Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Rachel Harris believes there is a new hope for depression, addiction, PTSD, and anxiety. Her hope is deeply grounded in research and clearly expressed in her new book, Listening to Ayahuasca, the result of years of scientific research into the use of ayahuasca, personal experience, and hundreds of hours exploring as a psychotherapist the therapeutic effects of ayahuasca with her patients. Rachel Harries joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to share the enormous healing potential in the use of ayahuasca as sacred medicine, the full preparation for and integration of those experiences, and the value of opening up to the rich spiritual world of visions, love, and the deep mystery in the physical world around us.

PTSD is an illness of the soul, not the mind. Today PTSD is considered “an anxiety disorder.” However, the cluster of symptoms used to diagnose PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), or the expanded set for Complex PTSD, all simply describe how a healthy, sane human responds to their own soul loss. In other words, it is not a disorder. Shamans have been effectively treating soul loss caused by trauma or chronic abuse for thousands of years. If those dedicated therapists studying and treating PTSD could understand that they are all late to the party and work respectfully with shamans as colleagues then those suffering could find a path to healing in months, not years. Join us this week and host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues to share the practical application of shamanic healing to alleviate suffering in our contemporary world.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is an issue of the soul, not the mind. To define PTSD as a psychiatric disorder is to miss the simplicity of what it is and how we can alleviate the suffering now for those who are trapped in a post-traumatic stress response to everyday. When we understand the soul loss involved in PTSD and include shamanic healing in the modalities prescribed, we can bring healing to those who have been damaged by their experience in terrifying ordeals, situations in which their life was threatened, or sustained situations that involve the constant threat of physical harm. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what PTSD is, why it isn’t just getting triggered by unresolved issues of the past, and why we as a culture must begin to encourage suffers of PTSD to step beyond the boundaries of psychiatry to heal for themselves and for the next generations.

The soul sickness experienced by many in our modern day can be remedied by living as ancient, animistic, shamanic people did. This requires creativity to bring ancient practices into present time, without losing the power held in the essence and beliefs. While this choice literally allows people to help themselves, it is not self-help. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the dumbing down of shamanism. A shamanic life works by changing the disengaged, purposeless life of a consumer into one that is connected, value-focused, and skilled. Engaging in shamanism as self-help limits the work to the realm of the self. The power in shamanism to transform comes when we leave the control of the self, surrender to the helping spirits, allow ourselves to be changed by something much larger than ourselves, and then make that change in the world.

Shamanic journeying is a practice, like other meditative practices, that allows the practitioner to access a non-ordinary experience of sight, sound, sensation, and self…in other words, you train to access your own mind differently. In this practice, the practitioner remains simultaneously self-aware and aware of compassionate and helpful beings who are also present, much like encountering dream figures in dreams. Meeting these compassionate, helping spirits and gaining their assistance and perspective is the primary reason to engage in the practice of shamanic journeying. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, addresses some of the most toxic nonsense being shared in social media about shamanic journeying. Join us as we explore the good reasons to learn to journey, what you can ignore entirely, and what you should actually be concerned about in your own journey practice.

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.

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.

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 blood lineage ancestors, who carry the unresolved issues of the family line, can change when met by a skillful person. The dead can finally rest in peace and the living can heal personally, within the family, and in the larger collective. The deep wound of separation at the root of our cultural despair and dissonance can be transformed by those with the compassion to attend to the healing of their own lineage. This week author, psychologist, and ceremonialist, Daniel Foor, and host, Christina Pratt, continue their discussion of his new book, “Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing.” Daniel shares how by reconciling with our ancestors “we make repairs in our personal psyches and family histories that, in turn, mend cracks in the larger spirit of humanity.”

Your blood lineage ancestors, irrespective of religion, race, or culture, include the thousands of women and men whose lives weave a story back to the first human beings in Africa over 200,000 years ago. For many living today, your ancestors experienced violence, injustice, or oppression, very much like our reality though in the forms of their time. When we bring healing to these unresolved issues in a family line, the dead can finally rest in peace and the living can heal personally, within the family, and in the larger collective. This week author, psychologist, and ceremonialist, Daniel Foor, joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss his new book, “Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing.” Daniel shares how by reconciling with our ancestors “we make repairs in our personal psyches and family histories that, in turn, mend cracks in the larger spirit of humanity.”

When people call out to their ancestors, they call out to a diversity of energies. Some people call out by name to the men and women of their bloodline all the way back to the first man and first woman. Others call out to all of their relations; their request reaching out to all life through the interconnectedness of all living things. While others call out to their ancestors and visualize that request reaching from humankind to nature and on through their cosmology until they reach Grandfather Fire, Grandmother Water, and the Void from which the dream of life unfolds. Though we call out in different ways and mean slightly different things, traditionally “the ancestors” is a universally good thing. So what does it mean when we diagnose “the ancestors” as the cause of chronic disease, family patterns of addiction, or lose of hope and passion for life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores why the dead aren’t becoming traditional helping spirits and why they remain stuck here hijacking the lives of the living. And more importantly she will share her non-traditional shamanic healing practices that effectively heal the energy stuck in the ancestral lines, which frees the living from the unresolved issues of the past and the dead take their place as helping spirits who offer us the rich legacy of all those who have gone before us.

What does it really mean to heal our ancestral lines? To truly heal what lies unresolved in the ancestral lines, we must go to the source of the problem. We must go to the first person by journeying back who knows how far in time, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to that first person who made that one bad decision that changed his or her life and then all of the lives of all of the descendants who followed. These decisions become the unresolved energies of the ancestors. If left unresolved they continue to limit, manipulate, and overshadow our lives today. Why do we need to heal the ancestral lines? It is the only way that we—the living—will ever be truly free to make new decisions. The only way we will ever be able to engage our wisdom, innovation, and co-operation and make the high quality decisions needed today is to clear this unresolved ancestral energy. If we want a different answer for healthcare, war, economics, how we treat the environment, education, homelessness, joblessness, and child poverty we must stop living the answers of our ancestors. Join us this week as we explore what it could mean for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual heath to heal the ancestral lines?

We all experience stuckness at some point in life. Whether we do precisely what people expect of us or choose a different path that flows against the dominant current, we can still end up getting stuck at some point. There is an art to learning to get out of your own way that begins with stepping out of denial that the things you are doing are working and stepping into true curiosity about the deeper, true nature of your own stuckness. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she 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.

Is there a parallel between our effect on the physical world, like climate change and polluting our elemental resources, and changes in the spirit world? And most importantly, if there is, what shall we do about it? 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.com joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to explore what happens first when we begin to engage in shamanic activism, the sobering truth of what spirit can and can’t do, and some cold hard reality about how we need to get out of our own way.

Aboriginal elders warned the religious missionaries they encountered that if the trials of initiation were stopped then an even greater suffering would be unleashed on the uninitiated. We see this greater suffering unfolding today in the epidemics of depression, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and suicide plaguing the contemporary “first world” and those who follow in our developmental and religious footsteps. In Gods and Diseases David Tacey explains what our ego-based society cannot understand, that it is “the task of culture to tell the person who he or she really is.” And that it is through the trials of initiation that the person comes to believe that deeper truth and use it as the foundation for sustainable mental wellness. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she continues to explore the power in Tacey’s work from his book, Gods and Diseases, which offers a an important way to look at mental illness and the possible new paths toward health and wellbeing that this point of view opens up.