Soul Whispering: The Art of Awakening Shamanic Consciousness

INTRODUCTION

What the World

Needs Now

Is Love Sweet Love

You are the soul and the medicine for what wounds the soul.

RUMI

This book focuses on personal transformation as the higher octave of healing. Healing is the work of becoming conscious of our wounds, releasing the energy of victimization, developing self-love and compassion, and forgiving ourselves and others. Healing leads to a state of peace and improves our life. This is a step along the way, yet it is not the goal of living consciously. Living consciously means shifting our story from being wounded victims to being spiritual beings who are undergoing personal initiation on a path of authenticity. We have the capacity to live in a state of love and expanded consciousness. We have become intoxicated and addicted to security and survival, and in the process, the true meaning of life has slipped from our grasp.

For many, the experience of being human is unfulfilling, imbued as it may be with a sense of meaninglessness and soul loss. This pervasive unease is due to identification with a false persona and an energetic disconnection of the mind/body from the soul and from collective wisdom. The sense of disconnection reaches further to keep us in the illusion of separateness from each other, all living things, the planet, and the universe. At this point, we all have two choices. We can focus on the problem or become part of the solution. The world reflects our inner state of being. As we collectively move into the new eon, we need to open to a much larger vision of our future.

Love is the energy of connection, and without love’s gravitational pull to anchor and connect us deeply, we feel a sense of isolation, untethered to our lives—unloved and unlovable. As Glinda told Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, It’s been in you all along. While that is true, Dorothy obviously needed a reflection of that deeper truth from Glinda, or a soul recognition from someone or something to whisper that in her ear. The it that has been in her all along is her true purpose as a human being, that of embodying her birthright and capacity for love and expanded consciousness to bring her home to her authentic self.

Reconnection and integration of mind/body/spirit and remembering who we really are has been the rallying cry of mystics and healers down through the centuries. Today more than any time in history, fully dissolving the artificial separations between self and soul, self and others, and even self and universe is happening. Western healers, physicians, and psychologists find that the old ways of compartmentalizing and fixing are no longer as effective as we once thought they were.

Shamanism and its practice of utilizing shamanic energy medicine has always addressed the whole person and the entire community by embracing a starting point of As within, so without; as above, so below. In addition to its recent popular worldwide appeal, shamanism is evolving—from being overly mysterious and available to only a chosen few to a practice that is accessible to all of us.

Following in the shamanic tradition, Soul Whispering is a technique that shamans and others may practice to heighten one’s spiritual awareness and connect more profoundly with one’s own soul. The practice of Soul Whispering allows you to fully reunite with your soul by learning how to listen to its whispers of guidance. Learning to listen to this inner voice of the heart, which should be distinguished from the voice of the ego or inner critic, allows you to move from lower octaves of consciousness to an evolved level of consciousness. As consciousness evolves, liberation from personal patterns and the restrictive tenets of cultural ideology also transpires.

Although one might seek out a therapist, doctor, minister, counselor, or even a shaman to perform the shamanic practice of Soul Whispering on your behalf, you may also receive guidance from your soul without the assistance of a third-party Soul Whisperer. This guidance can take myriad forms—sacred spiritual insights derived from witnessing a spectacular sunset, hearing the melodic song of a hummingbird, or sensing an unseen spirit guiding your actions from someplace in nature or even from some other dimension. If you’re open to messages from spirit in whatever form spirit chooses to appear, you will be in receipt of a gift from a Soul Whisperer.

To help you enhance your own abilities as a Soul Whisperer, this book includes an audio component (see How to Use the Soul Whispering Audio Tracks ). Each of the four tracks is a guided meditation to help you pull back the veils of your personality so that you may discover and access the guidance that your soul is wanting to offer up to you.

The world is now entering the era where modern-day shamans and Soul Whisperers are discovering our own shamanic wisdom and the consciousness that is hidden within our DNA. Modern-day shamans and Soul Whisperers come in many forms. Increasing numbers of people are on a path of spiritual seeking, traveling to sacred sites to ingest entheogens in the form of plant medicines under the guidance of a trained shaman, thereby accessing and entering into altered states and trance experiences. Other shamanic energy medicine methods include fasting from food and sleep and going on a personal vision quest, or participating in purification and healing processes such as sweat lodges, working with a variety of stone medicine wheels, chakra balancing, crystal therapies, and studying the Mystery schools that are now coming out of the shadows. We’re learning how to apply these practices, which have been hidden, back into our daily lives. All of them embrace a perspective of self-responsibility in healing.

Soul Whispering creates a safe container for powerful intervention with our unconscious, inhibiting beliefs and opens us to our authentic essence as loving spiritual beings. It is a practice that embraces being human as the lived path of spirituality. Our ways of being in the world are primarily unconsciously motivated. This is both the catalyst for and the obstacle to spiritual growth. Reconciliation of this paradox is precisely the medicine that is needed for our times. We are vibrant, resilient beings hardwired for joy and spirit-guided lives full of meaning and purpose. The Soul Whisperer holds space and lovingly supports us to awaken our shaman within and remember our true essence.

This book mirrors life—it is not always linear. Stories, musings, ideas, and concepts unfold as if on a spiral. Concepts and stories are revisited in different contexts and different chapters to inform the reader in a variety of ways. Personal accounts written by Soul Whisperers grace the end of almost every chapter. A glossary in the back of the book further articulates some of the key terms for an improved understanding of the material contained herein.

It is not necessary to read this book in sequence from the beginning to the end. In fact, we encourage you to intuitively use the table of contents, or simply pause and take a deep breath into your heart with the desire to discover what is up for you on your path at this time. Then, spontaneously open the book and see what raises your curiosity and read that chapter or section. Following your curiosity you will find the next bread crumbs on your path through the wilderness—both in this book and in your life. And in so doing, you will find your way out of the woods of the unconsciousness into the fields that await you—replete with manifold potential and possibility.

1

Seeking Wholeness

From Baby Boomers to Shamans

The generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early ’70s electrified their culture with an explosion of alternative lifestyles and beliefs. Much of the infusion of ideas from the young people of the time was actually ancient indigenous teachings given a psychedelic coating. In an attempt to heal themselves and the planet of its ills, baby boomers embraced spiritual and healing practices from all over the world, though often without the discipline and ceremony that the practices required. Many ended up burned out and disillusioned. Many, though, continued to follow a practice with increasing knowledge and discipline and have matured from experimenters and thrill seekers to wise elders in the shamanic traditions.

EXPLORING THE SHAMANIC WORLD

Have you ever wondered why there is a rising interest in shamanism, and why the word shaman itself has become so popular in the past several years? It seems that this is a hot topic with many forward-thinking people today. Some folks just want to know what shamans and shamanism are all about. Others are interested in talking with a shaman or taking a trip to Peru or some other place to seek a blessing, teaching, or healing from one who practices this ancient healing art.

But who and what are shamans exactly? Shamans may be called by many names in many different cultures, but essentially they’re the indigenous healers of any given tribe, village, or culture. They are universally known to be the ones who carry the mystical ability to connect the world of the imaginal and symbolic with that of lived experience. Shamanic energy medicine, which is the medicine that shamans employ, is comprised of an integration of shamanism, shamanic psychospiritual practices, and imaginal psychology.

Indeed, the primary tool of the shaman is the power of the imagination. In the early 1800s, German philosopher Johann Gottfried Von Herder wrote a book called Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. In it he discussed his views that imagination is the most powerful human force and that it comes directly from the soul. He admonished people to pay more attention to the imagination given that, to his way of thinking, it is the connection between the body and the mind. He also posited that illness is related to imagination and to the brain.¹

More than two hundred years after Gottfried’s assertion, neuroscience has offered empirical evidence about the power of imagination to impact brain chemistry.*1 Shamans use this power of the imagination, as well as art, song, and poetry, to enter the ethereal energetic fields and tap in to the collective consciousness to communicate with the soul of an individual, group, or community. In so doing, shamans can bring to consciousness information that is generally stored in the unconscious mind and not otherwise readily accessible. Using the power of imagination, shamans work with the energetic body to facilitate healing in the emotional and physical bodies.

By undertaking shamanic work, one may come to the understanding that the life of the soul is eternal. For indeed, shamanism respects the natural cycles of life, and in this, it embraces both birth and death equally. Shamans know that death is not the end, but rather a rebirth. All major religions teach that the soul/spirit is immortal, and in fact, many people refer to Jesus Christ as a shaman. This is because his teachings were clearly about the mystical powers of being born again or rebirthed from his own death. His spiritual path embraced life whole-heartedly, and when the time came, he embraced death fully, as do many actualized saints and teachers.*2

In embracing the duality of life and death, shamanism provides a means for us to embody both life and death in everyday life. Embracing the reality of death strengthens and deepens our connection to being present in the moment, and practicing death and rebirth is a symbolic experience of letting go. For death is the ultimate letting go—a surrender of one’s body and one’s present lifetime. Thus does the practice of shamanism develop one’s capacity to let go, particularly of that which one clings to the most.

Shamanic practices are inherently integrative and holistic. And the truth of the matter is that we are all shamanic. Thus everyone can learn to connect to the energetic, holistic/integrative healing capacity that is all around us and within us as well.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A SHAMAN

The following may be considered to be characteristics of a shaman.

Shamans may be considered to be wounded healers who have traversed difficult and painful experiences in life and have been strengthened by the experience.

They are considered medicine men or women and are often kept apart from the rest of the tribe or community.

They know that there is an unseen world (dreaming body), which is just as real as the one we inhabit in daily life, and that it influences our health as powerfully as germs and nutrition do.

They are able to enter altered states of consciousness for the purpose of journeying in the imaginal realms, where they often coax dissociated parts of the person into returning to the psyche for integration and healing.

In the shamanic tradition of old, the healer (shaman) attempted to restore healing and balance to others by performing sacred rites or ceremonies that typically included prayers, songs, and chants.

In the shamanic model, illness—both psychological and physical—is not an enemy to be eradicated. Rather, symptoms or disturbances of mental and physical health are messages from the soul or otherwise indicate obstacles to hearing messages from the soul.

THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF DISCONTENT

Many of the baby boomers who were discontent with the strictures of the times in which they grew up explored various alternative realities as away of finding meaning in their lives. However, many felt that they had gone too far left of the accepted cultural norms. As a result, some made a decision to turn back further to the cultural norms they had left behind to try to regain some stability and grounding in their lives. Unfortunately, many of the boomers threw out the baby with the bath-water and began to settle back into the mundane, living with their disillusionment instead of continuing to seek a way out of it. Others became stuck in the past, becoming lost in a world that had moved on without them. Still others were catalyzed by the times they had lived through, which served to shape them as people/thinkers/healers and allowed them to acknowledge the validity of their alternative experiences.

Star Wolf’s Story

MY INITIATORY PATH TO SHAMANISM

I was one of those overly sensitive children. I had a very loving, supportive, grounded grandmother who intuitively understood and saw me. She encouraged my sensitivity, which included psychic abilities such as clairvoyance, precognition, and the ability to see things differently from others. Yet she also understood that for me to be able to be on this planet, I needed to connect to nature, which included her garden and all of the many creatures that resided in it and on the grounds of her property.

I had a menagerie of dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, hamsters, goldfish, turtles, and an array of insects such as june bugs, large grasshoppers, and even worms. Daytime was spent outside. Shortly after breakfast we began the day’s chores of caring for all the animals, watering the plants, and otherwise taking care of the living things around us to create balance in our lives. My grandmother taught me that everything was alive and that we must tend to the physical world to create beauty and pleasure in our lives. She seemed to enjoy everything we did, and I too learned to look joyfully forward to all the little daily tasks.

After lunch, especially in the heat of the summer, we would frequently take a midafternoon nap and, upon awakening, finish our afternoon chores and perhaps take a walk in the woods to discover new creatures and plants. This is when my grandmother might tell me stories about life or ask me my thoughts about things. She told me to pay attention to my surroundings. She also told me that things around us were constantly communicating with us and sending us messages, which she referred to as signs and omens.

She encouraged walking barefoot upon the earth and sitting on the grass or large cool boulders in the woods by the lake. In midsummer we picked fruit from the trees, vegetables from the garden, grapes from the grapevines, and of course gathered eggs daily from the henhouse. If you have never eaten a freshly laid egg from chickens that have been tended with love, you have not tasted a real egg! (The ones in the stores are soulless, and if we have had the real thing, our bodies know this.)

Evenings were the most magical time of the day for me, although I thoroughly loved the whole day from sunrise to sunset. The evenings held an etheric quality as dusk arrived and the first stars appeared, twinkling in the night sky. Many months out of the year we would find ourselves swinging in the large swing that was in the screened-in porch attached to the outside of the house, swinging away until late at night.

During this time my grandmother would engage my imagination in a variety of ways and speak to my spiritual questions and concerns. We would talk about star beings, extraterrestrials, fairies, Jesus, and the supernatural world. Nothing was off-limits. We would sing religious hymns and recite poetry and rhymes. We would make up stories and tell jokes. You could call it our imaginations I suppose, but we saw things in the misty night around us and received messages from the other worlds. As long as my grandmother was by my side I was never afraid and in fact was quite brave. Without her, when I was at school and engaging with the outer world, I frequently felt odd, strange, different, and even defective. But somehow knowing that she was there, I knew I could make it and that I would be okay.

When she died rather unexpectedly shortly after my twelfth birthday I was completely adrift without her presence and love in my life. I sensed her reaching out to me from the spirit world, but it was simply not enough to help me to stay grounded. Although I do not remember wanting to die, I did not know how to live without her and wanted to follow her to the other side.

By the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around, I had discovered sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I truly do not believe that I would have survived had I not discovered these things, which allowed me to some-how live in both worlds. And even though these substitutes for love were not sustainable long-term, and in fact almost destroyed me, it’s as if they filled the absence that I felt at that time, which could not be filled in any other way.

In the 1960s, I couldn’t say no to the creative life-force energies that bubbled forth in the collective psyche of the world. I remember my friend Ruby saying it was like the whole world went from black and white to living color, which described so much of what I experienced as well. I came from a small coal-mining and farming town in western Kentucky where most folks—good salt-of-the-earth-type people—worked hard during the week and went to church on Sunday. There was comfort for them in that kind of living and thinking. They didn’t take kindly to having their worlds turned upside down or seeing the fragile security they had created be blown apart with any strange new ideas from outsiders.

I remember when I first saw a hippie on the front of a popular publication, Look magazine. Immediately I knew that I wanted to be one despite having no real idea of what it was all about. When I was sixteen, I begged my folks to let me take a field trip on a chartered bus from Kentucky to Chicago with my fellow classmates. As we drove slowly in the evening traffic to our downtown hotel, I saw long-haired teenagers dressed in strange colors and hippie attire playing loud music, dancing wildly, smoking pot, and making out in broad daylight.

As we drove by a park, I opened the window (yes, you could do that in those days!), trying to get a better look and to be a little closer to that amazing scene. A young man turned around suddenly, and we made eye contact. He gave me the secret code: he held up one hand with two fingers pointing skyward. Without a moment’s hesitation and without knowing exactly what it fully meant, I gave my first peace sign back to him. I felt elated. Energy started coursing through my veins. Secretly, I felt like I had been initiated into the club—whatever that meant!

Shortly after that, my determination to find my lost tribe became even stronger. Over the next few years, I found them in a variety of places around the country, from Kentucky to California and back again. I found those who seemed to know the truth—that which others didn’t seem to know or even suspect. This secret society was a burgeoning hippie nation that spanned and infiltrated every state and town across our country. Its members ranged from returning, disillusioned Vietnam veterans and college dropouts to students in the know about what were called aware college campuses. We came in many shapes and forms, but the main thing we all had in common was that we knew we were being called by an irresistible force rising up in our midst as a huge vortex—a maelstrom of change. We knew that we needed to get ourselves back to the garden, in the words of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock.

What I was to learn on my bus trip to Chicago marked the true beginning of my spiritual awakening. What I was to learn in the days and months ahead was that to transform ourselves, and therefore our worlds, we must come back to the place we know and see it again for the very first time. All of life travels on a spiral path and requires that we move through the cycles of change repeatedly. This is not in a circular fashion, nor is it a linear approach. The spiral leads us to greater and greater perspectives and to endless possibilities. The revisioning it entails is the part of the shamanic path that interweaves the past, present, and future in a simultaneous reality. It allows for a vast panoramic view that will inform us and transform us in amazing ways. We too can inherit our divine birthright to grow up and become real human beings—real humane beings. Perhaps this is a better goal for all of humanity.

Nita’s Story

MY INITIATORY PATH TO SHAMANISM

Growing up on the Akimel O’odam Reservation in central Arizona, I was privileged to experience Native American teachings on a daily basis. My father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and his job at the time was in a small office in the tiny town of Sacaton. Integrated in my daily life were medicine walks, ceremony, and ritual, although more often than not these events were not considered sacred or even special. They were the activities of daily living in a culture that, to a degree, had not lost contact with the natural world.

My childhood was one of deep connection to the land, sky, and all of Earth’s creatures. Rattlesnakes were revered, feared, and yet respected by my Native American friends’ parents. While my Caucasian father would immediately shoot them, I also witnessed the snakes being gently and carefully handled with kindness and serious intent by my Native American friends. Even at a very young age, I felt the rightness of this kindness in my bones. I was traumatized seeing the rattlesnake shot, and mystified when I was told that my father had killed it to protect me. Yet, I couldn’t work it out—how was I separate from other creatures? Surely, killing one of them was also killing a part of me.

Any attempts to discuss this with my parents were met primarily with laughter. As I got older and insisted on my worldview of non-duality, my mother would counter with: You don’t really think that. Only terrible people think they are related to things like rattlesnakes or skunks. If I pushed back, my father would intervene with intensity and say, Stop this talk! You are killing your mother!

One day, when I was all of five years old, I had a realization. I said to myself, Clearly, I will be raising myself as they [my parents] don’t know what they’re doing. I was standing in the majesty of nature that was my backyard. I was facing the distant desert mountains that I related to as my elders, the ones whom I trusted to hold steady when all else was a moving target. A quiet, hot afternoon was dissolving into a warm evening’s dusk, and with the naive wisdom of a five-year-old, I discovered that I was on my own—an emotional orphan. Part of me, recognizing my parental inadequacy, both expanded and dissociated.

The beauty of this early awareness was that it led me to seek guidance outside of my nuclear family. The downside was my sense of being unloved and unlovable, leading to years of emotional distress and physical illness. The upside to illness is that it also may be a drive to seek solutions. Blessed with being raised on a Native American reservation, alternative lifestyles and spiritual practices surrounded me.

Further dissociation took place, and I learned to not believe my experience. This is the fundamental characteristic of soul loss.

As years passed, I heard over and over that I was killing my mother whenever I asserted my core beliefs that did not conform with the beliefs of my parents. When I was eleven, my mother had a very serious heart attack and almost died. Though she survived it, I believed it was my fault. I threw myself on the mercy of Jesus, prayed for forgiveness, promised to be good and to never cause my mother any trouble again. Yet, she kept having heart problems, and my father kept reminding me that I was the cause. My conclusion was that I was extra bad, and God was punishing me.

Hitting puberty, I rebelled. Begging for forgiveness and trying to be good without being loved for who I was shifted into a deep hatred of my mother. My heart felt as though it had turned to ice, and I felt myself shape-shift into a storybook villain. My fairy tales were analogous to contemporary prequels that depicted the early life of the evil witch, fairy, or other antagonistic villain. These characters were portrayed as evil characters who had been sensitive, loving, and connected to all things until disastrous events plummeted them into darkness, and they incurred soul loss as a result. Gregory McGuire’s Wicked, the rewrite of Maleficent by Disney, and the TV series Once are all examples of stories of true soul loss—a dark night of the soul where dissociation protects the self from destruction.

In 1964, I was being initiated into the mystery school we call adolescence. The world was being turned on its head by the Cultural Revolution. My personal rebellion against my internalized parental admonitions was reflected everywhere in rock and roll, antiwar demonstrations, and an invitation to turn on, tune in, drop out! Growing up on a reservation had connected me deeply to the Earth. It did not prepare me for the alienation of a material world. My parents did the best they could, meaning that they raised me as they had been parented, through alienation, punishment, and the crushing of hope. Depression-era childhoods had left them focused on the material world as the only reality. The world of rock and roll and the cultural shift of the ’60s gave me, as it did many baby boomers, a taste of living beyond the limitations of the material world—and I wanted more of that.

Star Wolf and Nita Gage would not meet for another twenty years. Their biographical stories were very different though both were in search of methods of working with others in ways that were authentic, healing, and transformative. Their stories continue throughout the book as their odyssey to become Soul Whisperers unfolds.

THE WORLD REIMAGINED BY THE SHAMAN’S PRISM

Hippie spiritual seekers advocated dropping out and tuning in, taking psychedelics, and running off to India with flowers in their hair to seek enlightenment. Many of these baby boomers seem to have come full circle in recent years, once again leading the way and forging new territory by exploring shamanism. However, this time they are seeking not to escape from the Earth but rather to inhabit it in a different way.

Eastern religions and cultures have often taught practices enabling one to let go of attachment to desires and earthly things. They focus on opening to cosmic awareness and to surrendering to the void to become self-aware and find inner peace. Conversely, shamanism invites us to come back in to our bodies and our communities. This focus creates a pathway to higher realms of wisdom. Shamanic consciousness has become a bridge between dimensions. It calls for a sacred integration of all parts of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit as multidimensional beings.

Common phrases in popular postmodern shamanic circles are the healer is within and we are becoming the walkers between the worlds. Shamanic philosophy teaches us that there are many unseen and seen dimensions. All are sacred worlds, not just the loftier ones. This view-point honors both the light and the dark experiences. It asks that we give up attachment to the concept of either/or thinking and start practicing a more holistic approach to living, thereby healing ourselves through embracing and embodying both the sacred and the profane in our lives.

This calls to mind the Serenity Prayer, which is as follows: "God (Creator/Great Mystery), grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,