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As I see it, there are two well known ways of entering the shaman’s path. Both passages involve the Call to a shamanic mode of being. One way is that it comes upon you unexpectedly; — it happens to you, and you have little choice in the matter. The other way is that there is a natural inward desire or questing for the way of the shaman. Either passage is equally good, and both ways call you to your true life. My way was the first.
When I was 12 years old I was given my father’s study for a bedroom. This was a large private room with a large closeted library: Double windows framed the forest, which was only a few feet away, and I had a private bathroom. I was a creature of solitude loved to hide out in the book-room. I loved to sit at my window desk and gaze at the forest. Often I would climb out the bathroom window up onto the roof and watch the sunsets over the trees and in fall and winter, enjoy the silhouetted trees against magenta skies. I spent a lot of time playing and exploring the enormous woods. One day it finally occurred to me to bring trees inside my room. I gathered some rather large branches and erected them in the four corners of my room: I painted them with fluorescent colors so they would glow in the dark. It was a magical forest at night; a dream-space in which I would explore feelings and vast realms of imagination. Little mythologies would spring from these reveries, like ferns and grasses rising from the forest floor. Occasionally comets whizzed across the enchanting skies of my bedroom.
One evening when I was about 18, I climbed on the roof to watch the sunset, as I had done many times. Then it happened. The golden light was bathing the thick forest foliage and above the tree tops; the evening mist was settling like smoke. From this mist, like the forming of a mirage, a clear vision of my future slowly came into ‘view’-I visually saw myself working in a forest somewhere in the world, healing people as I helped them reconnect with the divine Spirit. I knew then, that this was to be my life purpose. I call this my “first awakening,” but I completely misinterpreted it to mean: “I should become a Christian minister.” So as the years passed, I went to seminary, got ordained, and had a parish for three years. I enjoyed conducting worship services, especially during seasonal changes and holy days, and I really loved the counseling work. The parish rapidly grew as the pastoral care and counseling activities grew. One rather conservative elder complained to me privately that the church was becoming a polyclinic. Soon it was clear to me as well, that being a Christian minister was not the right vehicle for me spiritually or socially: I was more a spiritual healer than a pastor. So I resigned and took a job at a counseling center. This was a decisive act that changed my life, for I began counseling in a highly intuitive manner, trusting the divine Spirit to direct me. The results were amazing, but I was at a loss about why I knew how to do things that weren’t in the counseling textbooks. I didn’t know what I was doing or why it worked. It just did. Then a “second awakening” occurred. I was about 32.
For many years I had been noticing bird wings and feathers everywhere in the shadows of trees at night. I thought it was just natural and that everyone could see these majestic wings. I was startled when I realized this was not the case. Once I realized I was seeing in a visionary way and other people were not having the same experience, things got a lot more interesting. I began to really pay attention to what I was ‘seeing.’ I would sit outside at night and look at a particular tree. It would transform into a magical tree, with an enormous multicolored serpent spiraling in its branches. I could look at this tree anytime and within seconds see this serpent. Quickly this visionary activity increased. I was driving to work one day and the road broke open into an enormous abyss and my car plunged in. There were amazing beings in the depths: gods and spirits, faces and glowing masks. Over the abyss ascended a gigantic Thunderbird. I knew that I was driving the car and needed to pull out of this trance.
A few days later while working in my basement I felt a spontaneous, physical urge to dance. I started dancing and noticed the large Thunderbird was in the room with me. We merged, then separated. Then I attempted to merge again, but this time it was a different experience. It felt like a human spirit. It spoke inside me and told me he was my Cherokee great-grandfather, and that it was time to wake up and realize what I am, and do what I am here to do. At this point, I knew I needed assistance in making sense of these experiences, and in controlling them. I did not at all think I was crazy – perhaps I was – but I knew I needed some kind of teacher. I sensed that what I was experiencing was highly meaningful and had to do with my life’s work.
It was not easy finding a knowledgeable ritual elder to help me, 40 years ago. I knew what the psychiatrists would make of it. I eventually found a superb Jungian analyst, T. J. Kapacinsakas, and he told me that he was familiar with the phenomenon, and called it a ‘shamanic awakening.’ He told me I needed to connect with a shaman, and sent me packing to Northern Ontario for two weeks, where I got help and underwent a Quest for a Vision at Lake Temagami, near Bear Mountain. I found in Dave Knudsen, who conducted the Quest, the ritual elder that I needed for that time.
On this Quest I connected profoundly with many spirits of the forest, had numerous ‘visions’ but the main focus, the real vision was a simple stone, a blue brown rock sitting in front of me. I touched it, rubbed it many times. I dampened it with water using my hands, and it shimmered with silvery flecks. I was drawn to its solidity and simple earthly beauty. Then a silent voice arose within: “This is the core and essence of you and your life work: to live from this solid core, the heart, and to help others do the same.” I realized the stone was a symbolic talisman of what my life and work was to be.
I cried out to the Great Spirit and to the spirit-beings I felt close to me, and said “I have no teachers, no one to help me on this path.” The voice came back, “We will teach you.” And I replied, “But I will have to find some way to practice and make a living.” And then a silent voice arose saying to me that I not only could, but should go to the University of Chicago, study and create structures for me to work in, structures that would be helpful to others like myself as well, and they can help reawaken modern culture to a more heart-open and earth-honoring way of life.
So I wrote Mircea Eliade, the only figure I knew to be associated with shamanic study at Chicago. It was he who had reintroduced shamanism to the modern world nearly 60 years ago with his book SHAMANISM: ARCHAIC TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY. I had good luck! Eliade wrote back, and advised me. I took several trips to his Hyde Park flat. He directed my readings, gave me a conceptual structure, and my first guidance on how to proceed. He invited me to come to Chicago and study. Eliade was in declining health at the time, suffered from arthritis terribly. Before I arrived to study with him academically at Chicago, his enormous personal library caught fire. It was a great loss for him, and the signal of the end of his life. He died a short time later. I was at a great loss of who to study with. I soon learned of the work of Robert L Moore, the Jungian analyst and collaborator Victor Turner on ritual structure and process. Dr. Moore, also deeply influenced by Eliade, did a book on the Initiation Archetype and the Ritual Elder. It was Moore who coined that term ‘ritual elder.’ So I ended up enrolling in the University of Chicago, the Chicago Theological Seminary, and the CG Jung Institute of Chicago all at once, and, with Dr. Moore’s encouragement, was able to design and coordinate my studies in Jung and shamanism, and eventually ethno-psychology and medical anthropology. It was a very rich diet of study. He would later ask me to write a book on the topic for his Paulist Press Series on Jung and Spirituality. That would become the JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE book. Many psychotherapist-shamans, today, come to the work as psychologists or therapists, and then became shamans. For me it was the other way around: the whole point of my study was to find ways to fit myself into modern society and find ways to communicate the value of shamanism to the modern world.
Robert L. Moore, was my first doctoral chair, and I learned so much about ritual leadership under his guidance. Soon I was focusing on a second doctorate when I enrolled in the class of the great medical anthropologist Sudhir Kakar at the University of Chicago. Kakar basically filled a gap, for me and others, left by Eliade, with his own more recent research. Kakar spent three years in the field with indigenous shamans, interviewing them, filming them, comparing ideas with modern healing systems and psychoanalysis. He published his findings in a well-known book: SHAMANS, MYSTICS AND DOCTORS, and in a variety of documentary films. He had developed the new field of cultural psychology, and mentored Erik Erikson at Harvard on the writing of GHANDI’ TRUTH. But in this class, filled to standing room only, we viewed the ethnographic films Kakar had made of shamans in Southeast Asia. We translated and analyzed the commonalities and differences ritual healing structure and process. Robert Moore had given me the ‘eyes’ to see things I otherwise would have missed in these shamans practicing their healing craft.
I was greatly inspired and encouraged by Dr. Kakar, finding through his work a way to bring greater public awareness and legitimacy to the healing power which shamanism could bring into modern western culture, overly rational and materialistic as it is. One day I mustered the courage Dr. Kakar if he would serve as a reader on my dissertation committee, and he generously accepted. But during the course of this conversation I told him about my own shamanic experience and work. He became fascinated and wanted to know the details of my story. The next thing I knew, I was the subject matter of a couple of classes. The course was entitled “Healing Systems Across Cultures.” Kakar looked at me as a field specimen from North America, giving the anthropology, divinity and behavioral science students and professors a chance to study me as a living human document. It was weird, but also exhilarating, for suddenly I found my rather odd way of life and work being the subject of formal interest. Strangest of all, several other students came out of the closet about their own shamanic experiences. We formed a little consortium, meeting once a week to share ideas and learn from each other. It felt wonderful to have peers, and I quickly learned how important and supportive it is for shamans (beginners or fully fledged) to have a community. One of the great friendships that formed during all this was with Dr. David Dalrymple, a Jungian analyst interested in shamanism and archetypal psychology, and who was working on his second doctorate and was my class mate. He drew my attention to some shamanic initiatory themes that he observed in his analytical patients.
By the end of my Chicago studies I had written two books, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED, and JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE. These two books succeeded in helping me develop a solid and ethical structure for integrating shamanism and psychotherapy in a modern context, and in time they came to help others do the same. Partly due to Kakar’s dust-jacket endorsement of my book, and partly because of my friend David Dalrymple, now the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis [NAAP], a certifying body for Freudian, Adleraian, and Jungian psychoanalysts, my book was submitted to the Gradiva Awards committee for peer review. As a result, in 1996 PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED won a Gradiva Award nomination for its contribution to psychoanalysis and spirituality, at New York University. I will always be grateful to my friend David Dalrymple… He helped me get it into the culture, one of my big reasons for going to Chicago. David introduced me to, and seated me besides James Hillman and Robert Bly, at the dinner table of the Gradiva Awards, at New York University. The sharing of ideas between us was an event I shall not forget. Hillman, known for his archetypal soul psychology, received a Gradiva for his docu-film on depression called “Something Blue” Bly received a Gradiva for his contribution to psychoanalysis through poetry. It was Bly who spawned the “men’s movement” with his pioneering book, IRON JOHN, but his poetry touched the inscapes of grief and raised ecological and earth-honoring awareness.
My second book, JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE is in its second printing and is used as a text in Jungian Institutes and many psychology programs in the USA and Europe. These books, as well as my entire Chicago education, were inspired and to some degree directed by my own ‘spirit guides’ who helped me see things, and write things that created the conceptual structures and legitimation structures in which I could work. All this, including the Gradiva was a kind of rite of passage for me, one which convinced me that I could, and that anyone could, create and make real changes in the world.
During and after Chicago I was building a large private counseling center in SW Michigan, and working with two of my shamanic mentors. Ai Gvhdi Waya, was my Cherokee-metis teacher, and don Alberto Taxo, my Ecuadoran Kichwa teacher. I did not seek out Waya. She was a Cherokee-metis shaman coming from a line of healers through her father’s Wolf clan. She saw that I was dealing with Jung and shamanism, and thought I could benefit from an initiation with her, and two other Jungians. In the early nineties I traveled to Arizona and spent a week in Ai Gvhdi Waya’s ‘Casa del Tierra Madre,’ near Sedona. We were initiated into soul recovery and extraction work, feather and crystal diagnosis and healing. We spent a very intense week in her desert Hogan, and there after Waya and I have continued our relationship. She was taught me much and continues to support the heart-path and teaching work I am doing. She helped me come to terms with my Cherokee-metis ancestry, my Celt ancestry, and the acceptance of all that I am, including my particular writers voice, a blend of the scholarly and personal.
Overlapping these 12 years I worked concurrently with don Alverto Taxo, who was teaching me to work with the elements and “fly with the Condor” which meant learning very exact ways to listen to, follow, and honor the heart. It also meant learning to transform the mind and bring it into proper relationship to the heart, as its servant. One of the most valuable things I learned from his was how to connect directly to the “Great Force of Life” (Jatun) by opening my heart and greeting any element, or plant, or person, or anything at all. “Tu Kuy Shunguwan Kuyanimi” are the Quechua words of a central chant used in virtually every ritual and ceremony, and it means “With everything in my heart, I greet you!” From don Alverto I was able to formulate the core principles of the archetypal heart, which I have come to call, “The Four Acts of Power.”
My work with don Alberto focused on connecting with the ‘usai’ (essence or spirit) in plants. Everything has an ushai, but for me the practice of greeting the plant spirits, entering into them, led me to become more present, more soul-full. I saw that this was a natural method of soul retrieval. Many of the Kichwa Iachak’s limpias (cleansings) are done with flowers, their ushais brushing you, clearing out engative energy forms, but also making you present, bringing you into the now. Through don Alverto’s teaching I learned how to do soul retrievals simply by connecting with the heart and helping my clients do so in therapy. I have found that all but the most stubborn or trauma-based soul parts will come on line naturally, if the client is properly connected to the heart, knows precisely how to listen, honor, and properly protect it. These discoveries led me to develop powerful and simple techniques, which I integrated with psychotherapy outcome research (Gendlin, Rogers, Nelson and others), to help any individual rapidly find, access, and get guidance from the heart, from its navigational system. I have come to call this the NGS. These teachings become client skills and are very useful in pre- and post-soul retrieval and integration work.
While all this experiential learning was going on, I continued to work with clients, and I began doing longer, frequent, and more intense wilderness quests for myself. On one of them I was sitting beside the water at night, my heart was wide open and I was in a deeply altered and receptive state when, in the mist, the marvelous Thunderbird formed and hovered over it. I sank into the vision. I looked eye to eye at its fierceness. And then it began stripping me of my flesh-layer by layer. It ripped the skin off my body, took my eyes out of their sockets, yet I could still see. It said to me “See, you don’t need these to see.” It continued taking out muscles and then viscera, finally my brain and spinal cord slithering out…and with each part removed it would say “ See you are not this either.” Finally there was nothing but my bones, and then they were disconnected and began dancing and clicking to a beautiful rhythm in the darkness. I became aware that there was nothing left to identify as me….I was no-thing, and yet “I Am.” Then the Thunder-being said to me, “This is your stone core nature…this is the heart. This is your central axis, live from here!” Then all my bones were reassembled, my organs and flesh all cleaned and put back on. I felt entirely renewed and invigorated physically and spiritually after this experience. I felt saturated with presence, and my heart had blown wide-open. Everything seemed more spacious and beautiful. Inwardly I knew I had found my axis mundi, and was rooted in the “absolutely real, enduring, and effective reality,” as Eliade described the sacred.
This event, probably the most profound in my life, showed me who I am. Eliade called this kind of shamanic initiatory experience a “reduction to a skeleton.” I was familiar with it, but I had not at all understood its significance until I underwent the experience of it, direct and unexpected. Later I came to see how similar it is to other contemplative traditions, of Advatia Vedanta’s ‘Direct Inquiry’, Tibetan Buddhist Chod meditations, and the archetypes of death/rebirth and the Self, which Jung pointed to and demonstrated in alchemical process. Everything changed as a result of visionary death/rebirth experience. I shared the experience with a friend of mine at Cambridge, an anthropologist, but also a practicing shaman. She said, “You better run for cover.” It was not long before I understood her meaning. Because of this new and solid connection to my ontological core of being, I now stood in my own truth and would not tolerate anything that was false or a deception in my life. Everything that wasn’t right, that wasn’t authentic began to fall away…my business fell apart, and so did my marriage, and any relationship that had an inauthentic basis was either transformed or it died. I lost everything, my home, my money, for a while my family. But it was ok. I had a deep sense that I was in my center and that my life had to realign so that inwardly and outwardly my life was ‘one.” It was a process that took several years.
The basis of my shamanic life, practice, and work is rooted in these experiences.