Shamanism is a continuous journey inwards and into different states of consciousness. Sometimes going to the forest and looking on a meadow is enough to access the inner wisdom and expanded, deeper awareness. There are also other methods – meditation, drums, dances, rituals, trances. They help us to enter the different states of consciousness and sense experience to find our power, vision, and answers to important questions. They help us to contact our own body and heart better, and hear what they have to offer.
A shaman helps people enter the different states of consciousness, so that they open to the self-healing. People open their hearts and they can connect with their souls. Healing the heart and soul heals the physical body too. This healing allows to review some of the codes and patterns adopted by us and which are not really ours and prevent us from fulfillment and self-realization. People can heal themselves from what they are not, and they can again be themselves. It is a way to find themselves.
Shamanism is wandering in the different dimensions of reality. It is contact with our dreams that contain answers to the most important questions for us. It is a work with stories, tales, myths, we tell every day, from the childhood to the death. They contain a lot of information that allow us to live better, more creatively, happily and more generously. It is a work on our shadow, which is the side of us we are afraid of. It is also a work on our ‘light’ which is what we believe in and what we desire. This is an integration of different aspects of ourselves in order to live better, share with others and have something valuable to offer.
Shamans are often healers and look at disease and health differently. The disease may be a signal from the soul that something has changed. It is like a message about the need for inner transformation and return to life in harmony with the purpose of the soul. Therefore, the disease can be taken as a positive indication for a man how to live, what is really important and what to change. The shaman can help a person to reach inside and read the meaning of this message, open up the process of transformation and self-healing.
Shamanism is the memory of our ancestors or deep awareness of our roots, origin, tradition and culture. It is the use of ancient knowledge, ancient wisdom, the customs and rituals of our ancestors, appreciating the value of indigenous customs and traditions. Today shamans are aware of their roots and at the same time open to other traditions, culture and customs. They have a great respect for the people who lived before us and thanks to whom we are who we are. They are often intermediaries between the old and the new wisdom and teachers of old and still important truths adapted to the realities of life in the new era.
Shamanism is sometimes the answer for a man lost in the civilized world full of rigid rules, plans, structures, and attempts to control life. Shamanism opens us to our true nature, which is more crazy and unbridled than we think. Just as the nature and weather are wild and unpredictable, a man in its nature is more spontaneous and wild, than he remembers in everyday life. In nature there are happening ‘small and big things’, the sun is shining, gusty wind is blowing the storm is coming, there happens earthquakes, volcanoes erupt, there happen droughts, it rains unexpectedly, the animals hunt and breed … This is also a human nature, we are in constant motion, unpredictable, changing, from the rage to calmness and something new again.
The nature shows us certain lows, as a succession of day and night, the seasons, the cycles of animal’s life and death… It allows us to discover some repetitive cycles in our lives, some of the truth, that we cannot escape, and that we can accept with humility and openness. Experience of the rain in May can open us to the softness, the roar of the waterfall on our wildness, and the ubiquitous transience in nature accustoms us with our own death and teaches the joy of life. The consent to the different facets of our own nature grows, to the richness offered by different stages of life (childhood, adolescence, maturity), to our changeability, that surprises us and makes us happy. Instead of controlling the life, we dance the life in the confidence that what is happening to us, is what should happen and what is best for us now. The nature in its abundance has many gifts for us, and it is enough to open to it.
Shamanism is also an ordinary life. It is being aware that if I want to have breakfast, I need to feed the goat first, and then milk it, and the day before I need to bake bread from the grain, that I previously sowed, grew and reaped. If I want to eat breakfast with my family I have to take care about them, cultivating relations, I need to be with people and for people. An ordinary life, ordinary activities. I feel gratitude for the goat, for the rye, a fire in the stove and for the people who are with me. Gratitude to the planet Earth for all its fruits and beauty that it feeds me with. If someone else milked the cow or the goat for me, and baked bread and took care of the heat in my house, I feel even greater gratitude. And if the world gave me bread, milk and honey, what am I giving to the world?