I’d rejoined the shaman school that treated me so poorly for their next round of classes after being encouraged to come back by a fellow student turned apprentice. I was very uncomfortable with it, especially after watching the founder’s new video where she pretty much avoids calling me out by name as a bad example of how to be. I cut my losses and walked away within 24 hours.

Not being able to see and fly blew me out of the water on training for the Scandinavian Studies center, and once again I was floundering. I finally gave up, and I said to the spirit world at large that they were very cruel to poke this dragonfly off her branch when she’d settled down quite nicely and had given up. It was also cruel that it had been taken away again, and that I had had enough. I quit, I told them, and I began to wrap seals around myself the way Dad had done me before. No more, I vowed. I’m done.

Did you know that sometimes a spirit, to get your attention, will put their hands over your eyes and ears to block your powers? No? Me neither, until I was halfway through the binding chant and he showed me what he was doing with triumphant eyes and a grin.

“I’m winning,” that look said. I’d have let him win, too, except I realized there was something I had to finish first so I stopped. Then I thought to myself, you don’t show your hand like that unless you actually don’t want the walker to put themselves back to sleep.

My approach wasn’t to kick him out or to hurt him. It was to ask what the fuck his problem was. Many Cats had to play translator, but within an hour with her I learned he wanted my help. He wanted his vices pulled, he wanted to be freed. And apparently I was the one to do it. So I did. I danced for him, sashayed wearing grass in the astral, turned his grief into butterflies, and wished him well. Doing that, for the first time I could almost see again. It was level 0 stuff, as far as my sight goes, but it was enough for me to know I had hope.

Finding out his issue, that’s not the approach of the Western shaman. I looked it up. The only shamanistic path that matched was in Siberia. I knew what I had to do. I had to somehow with magic sitting here in the States get Siberian training. So I began to look, and I actually found a hopeful link.

“According to Ulchi belief, shamans are selected and trained directly by the spirits, and the path of each shaman is unique.... Once a person is selected by the spirits to be a shaman, the spirits themselves provide the bulk of the training.” – “Shamanic Healing Practices of the Ulchi” (Roberta Louis with Jan Van Ysslestyne, Shaman’s Drum magazine, Issue 53, 1999)

In the Ulchi beliefs I have recently found a lot of parallels to what I not only grew up believing but what I learned by observing the metaphysical world and listening to my spirit guides. So tonight I sit here, pondering the confirmations and new lessons I have learned and will hopefully gain in the future. And it feels good.

For a while through the horror that has been the past year, I actually thought I would never find my place and was going to have to give up. Aside from the lessons, the tests, the things that happen naturally when you finally begin to step into things I’d experienced genuine harm. I’d also lost my sight, my flight, and all the things that were supposed to grow. Yeah, it has sucked.

I’ve talked often in the podcast and here about when things go wrong and what to watch for, so I don’t feel the need to rehash things. I’m now in this place where things are quiet – almost too quiet – and I’ve got space to ask real questions, to look at real things, and hopefully to take real steps forward. There’s still a special pain inside from the killing wound, and I know it. But you take it one day at a time, and you hope someday you can either figure it out yourself or find someone strong enough to help you with it. It’s not a psychotherapy issue, for those that would rely on that sort of thing. It’s a wound inflicted by a wyrm, and no amount of psychotherapy can undo the memory. Time might do it, but truthfully I think finding the right strong person to take a journey to help me is the right answer.

In the meantime, one of my personal frustrations has been explained via the quote above. The spirits teach a shaman mostly, according to the Ulchi. Their shamanic ways and lineage were mostly untouched by outside influences. Of all the paths out there, they may very well be the closest to the original path. The entire village even practices the way, because it’s their way of life. And this is how it is supposed to be. This is a little bit like my own upbringing, although for me it wasn’t anywhere near as rich as it has been for the lucky children born in the village.

“The natural world about us is beautiful forest, river and mountains. As for what you call the spiritual world, there is nothing symbolic about it to us, everything is very real, there is no myth, it is real. There is no separation between natural and supernatural, but there are many worlds that coexist. We have access to all these worlds.” – Nani Doro

This has been what I’ve tried to explain over and over again to various people, and it seems that none of them quite understood. Maybe they can’t, raised secular from the natural world as many of them have been. I can’t say that I burn sage and ask permission to walk in the forest, and if you don’t understand me you’re going to think I’m the rudest of them all to spirits that come along. But yet there it is, confirmed by a wise person far away from me. I’m sad I’ll never get to meet her. I’m glad she was able to speak this to the world and have it be heard.

We of the West live in a world where shamanism has been making a quiet comeback. Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman outlined some of the reasons why. It’s offers a (usually) safe drug-free way to touch the divine. Holistic health method work well alongside the path. The spiritual ecology at the time the book was published provided fertile ground.

Yet, we’ve taken the art and compartmentalized it in ways that go against both of those teachings. With the first, at least one of the largest shaman schools requires you’ve taken certain training classes as if shamanism were an undergraduate to graduate track. Expensive classes and retreats are offered. In these lessons, safety measures are not only ignored but not taught until you hit year/tier two of the training – things a new walker should know lest they get hurt the way I was. They even have a set cookie cutter way everyone must enter the spirit realm.

On the other hand, there is a new rise in “traditional shaman” schools. Past professional photo shots of the teachers holding drums while contemplating the sky, they also offer expensive classes offering to teach the traditional path of their ancestors. One minute they’re lecturing about some aspect of their practice. The next, they’re advising their followers to question anyone who offers to teach “traditional shamanism” and demanding ethnic respect and cultural gatekeeping.

After two years of training, many shamanistic providers strike out to offer services. Some decide to start teaching shamanism and open up their own schools after about 10 years. Most I’ve met have fallen short on their ability to grasp the deeper end of the realm they’re dealing with.

There’s a clear classism divide within the ranks as well. If you can’t afford $300 to talk to an “experienced shaman” on why you can’t fly out, people present immediately cool off in your direction. Work with what they feel is the wrong spirit, and they immediately make a distance – not because the spirit is wrong, but because they don’t know the actual lore and follow biases based off of Hollywood imagination. If you have the money, take a trip to Peru and enjoy a vacation taking shaman’s tea so you can come back and compare your experience with the other “shamans” who went. As someone pointed out to me, it’s become a bit of a social club fad. The classes are a spiritual humvee.

Furthermore, I’m learning that the most common path towards shamanistic practice in the West has been gutted. Michael Harner said it himself, “The way I offer you is that of the healer, not of the sorcerer.” (Harner, p. xxviii) This statement comes after he acknowledges that the shamanistic arts on the whole contained more than one type of practitioner. He opted to teach only one part of the entire package for reasons of his own. For the most part I don’t question them.

However, when someone who is not of the right cut but feels the inevitable pull comes to his teachings, things can fall short. One size doesn’t fit all. I tried to do it their way because for sure I was doing something wrong, what with all the drama around me. The more I fettered myself to their operative standards, the less power I had. The more I tried, the weaker I became while time after time no one had answers for what ailed me. The knowledge in my head clashed constantly with the knowledge they taught – things from how to fly from place to place in the spirit realm and just what the upper and lower worlds were for. But true to my word, if I said I’d do it their way I tried to do it their way.

It was all wrong, and in some ways dangerous. I’ve got an entire year of drama to back me up on that. Had it not been for those who did not come from the cookie cutter factory, I may still be in worse shape than I am now.

I have so very much to learn in this wide world at my age, and I’m glad I have stuck to the one gun my father handed to me: That when you begin to walk the shaman’s road, you find an elder to be your ear.

This isn’t a matter of being entitled, as some out there would have you believe. It’s a matter of growth, of turning to experience for advice, and of not ending up isolated and alone in matters that might bury you. That elder isn’t there to tell you how to be. They’re not there to tell you how wrong you’re flying, or what shirt you must wear. They’re there to give you advice when you run into a wyrm, or to tell you gently, “Hey, that so-called wyrm you’ve been seeing? Darling, I worry you may have threatened to sew shut the eyes of the great dragon god Ama. Spirits help you.”

Yeah… um… about that. ::sweatdrop::

By the Ulchi’s way, I currently am a small shaman. A very small shaman. Teensy weensy. What that means is I can do things for myself, but I’m not the person you’d call for a community meeting. I’m confident I can pull your pitch, but not much else. It also appears that despite being a small shaman spirits come to me “to be saved” (as one called it). Some of that is probably training. Some might be genuine. I have somewhere around a billion more years to go unless I study very hard and am an exceptional student… which, in case you forgot, is what Grandfather Shortlegs bade me to do. And I am an obedient granddaughter.

The house is quiet. It’s unsettling after being in essentially a spiritual warzone for a full year this month. The only spirits I deal with directly now are my eternal other half and my drum… literally. I took her down and oiled her. I loved on her. I played a song and watched a multicolored spirit watch from afar without getting close – I couldn’t tell what they were, only that they were marked and colorful like an Inuit painting. I’m used to things coming to enjoy my songs and poetry. It’s nice to have an audience.

Today was very close to how my life was before that cicada otherworld bastard stole my soul. The difference is that I’m more aware of what I’m doing and dealing with. And now I know that a lifetime of nighttime conversations with Voice plus years of defending my stance to priests, tribal elders, and sometimes even my own father have come to final stamp of approval. I’m doing what I should be doing. My goal is to do it well.

I hope you also can find strength in the road.