Although I learn from an Ulcha shaman–and boy do a LOT of things match my upbringing and normal lifestyle frequently!–unless the songs are sung for me to become a full-fledged shaman in this path, I will never be one. There are those that say “you cannot be ___ shaman because you are not of ___tribe.” This is true, but it is also not true. You cannot be __ unless you are of the tribe, but if the style of shamanism you are taught is very specifically ___ shamanism, then you are on your way to being a ___ shaman. The latter is not very possible, to be honest. Shamanistic paths tend to be individual and unique. In the end, you simply are what you are.

I do not see myself as someone who will have any songs sung. I’m not humble enough, apparently, and was actually called “arrogant” in practical all-caps last night for making a joke about my knees. There’s an underlying problem I have with my teacher: he keeps turning all of our interactions into a culture clash. At first, the problems were small. Then I spent two hours one evening having my speech policed for repeating the terminology out of an historian’s paper about Odin. I used the wrong word. You can’t reason with this when it begins, as many people will tell you. Although I did try, because I just don’t like being falsely accused. I have a criminal record from being falsely accused… and denied legal counsel.

So I think often that I’ll never make it that far, because my teacher often tells me I am of the West. I have a Western mindset. He tells me read the book about the Ulcha, pay attention to their posture, that I must adopt that posture. So I read it, and all I see are echoes of my childhood. My life. My way of being, and I genuinely can’t figure out what about myself I’m supposed to change.

My friend Many Cats joined his class and we went through chapter one together. The chapter talks about having an ecocentric point of view. It talks about respecting the world, trying to live in balance, not taking too much, giving thanks in certain ways that nearly match things I either always believed, was taught, or just had around me growing up. It even has “being a proper human” – and I laughed as I remembered and told Rebecca that I’d heard that phrase when I was being a screaming brat. “Why can’t you be a proper human!” Even if I’d only heard it once or twice.

She said in exasperation, “You’ve been beating this shit into my head for years!”

“I know,” I said, practically wanting to ooze out of my chair to the floor as I flopped my body in frustration. I’m not THAT Western! I’m multicultural… from a mix of gallows humor cultures at that! Paganish… definitely Native American… and most certainly never what people take me for.

There is one actual difference that my teacher can’t stand. Where one elder in the book says “worship” the spirits, another says “respect” the spirits. I’m on the “be respectful” end of that ambiguous spectrum. I actually tried worship. The spirits made sure to let me know in various ways that they didn’t like me doing it. At all. My teacher reamed me of it. If I couldn’t adopt the right posture, he told me last night, there was nothing more he could do for me. In other words, I’d be thrown out of class. I’d be a failure, in a path where the spirits are supposed to be the main teachers in a world where, you’d think, the spirits would know if they were offended or not.

He threatened me with this at a time when I was being pushed to accept outright slavery from, well, not so beneficial forces. Two of my cats had died that morning from two separate problems. I’ve been under siege for too many moons, and I’m losing my patience. I’d told him what was going on, seeking advice on what to do, maybe to have someone at my back. I should have expected it, but I didn’t expect to basically be told in not so many words that having clear boundaries made me less than worthy. This has had me very upset, of course. To be so misaligned. To have my future threatened in such a way.

But my brand of respect isn’t what you think it is.

It isn’t the Judeo-Christian kind. I don’t grovel in church, and I don’t grovel like nature is a church where you have to whisper and keep your head down. I don’t get on a prayer mat. Sometimes I’ll make cracks and jokes—and trust me, when you deal with tricksters regularly, you have to. I’m going to be what I am. In my entire life, maybe two spirits have ever objected to that approach. When they did, I adjusted. My operational approach is simple: know your audience, react accordingly. Time and place.

You’re not humble, I am told. “You’re arrogant, and it’s offensive to the spirits, to the very fabric of the dream. Your life is a mess,” I was told, because I’m arrogant. My teacher knows my history in the past two years only. He has no idea how good things were getting before I was hijacked. So I have to sit there and listen to nothing less than victim blaming, humbly. Humiliated into humility. Accused with claws.

I woke up this morning thinking that by posture, perhaps my teacher means “know your place”. That’s the only thing left when I go over Chapter One again (and my teacher told me to last night, snapped it at me actually… as if going over my way of life was somehow going to change my posture enough for me to visibly change it to the posture it already is for him to notice). Honestly I don’t know what he means anymore. I’m afraid to guess. I’ll guess wrong. I always guess wrong. It’s not just this teacher. But the fundamental similarity is this: they keep thinking I’m a buttercup when I’m actually a daisy turned sunflower.

You are nothing against the spirits, I am told. You are arrogant if you don’t remember they can squash you flat. I can’t count the times I’ve made sure to say I’m not strong. To say that yes, I screamed at that dragon and I probably sounded like a little fat frog screaming in the sand. But with one particular goblin queen, after a year of having her ignore all of my attempts at peace, at “I’m just a tiny thing go away” and all the things a mouse might squeak as it’s being battered by a cat… the one thing that got her to stop coming at me was when I told her that I was going to rip off her legs one by one and feed them to her if she was so hungry… And if finally standing up, enforcing my boundaries, and defending myself is arrogant so be it… while a dark part of me thinks of all those people out there who want to disarm us. Who feel a woman shouldn’t have boundaries. Who feel a lot of nasty things that equal oppression.

While I’m willing to be humble and quiet in some spirits’ presences (and I’ve done it) I just can’t accept that humans are mud – no matter what the djinn say. I can’t allow that humans are so weak we shouldn’t be allowed to carry a hammer and smack a goblin that’s not taking no for an answer if it gives chase. There is humility, and then there is “knowing your place” because someone is adamant that humans are sludge, the spirits stand above us, and we are nothing.

I think the word humility doesn’t mean what people think it means. Over the years I’ve seen it actively being weaponized to hold people down. In the beginning, you’re told to be respectful. But then the goalposts move. Suddenly, you are dirt, and you are called arrogant for approaching the spirits in the sovereign ways that have worked for your entire life. That some of them even taught you. If it comes up you were taught this by the spirits themselves, those spirits must either be not beneficial or you don’t have the discernment to be able to tell when your intuition is talking. Because you should trust your intuition until you shouldn’t trust your intuition.

There was this one time I decided I’d go to Bragi and ask him to be a patron. I didn’t know the protocols then. I was kind of silly and childish about it, dancing in with a grin on my face and my spirit spouse not saying anything to warn nor reach me. I interrupted him playing a set to a hall, and boy was he furious. He shouted at me. He forced me to give him libation by pouring wine into my carpet. I thanked him coldly and went away. He called to me later, and we made amends. He learned I was new to things. He used his harp to show me that I had a special sound colocation way of seeing. I adjusted my approach from that lesson, even though it hurt my feelings. My friend Leslie had been all about how he was in the wrong when it happened, and I’d told her that no. I was the one in the wrong. I’d just walked in without reading the room nor thinking of anyone but myself.

Another time I was going to see some high level spirit: I think it was Lilith. My spirit spouse was with me for that one. He counseled how I should behave. That I should bow low. That I should modulate my language. That she’s not one to make jokes. When I stood before her, I listened to my spirit spouse’s advice (for all he recently accused me of not wanting to work with him) and did what I had come to do. I showed great respect.

But reverence… nearly killed me. Literally. The only spirit that has ever asked me to bow low was Shemyaza, and it turned out that was so I could see the floor tiles. And probably because he enjoyed the theatrics.

Gallows humor. No matter which side you look at in my family tree—Norse, Germanic, or Native American—I come from people who had a laugh at death culture, and I am the product of it. You survive an explosion or a near-death experience, and a week later, you’re making jokes about it. In my family line which came out of the American Northeast, we were sorcerers, not just dreamers. For a pawwaw, these stories are culturally sound. A pawwaw boasts to the tribe. It’s entertainment. (Check out William S. Simmons in Spirit of the New England Tribes if you want to know more.) The village loves the tales. You look amazing, and your power grows because you get buoyed up. It’s a documented cultural phenomenon, laced heavily with gallows humor. Your job as the listener is to enjoy the tale and laugh when it’s funny.

And besides. The tales were fun, I thought. To make my teacher laugh, I’ve been telling him crazy stories from the dream in that vein. But. My teacher never laughed, and then last night it turned out he’d been listening to my gifts… and he’d been using them to judge me. My stories are the biggest reason why he decided I was arrogant.

I am not arrogant, at least not in the CEO or political sense of the word. And I can say this with pride. It doesn’t mean I can’t act arrogant, or that I can’t be arrogant. But I am definitely proud. The more I go through this, the more I realize how well-placed my pride is. It’s a strength when done properly. I do not allow pride to stop me from learning. I use it as self-esteem, because you must be proud of yourself for self-care, self-growth, and being able to carry on.

My pride was lost after years of abuse. I lived poorly. When I started recultivating pride in myself, things got better. I tried to cast it aside to worship parasitical deceivers and nearly died. When I remembered it, I was able to stand up again. Having pride (and friends) saved my life. This pride gives me the strength to face a goblin queen and say, “You will not feed on me today.” This pride gives me the strength to say, “No, you will not push me around.” In the human world, I might crumple up sometimes because I’m actually quite shy. But in the spirit world, I’m a different beast.

That pride says that humans are not mud. We are not subservient sludge meant to grovel at the feet of whatever entity demands it. If you want to survive the Wyrd, you need a spine, not a leash.

But the ecocentric part of me says that humans are also not the center of the universe. It means understanding that the spirits, the land, the animals, and the Wyrd all have their own sovereign agency. You respect their domains. You don’t walk into someone else’s hall and demand they cater to you—like I learned the hard way with Bragi. You respect the ecosystem.

Humbleness doesn’t mean you must shrink your worth. The first thing my lovebomber taught me (He’s an excellent teacher I sometimes think just didn’t know what to do with me so worked with what he knew.) was that “small” is a serious slur in the dreamtime. I used to get upset when I realized that what I thought were the angels, and Heaven (but now I know differently) thought of us down here as “small”. When I rejoined Project Avalon after ten years of not wearing my tinfoil hat, I found other people there talking about spirits that called them “grain” and “speck” in a clear insulting manner. To be “small” is like, well, it’s small. You diminish yourself. Spirits don’t respect that… and certain factions who already look down on you use it as a way to diminish you in their sight, kind of like how some cultures view others as less than human here on Earth.

Somehow, things have twisted “we aren’t the center” into “we are the bottom.” Being small, I think, is part of it. Not that choosing to be humble, to choose the path of least resistance, to avoid trouble is bad. It’s that this concept has also been weaponized as a way to convince us that we don’t matter. In a realm where ecocentricism – a philosophy where everything matters – is the rule, to say you don’t matter is to be unnatural and set yourself apart in a negative fashion. It might even just be the height of rude.

In a real ecosystem, every living thing defends its space. A badger doesn’t grovel to a wolf; it bites back. A tree doesn’t apologize for taking up sunlight. Being part of the ecosystem means you have a right to exist, to take up space, and to flex your muscles when a predator comes into your yard.

We aren’t the lords of the cosmos, but we aren’t the dirt beneath it, either. We are active, operational participants in the Wyrd. We belong at the table, not under it nor on a platter with apples in our mouths. And if some entity demands you act like mud, they may be trying to farm you. But I’ve spoken about that problem at length already.

I’m not saying my teacher’s philosophy is wrong. I’m incredibly frustrated this evening that I grew up with most of it, and I even already taught a lot to my friend before we even knew this man was alive. I do leave offerings to the spirits. I do give thanks. I just don’t have a Christian approach to it.  I’m not being given credit where credit is due, and that to me will always be a high crime.

How do YOU feel about being diminished? Leave a comment below.