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THE SHAMANIC PATH?
By Maryphyllis Horn |
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| In our modern society
a lot of emphasis is put on credentials, to determine a person's ability
in their area of service. Licensing is one way the government supports that.
Yet this does not necessarily assure us of high quality service. There are
varying degrees of ability among health practitioners, electricians, counselors,
mechanics, lawyers and other professionals despite what their credentials
may say regarding their training. There are some people with very little
schooling who can do a much better job at their craft than someone with
a great deal of formal study. However, this question has never been a deciding factor among the performing and fine arts. A person's ability may be enhanced by professional schooling, but professional schooling doesn't assure them of success in their artistic field. Only how well they express themselves and their art brings "drawing power" from the public, that is, success. This also is true of shamans. Ability to get results…not credentials… determines the shaman's success. The same is true of many areas of the psychic and holistic healing fields; the practitioner's worth is determined soley by results. Then what distinguishes the shaman from other psychic and holistic practitioners? The shaman's way is to rely solely on the wisdom, teachings and instruction of their own spirit helpers. By spirit helpers I mean those spirit beings some call Spirit Teachers and Power Animals…but which are actually of the Angelic Kingdom. In a shamanic spirit journey four years ago, my power animals gave me a profound teaching to that effect. They showed me that angels are actually beings of light, and they can take on whatever form is most appropriate for our understanding and comfort. The form can be of an animal, human, angel, pure light or sense of presence. All of us have spirit helpers; we wouldn't survive past infancy without them. They are assigned to us by our highest Spirit and answer to both our highest Spirit and the icon of our religion, be it the Christ, Buddha, Mohammad or other. They have access to our soul's history and life purpose; other beings don't have this privilege. They are such an integral part of us that they may feel like aspects of self and intuition. To the extent that we allow it, they guide us, heal us, bring us aid and good fortune; this may often feel like coincidence, pure luck or even a miracle. Four years ago my power animals repeatedly told me that "the kingdom of power animals wants all humans on the planet to come face to face with their own power animals." I took this to mean not that they want everyone to do shamanic spirit journeying, but that they want all humans to be intimately guided and healed by their own individual angels … using whatever form of contact is right for them. My power animals and spirit teachers all said that the reason they want this is because our planet and the human race are in severe trouble. The more of us who have intimate contact with our spirit helpers, the more of us will be true to our soul's purpose. The more we're true to our soul, the higher integrity we'll have with others. As a result, our relationships will improve and and we'll also treat the planet with greater reverence. This fits with the attitude of shamanic cultures throughout the world. They see everything as sacred and have a profound reverence for all forms of life. In Foundation for Shamanic Studies classes, Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman stress the fact that if we do not rely on our own spirit helpers for information and healing work, we are not doing shamanism … instead, we're doing some other form of psychism. At no time do they say we are working wrongly to rely strictly on intuition, channeling or the High Self; they merely say that that way is not the shamanic path. For example, on the second day of my Basic Shamanism workshop, Michael Harner explicitly stated that if anyone hadn't yet been able to journey into the two parallel worlds, they shouldn't lose heart. There are other ways of obtaining inner wisdom … perhaps they could try channeling. In the Foundations' workshops, most of the instructors place heavy emphasis on relying on one's own spirit helpers for information and to go with what they say, even if it contradicts what the instructors and everyone else says is true. They live that precept with great personal integrity. Several years ago I wrote to Sandy Ingerman about some very exciting exercises and insights I had received about soul retrieval. She took umbrance with some of them, and sternly wanted to know where I'd gotten my information. She said she'd not heard the like from her shamanic studies and that some of it was a "180" from prescribed teachings within many shamanic cultures. (But then, many shamanic cultures are a "180" from other shamanic cultures!) For each of her stern questions I stated that this is what my Spirit Teachers and Power Animals had given me.…And that I found it worked in my life and in the lives of many others. Do you know - in her response letter she praised the fact that I'd received the information from my spirit helpers and that I was true to the shamanic path. She told me unequivocally to "go for it! Continue doing what you're doing!" She would not have made this "about face" attitude had I said my information came from "this teacher" or "that book," i.e., someone outside of myself, or from my ego mind. Shamanism, as it is practiced, is a mystical path, a path of experience and pure faith. It is an inward path of consulting one's inner authority, not the path of books, credentials and consulting outer authority. For convenience, it may at times be helpful to take a workshop to learn a certain form of healing and inner work, but it's not absolutely necessary. I chose to learn soul retrieval from Sandy's 5-day seminar. Yet, some people have learned how to do soul retrieval purely through the help of their spirit helpers. Sandy herself learned it that way. Michael Harner merely corroborated that she was doing soul retrieval; he didn't teach her how to do it. Sandy has a beautiful, shamanic, way of teaching. In the soul retrieval seminar she described vaguely the stage of retrieval process we were learning and then had us journey to our spirit helpers to obtain specific details of how WE were to achieve that stage. She followed this pattern through each and every stage of the process. When the class shared after each journey, there was a wide variance in detail sometimes to the point of people seeming to contradict each other. Yet most achieved a soul retrieval for others. The HOW of the process is subordinate to the SPIRIT, that is, the spirit helpers behind the process. The beauty of following one's own spirit helpers despite what other people and circumstances dictate is that our spirit helpers know more about our path and abilities than perhaps even we do. They have access to all the knowledge of the universe, things known by humanity and things unknown, the old and the new. All we need do is phrase the right question, to get the answer we seek. But that's the eerie quirk of it. The answers to everything in life are all around us … just waiting for us to ask the right question, to unlock the answer we desire. Maryphyllis Horn, MEd, CMHt, CTFT, Rev., is
a Shamanic Practitioner from Pittsboro, NC. She has a private practice
in soul retrieval, shamanic counseling and healing, spirit releasing,
spiritual hypnotherapy and Thought Field Therapy. She may be reached at
919-542-0260 or by email at: soulshaman@aol.com
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