“…the main thing is that you embody the essential. If you do not embody that, life is wasted. -C. G. Jung
Welcome to our Website. Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies International sponsors learning communities in the USA, France and Belgium, South Africa, with a plant medicine school in the Peruvian Amazon. Spontaneous communities have grown up around our Wounded Healer Workshops in these countries, with seasonal events. This website will introduce you to the mission, life, photo displays, and some of the resources of Crows Nest communities. Note: This is not a Native American tribal organization, but a heart-open and earth-honoring community for those interested in shamanist way and Jungian psychological practices, and in healing and transformation..
We live in exciting and unusual times as a planetary species on all fronts, ecologically, geographically, economically, culturally, politically, psychologically and spiritually. It is up to us to respond to this opportunity for making a Global Shift. It has been my priviledge and synchrodestiny to play a role in the founding and nourishing of Crows Nest learning communities. For more than three decades my field has been to study the psycho-spiritual genius of shamanism across cultures and historical periods, which is itself a goldmine of human potentiality, exploring how to alter consciousness to tap our unlimited wealth of possibility which yearns to come on line, be accessed, downloaded, expressed. It can help us each to step into our power to make a difference in the world together–co-creatively. My disciplines as a Jungian psychologist and medical anthropologist have helped form this knowledge and skill-set, but my own initiations and direct experience have given it the deep substance and have most powerfully shaped what is now the vision of Crows Nest Wounded Healer Schools, in USA, France, Belgium, and S. Africa. In our public schools we have learned about evolution as a external biological process. Visionaries like A.N. Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin taught us to see the inner evolution that has begun a long time ago with our ancestors as a sacred evolution, which now becomes the major force of evolution in the future. C. G. Jung saw the shaman’s path as a prototype of the individuation process—inward evolution on this planet has its probable origin there-in. The shaman within us all is our evolutionary and transformative alchemical lab. Enjoy your exploration of this website, with its resources dedicated to helping together to create a Global-shift that is heart open and earth honoring. You are invited to join us in this work that is so much needed as we face the planetary challenges and opportunities in the years that lie ahead.
-Mikkal
This song was first shared with us by one of the attendees from our August Intensive. It was then taken overseas to be sung by our Europe community. A beautiful gift of song tying our communities together.
Interviews with Mikkal
A recent podcast with Mikkal in English and French discussing topics of calling, Imagination, and compassion in shamanism.