when you are stuck. That art begins with stepping out of denial and into true curiosity about the deeper nature of your own stuckness. Once you are there, you will find that there is something you are blind to in your stuckness. At the heart there is something that is too “normal” or “ordinary” to bother to see. Moving bravely into the middle of what your blindness protects you from is your first significant step out of being stuck. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares stories about stuckness and explores how we can use our shamanic skills to get unstuck in life, access the latent power in the mess, and redirect our resources into living our deeper purpose.

The lie of separation keeps us from experiencing the rich empathy and compassion for self and others. It keeps us from the experience of being connected to something larger and possibly more real than one’s self. But where does that lie of separation live within us? And even more importantly, how do we bring the greater truth of Oneness, the connectedness-of-all-things, to that lie for healing and transformation? Teacher, producer, and cutting-edge thinker, Michael Stone joins host, Christina Pratt, to explore the ways in which learning to embrace uncertainty allows us the freedom to reconsider who we are and who we might become. Ask yourself, “What would your life look like if you were free from stress and anxiety?” and join us to find out how you can create that life.

The sacred is inherent in all things. Relationship with the sacred nourishes our deeper self, rekindles our passion for our soul’s purpose, and opens the way for love to enter our lives. Yet we have largely lost the art of being in relationship with the sacred. In everyday life we starve our deeper self of the energies that nourish it, indulge our stories of isolation and separation and justify depression or aggression as appropriate responses to life and its teachings. The sacred, immune to our folly, is patient and present, waiting for us to remember how to tend our relationship with it. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares the basics of shamanic practice that retrain our intention, perception, and imagination to engage with the sacred as a natural course of our everyday lives.

Sacrifice enlivens our spirit. It opens the way for miracles or the impossible or that which we truly desire to come into our lives. To enliven the spirit in our shamanic practice we must learn to step out of our comfort zones where we feel the simple exhilaration of surfing the surface wave and step into the deep soul satisfying discomfort of becoming people who will make a significant spiritual contribution to life on earth. Author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman, joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to explore how we move our shamanic practices from serving our own visions to surrendering intimately to spirit and serving our part in the larger vision. Join us this week and discover who we need to become to engage in the transformations through love that are the needed medicines for our time.

We interpret the world and our experience through our mind. Ancient peoples understood this and were sophisticated enough to leave nothing to chance. The ancient mind was trained first by stories and then by ceremonial engagement with the invisible world and education in a cosmology that was as functional as it was accurate. The ancient mind was prepared to become the shaman mind and take on the challenge of interpreting altered states of consciousness. “The contemporary mind is weak and vulnerable to seductions,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “where the story telling is left to the media and ceremony runs from vapid and self centered to empty and self destructive, there is no coherent cosmology to illuminate the way. The mind is utterly unprepared to accurately interpret life itself much less enter altered states reliably. Join us this week as we explore the shaping of the shaman’s mind.

A spiritual life is nothing but dogma and deception without the heart’s active presence. The heart’s active presence will soon wander, bored to death with you, if you refuse to engage regularly and intimately with ecstasy. Ecstasy, the falling into the fire naked losing yourself to One surrender ecstasy that comes in union with your helping spirits is one of the great gifts of spiritual life in a shamanic practice. So then why are our shamanic practices so stodgy, precious, (frankly) boring, and ineffective in creating large-scale life change? Join us for part two of a series on creating an effective shamanic practice in your day-to-day life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the necessary terror in igniting the ecstatic heart and how to keep the fire of true love burning at the core of your shamanic practice while you passionately engage the world.

Knowing where you stand in life—and how to truly stand there—is essential if you want to live a spiritual or enlightened life. This is one of the many paradoxes of living life where the real energy that drives things exists under what is apparent. Those who cannot ground their visions will not live them. Those who invest too much in the physical world and cannot let their visions soar will never know why they are here. Join us for part one of a series on creating a shamanic practice in your day-to-day life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the cornerstones needed to create a foundation that will not crumble under the weight of the real life challenges life throws at you or collapse when you need it the most because your denial, like so many termites, has eaten through the beliefs you think support you.

The most direct path to living your soul's true purpose is both individual and communal. As individuals, people often feel lost, fragmented, or unknown to themselves. Others may feel whole, but have lost the simple art of connecting deeply in inner dialogue with their soul. Living in this way, at a distance from one's self, creates anxiety daily and the life path that unfolds leads further and further away from the True Self. Individually we must relearn the skills of deep inner communication. Communally, we must come together to tend the critical gates in life: birth, adulthood, and death. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares her experience teaching communities to tend the gates for each other and individuals to engage in meaningful inner dialogue with heart and soul. Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina, asking what soul healing Last Mask Center offers for individuals and communities, why these teachings work, and how our passionate expression of our soul's purpose is exactly the medicine the world needs at this time.