When we look at mental illness through a different cultural lens we can see something entirely different than the standard allopathic interpretation of the situation. There are other ways to look at what is actually happening to someone who has been diagnosed as “mentally ill.” Malidoma Patrice Somé is committed to helping contemporary people to see that we can use ritual, albeit adjusted rituals, just as the Dagara people do to relieve the suffering at the core of “mental illness.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the current work of Somé that shows that a different perspective opens up very different possibilities. Ritual can open the way for the individual’s healing relationship with helping spirits that supports a cure or definitive movement out of the “mentally ill” state of being and back into the world as an individual better equipped than most to give their gifts to the world.
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.
What we diagnose as “mental illness” today grows ever more resistant to reason, logic, pharmaceuticals, or medicine. What if these are not illnesses of the mind, but diseases of the spirit? Author and scholar, David Tacey, explores how we would understand and treat mental illness if we understood that by shutting spirit out of our lives with our beliefs we have forced spirit to enter through the side door of illness. When we understand how spirit is trying to work with us through disease we can see that our suffering can be resolved or transformed only when we introduce the dimension of our soul into the healing equation. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares Tacey’s work from his book, Gods and Diseases, which offers a powerful example of the way in which looking at mental illness through a different lens opens up new possible paths to health and well-being.
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.
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.
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 shamanic path is not a path traditionally intended to achieve enlightenment,” explains Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. “It has been a path followed because people…wanted to help (others) through healing and alleviating their suffering. In following that path, gifts were then given them that were totally unexpected…This then changes them, and they are never the same again; they are indeed enlightened. But that was not the intention; it was just a result.” Shamanism is and isn’t a path of transformation and enlightenment. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores this interesting state of affairs. Shamanic trance states are task oriented. They are not focused on gaining enlightenment. However, an ongoing working relationship with Spirit is one of the most efficient and effective paths of transformation, waking up, and growing up for shamans and for lay people. Join us and discover all the side benefits, like enlightenment, of becoming a spiritual adult.
One of the highest values held in shamanic cultures is the fact that each individual brings to this world a unique soul’s purpose. The gift of that soul’s purpose has never been seen before and will never be seen again if you do not live it. This isn’t karma and there are no second chances. This is the one moment to live that unique genius. This value was held in various ways by pre-contact shamanic peoples around the world. To live one’s purpose was believed to be at the core of one’s well-being. “I see this, or more precisely the lack of it, to be true today,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “When we are living far from our right work, spending 8-10 hours a day in a job that is not meaningful to us, ignoring the body’s cries for balance, and making sure that our sleep is so short or shallow that we never touch into the call of the soul then it’s no wonder we are unwell.” Join us this week as we explore how to catch the scent of your soul’s purpose and bring your life back on track with your passion. By changing this one thing— your relationship with your unique purpose—you can restore well-being in all aspects of your life.
Hatred is a luxury we do not have. It costs too much, eventually destroying all that truly matters and leaving the soul lost as collateral damage. What can we do to reverse the rising tide of hatred in the United States? Using our shamanic skills we can draw on our helping spirits to support us in small, everyday acts to shift the story playing out around us. For the more experienced practitioner we can engage in large acts of ritual, healing, and ceremony that reach the very source of the hatred and focus the power of transformation there. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the small, subversive daily acts that allow each of us to engage hatred where we meet it and the larger shamanic acts needed to disengage today’s hatred from the historic roots that nourish it. Large and small, it is work we must all engage in or we have learned nothing from history. Hatred ultimately costs us our souls.
Shamanically speaking, what is happening in our country is the dismantling of our shared False Self, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. Do you want to rebuild a system based on fear and unsustainable ideas about the world we live in or do you want to co-create a new system based on our understanding of what does and clearly does not work? Now is the moment for you to choose. Love or Fear? More importantly you are choosing now in every act you take and don’t take. Join us this week as we explore small acts of power. Our small acts of power are everywhere all day long. The most effective begin by co-creating with Spirit. This week we explore how to make these acts of power in the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dynamics of your life. Allow yourself the time, through small powerful acts, to connect with the Sacred, to cultivate relationships with the Essence energies that give your life meaning, to risk allowing yourself to love, and give your body what it needs to carry you on this journey. You do not know what is ahead. But you can trust that your life will become what you are cultivating now. Choose well and tend to the small acts of power everyday.