The following list is what I hope to deal with personally as I strengthen my spiritual practice. They are somewhat ‘course goals’. Items to look at, mindsets to explore, pain to release.
These are either ‘in need of personal healing’ topics or ‘axes to grind’, depending on how you look at things 🙂 I tend towards the former in outlook; that’s one of the reasons why I’m in the Shamanism101 programme. Talking about these sorts of topics with most folks gets a disgusted ‘forget about it‘ or ‘stop being a victim‘ or my PERSONAL favorite (not) ‘stop dwelling in the past‘. Those are all forms of people saying ‘shut up, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to listen, and I don’t want to comfort you. I want you to stop talking about this and go back to being convenient and having no needs and not expect anything from me emotionally.‘
Well, guess what, I’m done being convenient, folks. You can’t reciprocate emotional nurturing? After I listen to your ass for hours???? There’s the door. Don’t let it hit you on the ass on your >permanent< way out.
Okay, so that was MY axe to grind.
[alert type=”general” accent_color=”#7f1515″ background_color=”#ededed” border_size=”1px” icon=”fa-exclamation-circle” box_shadow=”yes” animation_type=”fade” animation_direction=”down” animation_speed=”0.3″ class=”” id=””]Things that need to heal:Â I’m making it all up; my spiritual path is a load of horseshit; and I don’t have any right to practice shamanic techniques.[/alert]
Moving on to topics that need to heal:
a) I’M MAKING IT UP.
Worrying that, in journeying, I’m ‘making it all up’ and ‘it’s just in my imagination’. Now, I’ve had some experiences to challenge these beliefs, so I’m in a better place with it now, but it may come up again for me. I can share one of them: I journeyed to the Upper World to met a Teacher, and I was told by this Spirit, who took the form of an Old Woman, that I could call her ‘seanmhair’ ( that’s pronounced SHUN-a-ver ). I thought, well, doesn’t that mean ‘grandfather’???? Really? I instantly thought I was making everything up. Until, that is, after the journey and I looked it up in my dictionary. Grandfather is ‘seanair’ (SHUN-er). Had I been making it up, I would have gotten the Gaelic wrong. Had I been imagining her, I would have imagined her speaking in Gaelic to me, using the wrong word. She also used words I genuinely didn’t know, and had to look up. This was beyond my experience and my knowledge. The communication I received was too accurate and too detailed for me to have ‘made it up’ and gotten it correct.
And that’s only one example. I did a journey for someone else which I can’t share, but the advice, the responses and the accuracy of the situation (of which I had no knowledge of – this person I had never met prior to journeying for him) were spot on, according to him. I would have no way of ‘guessing’ or ‘imagining’ that.
b) MY SPIRITUAL PATH AND BELIEF SYSTEM IS MALARKY.
I periodically seem to go through a complete loss of faith that anything I’m doing is real and legitimate. These dark nights don’t happen often. The last one I faced was a number of years ago, at a period of great stress, but, it may come up again.
c) I HAVE NO RIGHT TO PRACTICE CORE SHAMANISTIC TECHNIQUES.
Another challenge I have is that I feel at times that I have no ‘right’ to practice shamanism because I’m not Native American or Siberian or Eskimo or African – that I’m just a white girl from America ‘stealing’ other people’s spiritual practices – it’s the same issue I have with my Scottish heritage – since I wasn’t born and raised in the Highlands, I HAVE NO RIGHT to speak Gaelic or follow my cultural heritage, even though my family came from Scotland in living memory, I wasn’t born there. Since I was born in America, and I’m white, that means the only thing I’m allowed to do is go to KMart and eat at McDonald’s and go to the local Baptist Church. It feels like a horrible straitjacket, due to my place of birth. I can’t tell you how much this bothers me. This is one of the things I need to work on healing, the feeling that I have no right to anything because I wasn’t born in a particular place and embedded in a particular culture from birth.
Item C is the worst one. Even though I had my ancestors come to me in dreams and say ‘you need to learn Gaelic – not Irish, not Welsh, SCOTTISH GAELIC’, I still have a hard time with present-day, embodied humans saying ‘you’re not Scottish. You weren’t born there. You’re an American. Said with eye-rolling and disgust and meant to shut me up and shut me down. You don’t belong, you shouldn’t be doing that, you’re stealing, you’re a horrible person, etc. etc. Mind you, this comes from my family – who are first generation American. It’s like our heritage is taboo.