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From slowing the decline in fatal brain disease, to generating a sense of oneness with one another and the universe, drumming's physical and spiritual health benefits may be as old as time itself. Read the article here
Read more…This article from Stan Krippner was originally posted at http://stanleykrippner.weebly.com/anyone-who-dreams.html. For those who don't know Stan, he is a brilliant mind who has made some of the most important contributions to dreams and shamanism, among other topics. I'll post his bio at the bottom of the article here... ****** The Wisconsin farm where I spent my youth was located near an Indian path known as the Black Hawk Trail. In 1832, General Henry Atkinson’s forces attacked Indian envoys…
Read more…Thought some of you in this group would like to know about this retreat in March in Peru with C. Michael (Mikkal) Smith. His book, Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue, has been a go-to book for me for years. Details about the retreat are here
Read more…This is a fascinating—and fairly compelling (I think)—article on how psilocybin mushrooms stimulate and connect parts of the brain that don't normally talk to each other, decreasing brain "chatter" and also the part of our brains that is responsible for maintaining the sense of "self." Together, this can result in decreased depression an an increase in openness, imagination, and appreciation of beauty. Our human ancestors underwent a profound and significant dynamic shift around 30-35,000…
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Thanks Britta,
Your image of the shaman with 4 thumbs sadly made me think of how we in the western world would have treated that child at its birth. Maybe we need to also be sensitive to the fact that we often label something a wound that is really an opening to a deeper, richer vision. Even pathology might be redefined not as the study of pathos but the study of another path.
Interesting thread. Thank you.
I am reminded of an experience I had while trekking in Nepal many years ago. I became sick deep into the journey days away from "medical" help in a very small village. The medicine man was sent for and I was treated by a Shaman through ritual practices while the village folks watched. He was gifted with 4 thumbs, two on each hand that worked. I can still distinctly see him moving grains of rice around on his tray with his thumbs. Perhaps I just ate something bad or perhaps his medicine worked as the next morning I left that village and resumed my trek.
He was "marked" for the highly skilled work of healer. He was not ostracized as different but revered for it and the gifts that came with that marking as special.
For me it is not just the wound, but what has been done with the "wound" or marking that is the true mark of a healer. Like Ed said, it is in the awareness and its healing, not simply the wound itself.
And thank you for the Navajo weaver reminder. May write my paper for Native Traditions of the Americas on that! Thank you!!!
I think the idea that the divine comes through the perfect & ideal is an inheritance from the Greeks with a Christian spin being put to it later. Not sure if any other cultures also have this perfection ideal. (Anyone? Anyone?) Whether wound to the body, ego, emotions, and/or spirit, I'm one who agrees that the gift is in the conscious awareness of the wound and its healing. (I'm also a bit jealous of your on-going experience.) Thanks for reminding me of the Navajo weavers. There is something I'm supposed to hear in this for today.
Ed
I am excited to find this group and by all of your contemplations. I have been working with a woman trained in shamanistic practices...attending a weekly self-healing shamanic journey circle. My experience is a level of embodied connection with my place in the cycle of life, The Mystery, and the mystery of who I am. In thinking about the wounded healer...and the flaw Navajo weavers wound intentionally include in their work...and the idea that the gift is in the wound...I wonder -- contrary to the popular notion that the divine is found in the perfect & ideal -- if the potency of the divine seeks, perhaps needs, and is hidden in and called forth through the flaw?
I appreciate all the comments made by Cathryn and Lynn Marie this morning - nod of head. Mostly, I appreciate Cathryn's pointing to the foot offering for this shaman woman had a limp or dragged her foot in her life and gifted with a new foot for her next life passage. I am struck by what feels like consistency of heritage of shamans as Wounded Healers - this woman, 12,000 years ago, a healer with a limp, and the one whose captured my attention (26,000 BC) having facial paralysis on her left side (see more quotes on her below). This leads to such matters as hysteria and "mental illness" once being initiatory ground (or still being such in other cultures) rather than pathology. How might we revision suffering which may very well be the voices of the gods, new green grow? Musing with coffee in hand. Cheers, Mary
“Her faithful depiction was achieved by one of her contemporaries of the settlement represented (found by Absolon in 1936 –perfect three-dimensional small female head)…. Some generations later…she was depicted a second time but
now in an entirely different manner (as she was now known only in traditional
memory) as a ritual mask for ceremonies.
She might also (in life) have functioned as a ceremonial practitioner or
assistant, who gave explanations of everyday occurrences through mimicry,
gestures, or vocal utterances.
We may therefore assume that in the open sites of the upper paleolithic there took place the same complex religious ceremonials thatwere performed before the excellent paintings, engravings, and animal
sculptures of the western European caves.
Selected individuals of the primal communities seem to have dedicated
themselves to such ceremonials….
It is, of course, possible that, as with the Chukchi – where women were
better acquainted with all ceremonial concerns and cults than were men – women
assumed as “guardians of the fire” thee care for sanctified objects. Furthermore, the domestic magic of women
was credited with greater power and force than were the hunting efforts of the
men on the tundra. At the lower
phases of economic and social development, cultic concerns were also women’s
tasks.” (Bohuslav Klima, “The
First Ground-Plan of an Upper Paleolithic Loess Settlement in Middle Europe and
its Meaning,” in Robert Braidwood and Gordon Willey (eds.), Courses Toward Urban Life, 202-204.)
“The asymmetrical left facial halves, reminiscent of slack features, may be thought to be indications of total debility of the meneticmuscles and a clear evidence of a peripheral paralysis of the left facial
nerve.” (Bohuslav Klima, “The
First Ground-Plan of an Upper Paleolithic Loess Settlement in Middle Europe and
its Meaning,” in Robert Braidwood and Gordon Willey (eds.), Courses Toward Urban Life, 203.) (Ref nervous systems, ritual and the
grotesque – she is grotesque by definition of the grotesque – not classical,
drooling, etc.)
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