| Shamanism: As I Have Experienced it By Holly Dunn Posted 12/01 I have been journeying for about 6 years. Not a long time in the big scheme of things, but long enough to understand how things work for me, and that they may not always work for others. We all have an ‘idiom’, a style that is specific to us. Mine is within the category of the warrior. I am ex-military; my hobbies have tended to be…shall we say, active, if not overtly combative. So much of my life has been a war, one objective after another to be taken or destroyed. This has made for the development of some interesting skill sets that have translated very nicely into the shamanic realms. As a warrior my growth has progressed towards learning to heal that which I have destroyed and knowing when the healing is within the destruction. In a nutshell, knowing when to fix what I broke and knowing when what I broke just needs to stay that way and, of course, the all important knowing when not to break things in the first place. With all of the pain I have experienced within myself, caused within others and watched others experience I have become a healer. I am a Licensed Massage Therapist and an Emergency Medical Technician; I am also working on a degree in Psychology. I developed and continue to develop the real world skills to deal with real world pain. I guess that the most brutal journeying I do is when I hunt my own demons. Going into the deepest, darkest recesses of my own psyche are not for the faint of heart. It is painful, bloody and would probably make Wes Craven shiver. Of course, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me was the first time I ever ran up against something that I had to accept. This was the first moment that I realized that I couldn’t hack and slash my way through my own growth and soul healing. I was learning compassion and acceptance for myself. What my warrior nature as a shaman has given me is the survival skills to transverse any landscape, the power to face anything that I may confront (no matter how painful), and the strength to bring it back into this waking reality and be kind and loving to myself and let the journey transform, and heal me. I look to my experience to get me through and to the ‘great spirit’ to guide me to what I need to see and where I need to be. I feel that the most important work is to fight my battles, accept my shortcomings, embrace my strength and heal my soul. Only through my own growth and healing can I be of any use to my community. As a leader in my community I am responsible to my community, but not for them. I feel that it is important that each individual walk their own path and experience their own journey through the landscape. I can help by assisting them through the landscape, helping them to hold it together when it gets rough and being there for them when they get back, but unless they do the work themselves it will be meaningless. For me to go out onto the planes of existence and bring something back for them has much less impact than having them go out themselves and retrieve it. The healing is as much within the journey itself as it is the completion of the mission. As a guardian of the community I can set up wards to hinder and prevent ‘big, bad, nasties’ from coming in and messing with my tribe, but it is not for me to limit the people of my community by telling them that they may not move past a certain boundary because it is not safe. I do not look at my role as Shaman as doing things for other people, more like, helping others do for themselves. Articles Sheya Shamanism Transformation Links Reading Bike LumensGate Web Rings Home |