Being Shaman: But Don't I Have to Be Perfect?

Years ago, I began reading numerous books about shamans, including some by Western anthropologists, psychologists, and physicists who had ventured into the world of shamanism. With all this reading, I began to think about what it might mean to be or become a shaman in today’s world. Would it involve mysterious rituals and rites, seeing or calling ‘souls’ that others could not see, working with people whose spirits were somehow sick and becoming their healer? How, if at all, might being a shaman apply to the work that I did every day as a professor of management? How might being a shaman, in fact, apply at all in our modern world, where the term is hardly known and even less accepted, except in what most people view as ‘New Age’ circles? For the most part shamanism’s concepts and ways seemed entrenched in traditional and indigenous cultures with all of their mythologies and beliefs about the natural world and spirits that seem to be vastly different from everything familiar to the scientifically-informed worldview of a culturally Western woman, steeped as I was in a business school environment.

What, after all, is a shaman? Shaman: the very word calls up mysterious and sometimes scary images of native medicine men and women. The shaman in traditional and indigenous cultures plays three important and interwoven roles: healer, connector, and sensemaker. Traditional shamans tend to focus their healing on individual patients and the surrounding community. In many traditional cultures patients are believed to be ill because there is something wrong with the myth or ‘story’ that the surrounding community, which the shaman attempts to heal with the idea that healing the mythology will allow the patient to heal.

The shaman is the medicine woman or man—the healer. Often, she or he is the wise elder. He can also be the bearer of the cultural mythology and provider of technology or art as well. In that respect, the shaman is a sensemaker, helping others to understand what is wrong in their community cultural and mythological context.

So…before we go any further with this discussion on shamanism, I have a confession to make. I often feel like a complete fraud when it comes to being or becoming a shaman. It is, somehow, not for me to say that I am a shaman, but rather for others to recognize that my work has put me into the category of shaman, if indeed it has done so. Further, whatever gifts I might have, they do not seem to be the powers or gifts of communing with spirits or ‘seeing’ them, or the psychic powers that other ‘real’ (to my mind) shamans seem to have that help heal others.

For years, it seemed that I had to get to be shamanically (and humanly) ‘perfect’ (whatever that means) in some way before I could talk or write about shamanism in any coherent kind of way. Certainly, it seemed that I needed to have the same kinds of shamanic experiences that others have—seeing or hearing spirits, getting insights psychically, sensing things before they happen, empathically feeling what others are feeling, or being able to sense and use energy in powerful ways to help heal others or something in the world. Combined with an innate skepticism about all things spiritual or intuitive, and despite a long-standing interest in and study of shamanism, I was entirely skeptical that any shamanic gifts were open to me.

Nonetheless, after years of hesitating and working around edges of thought and practice that I (and I presumed, many of my colleagues) considered strange or weird, I ultimately entered into study of shamanic practice with an African-tradition-trained shaman (also PhD psychologist, Buddhist priest, high order martial artist, and acupuncturist), who translated his knowledge and insights into thinking about the power associated with the shaman without ritual, particular traditions or belief systems, and through practices familiar these days to many Westerners. My teacher, John Myerson,[i] who has written three books on his shamanic experiences, soon had me meditating and journeying, sensing in new ways, and over the course of a few years working with a group of other interested people, a group that is still on-going as I write. There is a Buddhist proverb that says ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,’ and that is what happened for me.

Over many years of working with meditations and journeys, with trying to sense various energies around me, as well as working with the ‘Way of Power’ group that John started, I began to have some degree of trust in my own powers—though they were hardly traditional or accepted shamanic powers. Though the years, particularly from John’s teaching without ritual or particular practices (frustrating to some of us in the group at times), it became clearer that shamanism today need not be embedded in traditional rituals, ceremonies, and practices. It also (finally, according to our group) began to dawn on me that shamanic gifts come in many flavors. Although the Way of Power group did experience some more traditional ways of entering into shamanic journeys, i.e., through drumming sessions, most of the time we entered into the shamanic state either through a variety of meditative practices or by simply sitting quietly with the group—or elsewhere—and sensing what ‘came up.’

Something like that, it finally became clear to me, happened with my work as well. My day job, if you will, is that of professor of management, and I have always worked on issues relating to multi-sector collaboration, business in society, corporate responsibility, and more recently large system change (among other topics) to deal with the issues of climate change, sustainability, and social justice. Numerous times over the course of my career, I have been at the edge of something new or some new ways of thinking about these things. It was only through the work with the Way of Power group and with John that I finally came to realize that not everyone has the luck or what the great psychologist Carl Jung called synchronicity to be in the right places to access new information. In my case, not everyone realizes the capacity to cross the disciplinary boundaries that enables new ways of thinking to emerge, which seems to be my core gift, such as it is. Some of that capacity involves a willingness to trust my instincts—intuition—that something is right or that a certain way of thinking needs to evolve even when others are skeptical or downright negative about the ideas initially. Some of it involves trusting what we in the group came to call ‘the Universe.’ Depending on your own tradition, you may wish to call it God, the One, spirit, or by some other name.

More times than I can count, when such trust appears, I am gifted with ideas that connect things in new ways that I can only hope have the power to shape new ways of thinking with some potential for healing what is wrong in the world. Once I essentially was gifted with an entire book—whatever I needed to write and the inspiration for the shape of the book basically came through me and poured out of me without a lot will on my part.

That said, with my more or less scientifically trained mind and pretty rational Western sensibility, I remain skeptical about all things associated with shamanism…trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t from some sort of testable perspective. At the same time, I have learned to trust my own instincts when I am able to let the Universe flow through me and hope that my work has done some good in the world. So…eventually I realized that shamanic power is not about perfection or one specific way of engaging with the world. For me, and I hope for you, it is about using your own powers and capacities to the fullest to bring about positive change in the world. You don’t need to be perfect to try to do that. You simply need to put your own energy out there with the intent of helping…and work to accept the gifts that you are given, whatever they might be.

Not being perfect means that we make mistakes sometimes. It means that not everything we do is as helpful or healing as we might wish it be. It can mean that we recognize ourselves as flawed human beings with good intentions—and it also means that we take the necessary risks and do the necessary work to put ourselves into the best possible position to be able to undertaking whatever helping it is our purpose to do. It means we work through our own fears and try to heal ourselves spiritually (and psychically and emotionally) so that we are able to do the work in the world that we are called to do. I believe that everyone can be a shaman today if they are willing to put the work in and take the risks inherent in the shaman’s role.

The question for you is, what are your shamanic powers and how will you use them?

Endnote

[i] John Myerson’s books are (with Robert K. Greenebaum) Riding the Spirit Wind: Stories of Shamanic Healing (LifeArts Press, 2003), (with Judith Robbins) Voices from the Other Side of the Couch: A Warrior’s View of Shamanic Healing (LifeArts Press, 2008), and (with Judith Robbins), Death Grip on the Pommel: A Warrior’s Journey to Grace (LifeArts Press, 2012).