Monday, January 25, 2010

Following a Shamanic Path Pt 2


So I took that turn and wandered down that little Frostian less traveled road. Looking back rarely to what I imagined I might have left behind. For the most part racing ahead red-cheeked full of joy and abandon.

Finally a place that felt right to me. A place where I seemed to fit. Where everything I knew inwardly began to match what I could see outwardly. A place where I was constantly challenged, not to change the world, but to change me. A place where I was not expected to conform to anything. Where I was only expected to be the best me. Liberating and frightening at the same time because the best me is pretty good.

Things that had long been part of my extracurricular studies began to make sense. They were the inexorable pull that brought me down this particular trail of all the trails I might have chosen. The trail of the Shamanic practitioner.

Sounds goofy doesn't it? That a middle-class formerly Catholic white as snow girl would be tapped to do this of all things? To abandon her own cultural belief system and find peace in that of a completely other culture. Usually a completely other culture that her white as snow ancestral culture tried to obliterate from the Earth. Delicious irony that. Yeah still gives me a bit of doubt myself. I comfort myself with the thought that "What the hell I have been wrong before". And as long as I do no harm who does it hurt?

Mostly it has been a solo journey for me - like walking the Camino de Santiago. I alone am responsible for my progress, where I stop and rest, when I continue single-mindedly on. Sometimes I have had the benefit of a mentor to point things out as we go and make the trip more interesting. But always those people have moved on. And I have continued alone. They often appear as if by magic shortly before I have need of them and they bring understanding that I haven't quite recognized I need yet. That is how Toby came to me. A series of phenomenal coincidences that landed me under his drum for a soul retrieval - which is exactly as it sounds - a ritual to find and reinstate soul pieces that are lost to trauma. I often described myself as broken, fractured, piecemeal. What I referred to in those moments was not my body, but my spirit. In one afternoon Toby managed to give me more than I ever expected. He returned part of me.

I can still remember thinking over the next weeks, months, years how great it would be to be able to do that for other people. I looked into studying with Harner or Ingerman, but always I held back. Because I was supposed to learn this from Toby. Which I finally did. When it came down to it, there wasn't much in there that I could not have intuited, but it felt good to share those footsteps with other pilgrims. I do not know where that training is going to take me. I don't really care anymore.

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