Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Shamanism offers us a direct relationship with spirit, and through that ongoing relationship, guidance and direction. With the help of spirit, every individual can find his or her path of integrity and authenticity. <br><br> But sometimes that straight and narrow path looks really long and time feels very short. Have you ever just wanted a short cut? <br><br> The Trickster, found cross-culturally in shamanism, brings us direct relationship with the “Crazy Logic” Teachers of our world: Death, The Unknown, Chaos, and Darkness. These characters always know the shortest path to where we need to go. <br><br> Like any shortcut, it’s filled with brambles, steep climbs, and leaps of faith; but it always gets us there. These teachers offer excellent guidance in dealing with addictions, chronic fears, frustration and exhaustion. Work with them always builds character, but it also cultivates the internal richness necessary to bring up our light, and the courage to express that light with truth and humility in the world.

In these times that require sustained action to create change simultaneously in multiple arenas: political, spiritual, social, economic, and cultural, how do we sustain ourselves. How to we sustain ourselves as we engage day after day in our own inner work and the outer work needed in the world? How do we stay in our hearts for the endless clearings, extractions, the unraveling of thoughtforms, and depossessions and out of the very human frustration and rage at those feel entitled to everything at the expense of everyone else and the earth? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, returns to Betsy Bergstrom’s practice of Heart Centered Shamanic Depossession to explore how do we protect ourselves in these challenging times?

Working with spirit is at the heart of what defines shamanism as shamanism. What does “working with spirit” mean? What are shamans talking about when they speak of “spirit”? Isn’t it all just in their heads? Join us this week as shaman and host, Christina Pratt, explores what a working relationship meant in more ancient shamanic times and how it has transformed today. How do we create a working relationship with spirit? Once we do, how do we nurture and cultivate that relationship over time? And when do we know we have gone off the rails and are just making things up?

What is right relationship with power? Once we make a successful bid for power how do we use it? And, perhaps more important, how do we maintain and sustain that relationship with power without turning to control, dominance, or manipulation? “The line between the shaman and the sorcerer exists,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “but it remains elusive in the contemporary mind that requires black and white definitions and refuses the elegance of paradox and complimentary dualism.” Join us this week as we continue to explore what power means in the realm of the shaman. How can these ancient ways help us to resist the abundant abuses of power we experience around us each day?

What is power? How do we make a bid for power? And, perhaps more important, how do we recover when our bid for power goes sideways and we are left wondering what just happened and how do I get home from this remote jungle location? Join us this week as José Luis Stevens joins host, Christina Pratt, to share stories from his new book “Encounters with Power: Adventures and Misadventures on the Shamanic Path of Healing.” José is the president and cofounder with his wife Lena Stevens of Power Path Seminars, dedicated to bringing the indigenous wisdom from shamans around the globe into business and everyday life.

How do we walk the line between the Old Story Rules and the New System we are creating? Once you have found the path to your soul’s purpose, how do you stay the course? Our lives are often a great web of responsibilities, expectations, addictions, and distractions that create conflict in our hearts and rob the clarity in our minds. In that tension between who you have been and who you are becoming one hesitates to act and loses confidence that there was ever true guidance at all. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she answers listeners’ questions about the day-to-day effort and art of living your soul’s purpose. The secret is remembering that we have only one true responsibility, which is to live our soul’s purpose. And no matter the situation that arises on that journey, we have the most power to create change on ourselves in the moment.

Those who engage in life and live it to its fullest, die many, many small deaths. When we live fully, learning, healing, and expressing who we truly are then the person we have been is regularly outmoded by our growth. Death is necessary if we are to move authentically in the world. Nowhere is this more important than in our shamanic practice and our choice of shamans to help us. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores our misconceptions of what makes shamanism “real.” Authenticity in shamanism requires the sacrifice of contemporary sense of entitlement. Authenticity requires sacrifice of the old mind and ideas of individuality and separation for the greater awareness of the interconnectivity of all things. Authenticity requires sacrifice of the old heart and feelings of selfish, need-based love for selfless surrender to the calling to serve the people and the planet and the times we live in.

Are your visions just illusions? Are your dreams really just fantasies? How do we know that our connection with spirit is authentic? Regardless of type of altered state, whether waking or dreaming, light or deep, induced by rhythm or sacred plants, ultimately it will have to be made intelligible through the mind. And the contemporary mind is filled to over-flowing with many things, mostly all entirely not shamanic. The contemporary, Western-trained mind is not prepared for authentic shamanic experience. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what makes shamanism of any kind “authentic” and how we cultivate the connection with the invisible world necessary for the accurate interpretation of the information found there. Authenticity in shamanism is more than a set of skills with an academic pedigree or a bloodline or being one of the chosen messengers of Aya. Authenticity in shamanism requires sacrifice of self.

“Our times call for the transformation of rallies, protests, and marches into massive, intentional sacred healing rituals, in which we ally ourselves with all humans, the compassionate spirits, the ancestors, and the spirit of the earth and stars.” This is the vision of our guest, Lenore Norrgard, shamanic healer and social alchemist. Lenore will discuss her journey from revolutionary social activist to profound social healer. She joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her experiences leading social healing rituals from the White House to inner north Portland. Lenore explains that, “Through ritual we remember our oneness with all things, even our opponents, and find our way past oppositional stances to a place where we create collective healing for all and profound social change.”

Shamanic practitioners could direct our current wave of energy for change into actual manifest changes in our everyday lives, if they would work together. To do so shamanic practitioners would have to use their specific skill set in ways that are more creative, collective, and honest about the underlying causes of the challenges and opportunities in our time. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues to explore the shaman as activist, a conversation begun with Kelley Harrell and Evelyn Rysdyk over the past weeks. As contemporary practitioners it is our role and our responsibility to take action to manifest needed changes for the good of all living things. And we must begin to do this now, in new and more courageous ways.

Literally millions of women around the world of all ages, with children, men and other loved ones, marched peacefully for an awe inspiring, record breaking, historic show of force, love, and dignity on Sunday, January 22, 2017 to cry out for change. How could we direct this wave of energy for change into actual manifest changes in our every day lives? In ancient times we would go the shaman, and through her, we would ask the spirits how. Join us this week as contemporary shamanic practitioners and teachers, Evelyn Rysdyk and Christina Pratt explore the fact that shamans have always been activists and shamanic work is the work of transformation. As contemporary practitioners it is our role and our responsibility to take action to manifest needed changes for the good of all living things. How do we do that now?

The fixed and constant idea of the invisible world ordered in upper, middle, and lower worlds is a fundamental assumption of neoshamanism. However, if the relationship between humans and helping spirits is truly a working relationship, then it is possible that humans are changing the spirits even as the spirits are help us to change ourselves? Join us this week and contemporary shamanic practitioners and teachers, Kelley Harrell and Christina Pratt explore the signs that humans are changing the dynamics of not only the physical world, but also the invisible world of energy and spirit. Are there spirit world parallels between our affects on the physical world, climate change and polluting our elemental resources, and the spirit world? And most importantly, if there are, what shall we do about it?

One of the great challenges and ongoing questions in contemporary shamanic practice is “what is initiation?” or more accurately “am I initiated?” It is messy because hundreds of years of colonization and genocide across our globe have deeply damaged, if not destroyed, traditional shamanic cultures. The current dominant religions and governments have changed how traditional practices work and don’t work. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the fact that the invisible world could care less about religions, governments, and broken traditions. It just keeps reaching into the pool of humanity, grabbing us by the scruff of our soul, and trying to initiate the shamans needed in this time. This week we explore listener questions about initiation. First and foremost, initiation is not a specific ritual, it’s not time spent, it’s not the fact that you paid for it; it is a function. If that function does not occur, initiation hasn’t happened.

The shaman’s working relationship with spirit defines the practice or the healing as “shamanic”. It is the basic working relationship of shamanism and it is built on four even more fundamental relationships. The first fundamental is your relationship with the invisible world as a whole. The second is your relationship with ordinary reality and how you understand your place in the world around you. The third fundamental is your relationship with your personal energy in larger energetic reality around you. And finally your shamanic practice is guided by your relationship with your humanity and the quality of the choices that shape your path to your destiny. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how you cultivate health, well-being and efficacy in your practice and the fundamentals that are absolutely essential if you feel you are called to take that next step from shamanic practice into shamanic healing..

The ability to face the impossible and do it anyway is at the core of what it means to be human. At their best humans have the ability to think outside the box, to take action guided by values that truly matter, to take risks, to be vulnerable, and to take action in connection with others, both physical and spiritual. In 2016 we lost so many luminaries who truly inspired us and gained people of gargantuan egos and questionable mental health who model for us our own deepest untouched Shadow and some of the worst humanity has to offer. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores learning from those who inspire us to do the impossible and become the person we never dreamed of. By knowing we are not enough and doing it anyway we become the person who is enough. When faced with things that are unjust, inhumane, and just plain wrong, doing the impossible is required if we are to be humane.

The solstice of 2016 gives us the opportunity to step off the wheel of the Old World whether we are enjoying winter or summer. A solstice fire ritual is an opportunity to work with our most ancient ancestor, Fire, to release our deep habits of “life as we have known it” and step into the space between stories. To move toward the New World we must explore our unconscious collusion with the dominant paradigm that drives the old, familiar reality through us into manifest reality. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, offers us a ritual for both hemispheres to release the Old Story. Regardless of our conscious position in the world we are all playing roles of one kind or another in the old script. And we have shamanic skills that allow us to explore our unconscious collusion with the Old Story and expose the ways that we deceive, mislead, and otherwise excuse ourselves from stepping fully into our authenticity and the unknown.

The Psychedelic Marine is a vivid portrait of both the anguish of war and the power of entheogens and shamanic ritual to help combat veterans complete the inner journey combat begins, and heal from PTSD and the deep, traumatic loss from war. Author, Alex Seymour, enlisted as a teen in the Royal Marines Commandos and served for six years, completing two tours of duty, only to re-enlist 20 years later. Alex served another tour of duty in Afghanistan where he suffered severe losses. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, speaks with Alex about the relationship between our fears, beliefs, traumas, and PTSD and the depth at which we can let go when faced with our own direct experience of The Sacred. Join us this week as we explore how ayahuasca in shamanic ceremony can offer a way to help soldiers prepare for war and help combat veterans heal from it.

Shadow work is the sacred ground of decades of men’s work and women’s work pioneered by early visionaries like Jean Houston and Robert Bly and those that followed. If all of the decades of shadow work was actually all shadow work we would not have the ugly reality of the United States’ collective shadow staring us in the face right now, waiting to be manipulated in the debacle of our 2016 presidential election. “Shadow work isn’t psychological work, its heart work,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “As soon as the ego shoved that aspect of self into the Shadow, that aspect of self was moved out of the realm of the mind into the realm of the heart.” While insight and understanding are helpful and they satisfy the mind, true shadow transformation occurs in the darkest realms of the heart. It begins with nothing less than a daring rescue mission to free the falsely accused, imprisoned and forgotten self. And that is just the beginning.

Advertising seduces through free-floating anxiety. Hatred seduces through cowardice of the heart and the fear of risking acceptance of the Other. Greed seduces through the illusion of the easier, cheaper, or more profitable path. It is your choice to be seduced or to become immune to seduction. To become unseducible is to say “yes” to the dignity of your soul and “no” to the invitation to live life beneath the nobility of your human spirit. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the first steps on the path to becoming unseducible and looks ahead to how we must walk during the collapse of the Old Story. We are better than this and we must become unseducible to prove it.

How do we find the eye in an intensifying storm of disorder, unrest, and fear? Shamanic people, traditional and contemporary, know that Trickster had a hand in making this world and it is that hand we need to grasp to pull ourselves up into the possibility inherent in this chaos. At the same time we need to look within and track the unconscious energies that want to recreate the old world as it has been. Indigenous people have been tracking this unconscious psychic virus for many centuries calling it by many names, like e’epa and wetiko. Wetiko is a true illness of the soul and is at the root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we can use our shamanic skills to become immune to the wetiko virus and learn to paradoxically ground in the chaos and co-create a New World.

Many in shamanic practice seek to deepen their relationship with their own ancestral lines and, in this, to reconnect with the shamanic roots in their own bloodline. Contemporary people seek an authentic practice in a time of broken lineages, appropriation, and deep histories of abuse, dominance and pain. Shaman teacher/healer, speaker, artist and author, Evelyn Rysdyk, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new book, The Norse Shaman: Ancient Spiritual Practices of the Northern Tradition and the vision it offers us in our own time. While we face a life-ending Ragnorok of our own creation in climate change and ecological destruction, we can choose to learn from our ancient ancestors to sacrifice what must die, to transform ourselves, and to work together with the Earth, each other and spirit to “bring forth a verdant new world”.

What actions are required to unite a nation divided? If we are not insane (and one wonders these days) then we must innovate and take new actions if we are to create a different outcome. Shamanic skills give us the ability to engage spirit in creating different actions through direct revelation and asking for help. But will we have the courage to explore what is needed with a whole-heart and commitment to a greater, shared truth. And will we have the courage to take those actions? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how easily we can slip into shadow when our world asks us to act consciously from the heart. Will we continue to allow our minds to be hijacked by the media or will we use our shamanic skills to take the power to shape our collective dream? Will we rise to the hope of our spirit or allow that dream to continue to be rendered impotent and invisible. And in our body’s disgust with the whole thing, will we slip into rebellion?

Now that the ugly racist, sexist, violent, ignorant underbelly of America is exposed for the world to see, will we learn to heal the wounds of our culture? Will we simply move on to ogle the next bloody accident of our culture, get distracted by the next shiny thing, or martyr ourselves on the sad cruelty of our world? Why would we be such cowards when the world is full of beauty and blessings? This ugly underbelly is a blessing in disguise, a gift, a calling to the human you are dreaming yourself to become. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we use our shamanic skills to turn the trauma of this election year into medicine. Can we step up into the disease within our culture and be the healing salve of inclusion, vulnerability, and the honesty necessary to embrace being the change we are seeking?

True visionaries are a dime a dozen. Humanity is full of great ideas. What we find in short supply are those people who will actually manifest a new vision. These are people who have the capacity to stay out of fantasy thinking, hold two divergent thoughts simultaneously and tirelessly, and work on all parts of the project indefatigably. Vision is easily distorted by doubt, perceiving reality as a limitation, and denying the truth because you simply don’t like it. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what it takes to manifest a truly new vision. With the help of spirit and shamanic skills we can see through the lies we tell ourselves that keep us from doing good work and see through the hype and illusion to the actual power of our vote.

Leading is a thankless job, whether you lead a community garden or a nation. People criticize, blame, and project their unacknowledged flawed selves onto leaders without hesitation and regardless of fact or fiction. People project their unlived dreams and desires on to leaders so that they do not have to take full responsibility for the life they are unwilling to create for themselves. The contemporary dynamic between the leader and those led is deeply steep in shadow and misuse of power. If we are to become a new people who can write a new story then we must drag our relationship with leaders out of the shadow. Only then can we come into right relationship with our power and cultivate the capacity to lead well and to be led. Join host and shaman, Christian Pratt, as she explores the shamanic values that shape a new vision of leadership and the shamanic skills needed to bring that vision into the world.

Timespirits exist in the shared field and can motivate the actions of individuals in the collective. The more unaware you are of your self and the timespirits that exist in your field the more easily you become possessed and motivated by them. Some timespirits are in the forefront like the forced roles of racism while others are in the background like the unknown path of diversity. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the influence of timespirits in shamanic practice. Conscious engagement with timespirits can help us to transform ourselves individually, create lasting and resilient shamanic communities, and work within non-shamanic communities to create the humane, informed, abundant, and inspirited ways of living together that celebrate all life.

What are the tangible ways we can engage shamanic skills to approach both systemic racism and our own internalized racism? They begin when we engage the Visionary to access the power of shared dreaming and the Ancestral Helping Spirits to learn from those who have gone before us. Those who colonized North America dreamed of religious freedom, but hypocritically took action, perpetrating genocide and slavery, to ensure freedom only for themselves. Today we live in that hypocrisy, not in that dream. Join host, Christina Pratt and her guest, Langston Kahn, as they explore what is necessary to step out of the shadows of our unresolved past and weave a new vision. How can we use our shamanic skills together to go beyond the limited imagination of our ancestors and make the medicine we need from the great diversity of our time.

Can contemporary American’s transform their consciousness—and unconsciousness— in their engagement with systemic racism? Shamanic practice offers tangible ways we can approach the transformation of our own internalized racism. When we choose to engage powerfully and skillfully on our selves in this moment we become the people who can then transform the system itself. Join host Christina Pratt and her guest Langston Kahn as they continue their exploration of how we can effectively engage the double wounding of racism and the roots of this cultural disease from a shamanic perspective. There are ways to use our shamanic skills to make new medicine for this ancient illness and step up, together as humanity, to shape a social fabric our descendants would be honored to inherit.

The poison arrow of racism is a double wound. It is the arrow—the direct injustice inherent in the act that harms the heart and mind. It is the poison—the insidious, creeping awareness that the larger system condones the injustice, righteously maintaining a double standard that has no basis in scientific or spiritual truth. Does shamanism offer contemporary American consciousness a possibility of true transformation? Join host Christina Pratt and her guest Langston Kahn as they explore the double wounding of racism and the roots of this cultural disease from a shamanic perspective. Can we use our shamanic skills to make new medicine for an ancient illness, to lean effectively into our own discomfort, and shape a social fabric our descendants would be honored to inherit?

The collusive, fearful, racist underbelly of the American culture has been exposed by the hate-filled rhetoric, violence, and lies of the current presidential race. The avoidance of social issues condoned by the 1980’s politics of political correctness have done precisely what avoidance does, allow that which we are avoiding to grow unchecked. In this same timeframe shamanism has blossomed into contemporary American consciousness offering a possibility of transformation. Join host Christina Pratt and her guest Langston Kahn as they explore the double wounding of racism and the roots of this cultural disease from a shamanic perspective. Can we use our shamanic skills to make new medicine for an ancient illness, to lean effectively into our own discomfort, and shape a social fabric our descendants would be honored to inherit?

Blessings are the way to give life to that which you value, to give it strength and help it to survive and to thrive. Through blessings we can give life and protection to what is new and uncertain. They are a way to give strength to that which doesn’t have strength yet, like a new story for a new world, and to give it time to take shape and build resonance. Blessings can be a formal, complex ritual process or a simple act of love, like calling on the spirits of the family totem to protect a child as she leaves for school. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the power of blessings and how we can use them with intention to create change in these challenging times. Blessings call on energies of the invisible world, like elementals, nature spirits, and angels, and ask for their participation in our lives in specific ways. Whether simple or grand, our blessings are most powerful when they are an expression of a deep relationship with spirit, one that we have already cultivated with our faith, gratitude, and practice.

Faith does not require religion and is often stronger without it. Faith is the power to stand in the Unknown with uncertainty and discomfort and take a new step forward anyway… and then another… and then another. It is the power to do what hasn’t been done and what feels impossible. We must cultivate the capacity for faith, barrels of it, or we will not be able to be the change that we seek. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores faith and the need to cultivate faith that does not inspire separation from others via religion, race, or nationality. To rise to the challenges of our time we must know without ever getting proof that we were born to be the medicine for the illness, disease, and unrest of our time. And that it will require faith, again and again, to surrender who we are for who we could become so that we can be that medicine. Faith is power.

Gratitude is a choice to see beyond the surface of instant gratification. Gratitude is not a luxury for people who get what they want, but a requirement for anyone who wants the help of spirit with the impossible. When we are without gratitude we are without perspective. The visionary capacity of the heart slips into doubt, we fixate on what is not working, and blame others for our problems. When we orient in gratitude, we are forced out of an attitude of entitlement and blame. Only then can we see the affects of our own internalized racism, sexism, and other systems of hatred and fear. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the power of gratitude and why it is necessary in these challenging times. Gratitude must be made concrete through action and intent. The power engages when you show gratitude at all times, make every gesture of your life a labor of love and retribution for the gifts you receive and will receive.

To bring our mature courageous hearts into action in the world we must be resilient. But resiliency is the first casualty in a culture that avoids discomfort through mood altering prescription drugs, escaping through recreational drugs, and learning skills to clear the discomfort away, without ever asking why. The root of resiliency is in the courage to heal the deeps wounds of your past, to risk stepping through fear into a new way of life, and to engage in the mundane daily practices that cultivate a robust inner life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores why any true path of healing or raising consciousness cultivates resiliency. Living your authentic life is not accomplished by "special snowflakes" who seek to control their environment, but by courageous and resilient, whole-hearted people who aren’t afraid to make a mess.

The highly skilled wounded child arises when an adult learns an assortment of excellent skills to move out of the pain caused today by their unreconciled childhood without healing the wounds of that childhood along the path of that journey. The highly skilled wounded child tends to over-react and under-react regularly and then take responsibility for using their skillset to clear the painful reaction without investigating why they over or under reacted in the first place. They learn to clearly communicate to others how the others need to behave differently without seeing their own righteous positionality. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the growing phenomenon of the highly skilled wounded child, how to recognize this behavior in your self, and most importantly, how we can use our shamanic skills to heal the wounds of the past, cultivate resiliency, and bring our mature courageous hearts into action in the world.

Discernment, the ability to accurately tell one thing from another, is a necessary quality of wisdom, along with objectivity and clarity. Cultivating discernment is critical for living an emotionally and energetically healthy life. It is even more essential when we engage in the invisible worlds as we do in shamanic practice. Until we learn to discern we will not be interpreting energies, messages, or experiences accurately. “At the most basic level discernment requires differentiation of self from other,” explains our guest, Mary Shutan, creator of “The Discernment Course.” Join us this week as Mary joins host, Christina Pratt, to explore the steps to cultivate discernment and the issues that arise when we skip that basic step in our development. When we reframe our lack of discernment as super sensitivity or empathy we undermine our health and the development of our true gifts.

Living with chronic illness is a challenge, a challenge more and more people are being required to navigate daily in an already busy life. How can we use our shamanic practice most effectively and efficiently to respond to chronic illness, whether our own, a client’s, or with a loved one? How do we cultivate good energy hygiene or even go for a walk daily when chronic pain is robbing us of the energy we do have? What is reasonable to expect or responsible to promise from shamanic healing as a resource for the chronically ill? This week author, teacher, and shaman, Kelley Harrell, joins host, Christina Pratt, to explore how we can apply shamanic practice to address chronic illness and how to avoid the fantasy, illusion—no matter how well meaning, and the false claims that arise from our pain and fear of the Unknown.

A mythical beast is a beast that we believe never existed in physical form, like dragons, the basilisk, and the phoenix in the Harry Potter novels. But never is a long time. If they never existed, then why do similar mythical beasts appear in different stories the mythology of peoples who never spoke or met? Whether you believe they were real or are imaginary, mythical beasts are very special helping spirits to work with in shamanic altered states. “You need to pay attention,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “There is a quality of being not of this world when we engage the mythical beasts. But we work with them because they remind us that our souls are not limited to this world either. Mostly we engage the mythical beasts to grow up and stop acting like our silly, violent, consumerist culture has anything to do with the real reality and why we are here.

Elemental Spirits are often ignored as we reach for helping spirits in the vast range of land spirits, from the smallest garden sprite to the great mountain spirits and all the many manifestations between. And yet the spirits of the elements are constant teachers of balance and flow, the two fundamental energetic principles for physical health and mental well-being. Join us this week as geomancer, Daniel Abney, joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to explore our health and its relationship with the plant and elemental spirits. In our addictive rush to the altered states offered by the plants like ayahuasca, San Pedro, and peyote, we miss the powerful medicinal force of plants as helping spirits and the exceptionally direct and wise restorative force of the elemental spirits.

“Nature communicates through energy, not words. It communicates with us through signs, symbols, omens, and feelings,” explains our guest Ana Larramendi of thehollowbone.com. Ana joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to share her wisdom and experience in communicating with the vast range of spirits of the land, from the smallest garden sprite to the great apu spirits of the volcanic mountains of the ring of fire. Ana cautions that our human tendency to approach all experience from an anthropocentric perspective is our greatest hurdle in communicating with our most abundant and ever present helping spirits. We need to slow down, be silent, visit regularly, and always engage with gratitude and respect. When we help the spirits of the environment around us they are able to help us live more vital, vibrant, and interconnected lives.

Deities have a long history of engaging as helping spirits with people in shamanic altered states. What does it mean when a deity enters your journey scape? How do we navigate cultivating right relationship with a being who has a living tradition and long history with humans, expects certain protocol we may not know or understand, and has their own agency? And how do we know the difference between big, intense energies like deities and archetypes and why should we bother with them? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest Langston Kahn of Occupy-Your-Heart.com, as they discuss how to navigate right relationship with deities and archetypes, the distinction, the cautions, and ultimately, the gifts that they offer to those who are willing to step out of the safe constructs of the mind and enter the deep waters and intense currents of a nonordinary life.

Why would I want a working relationship with my ancestors when I can’t stand my own relations? Fair question when so much addiction, depression, social pressure, and sexual dysfunction gets handed down generation to generation. What we fail to understand is that our break with our Ancestral Helping Spirits is in large part why we experience such illness and abuse of power in our family lines. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we cultivate a strong working relationship with true ancestral helping spirits, avoid ghosts, use our relationship with our ancestors to mend our feelings of alienation, isolation, and loneliness. As we learn from those who have gone before us we can properly reach to the descendants to learn to ask for more from life and more from our selves.

Direct communication with our helping spirits is one of the greatest gifts in the reintroduction of shamanism into contemporary life. Yet in this age of social media and everyday twitter fights, people have all but lost the art of honorable, sincere, and heart-felt communication. Your helping spirits can’t hear your whining, don’t care how many people are following you, and see dishonor in the entitlement you take for granted. How do we cultivate a strong working relationship with our helping spirits when we don’t even know how to communicate with each other without our Smart phones. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the simplicity of working with our helping spirits, ways to cultivate a strong working relationship with spirit in everyday, “normal” life, and how learning to discern with your helping spirits can restore your trust in the path of your heart.

Contemporary shamanic practice looks different depending on the tradition, cosmology, or beliefs that guide your practice. The variations in authentic shamanic practice are a rich and complex field of good work being done today. At the same time there is a line for most practitioners when their early experimentation and uncertain dabbling became a way of living that they could not back out of. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she responds to multiple questions from listeners about what contemporary shamanic practice can look like. How do we hold space at work or in our unwieldy extended families? How do we practice without community? How do we practice in a community that doesn’t? How do we maintain balance sufficient to practice when contemporary life seems determined to distract, deny, and disillusion? How do we deepen our practice with all the demands on our time to become the practitioners needed by our time?

We need initiation into adulthood desperately, as individuals and as a culture. At this time the lack of initiation is at the root of much of what ails people on this planet, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Initiation is a bit of a mystery for children raised on tales of knights who slay the Dragon and are given the princess as a prize, a tale that further perpetuates the patterns of abuse of power in the Old Story that so deeply characterize any male-dominated, mentally-fixated culture. Yet, shamanic cultures, still alive today, share a different story of our path to power that is deeply rooted in the initiatory process. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores a deeper understanding of the function of initiation into adulthood and how returning to this practice creates a new foundation for the health and well-being of the young, the old and the elders.

Initiation is not graduation. Initiation is not the formal certification of the successful completion of a course of shamanic training, nor is it the ritual or ceremony that celebrates that completion publically. Initiation is a function; it is the enduring transformation of the collective energy of a person into a state of being that did not previously exist. Thus one can experience an initiation process without being initiated. One can experience change and transform without being initiated. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the functional transformation at the heart of initiation. When we dispel our misinformation, myths, and wishful thinking we will be better able to co-create the rituals needed to heal our hearts, broken and betrayed by the culture that did not initiate us, and then begin anew to initiate our young into the power and responsibility of true spiritual adulthood.

Right relationship with the elements allows their energy to flow into our lives, creating well-being by balancing our own excesses and deficiencies. Learning to work effectively with the elements through shrines, songs, ritual, and ceremony allows these essential energies to nourish the essence of our own souls. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores what it means to enter into right relationship with the elements, creative ways cultivate relationship that fit into our contemporary lives, and how to know when you need an elemental ritual to deal with what life has given you. Through right relationship with the elements we gain courage, presence, the ability to change as life demands without losing our true essence, and the ability to release and begin a new, no matter how improbable change seems.

The outer world reflects our inner world. Pollution reflects the ways we pollute our bodies, bloody conflicts reflect our inner struggle in immature, self-centered times, and our waste of the earth’s resources reflects the many ways we waste the energy and essence of our lives in feeling lost and addicted. Yet the answers for who we are and how to live well are right here, waiting for us to learn again to pay attention. The Earth is the great teacher of our True Nature with its flowing harmony of ecosystems and the wild beauty of nature. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the is great power in our True Nature and the fundamental healing in letting go of all that no longer resonates with it. When we allow our True Nature to flow through our lives and out through our words and actions, we come into a natural alignment with our essential selves. Living in that alignment we focus inward to energize our deepest core purpose and outward to work in a way that is good for all living things.

It is particularly important today —given the vast changes moving in the earth and across environments— that we learn again to work with the Spirits of the Land. We have passed the possibility of going back and must now go forward. Will we go forward with consciousness and skill or continue consuming, deaf, dumb, and blind to our affect on the world around us? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, revisits “Working with the Spirits of the Land” in the context of learning about the structures and spirits and energies that are part of the vast practice of working with land. Whether you are a practitioner or an everyday human, your flourishing is tied to the flourishing of the land. To flourish in the coming changes we must live and work with the Spirits of the Land today.

What can we do to address climate change and other big challenges to the balance of life on earth? We can do a lot when we remember that our shamanic skills allow us to engage effectively in issues that feel overwhelming and out of our reach. Whether our shamanic skills are just budding and basic or advanced and in full bloom, we can bring our shamanic skills to bear on a larger scale to address the needs right now on earth. This week, shaman and earth healer, Ana Larramendi, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her work with the earth in clearing, restoration, and deep facilitation of a return to right relationship with the earth. Ana’s Earth Tenders Apprenticeship is unparalleled in the training it offers practitioners in developing awareness and skills that are applicable to a broad range of situations requiring earth-healing interventions in our modern times.