Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Hatred is a luxury we do not have. It costs too much, eventually destroying all that truly matters and leaving the soul lost as collateral damage. What can we do to reverse the rising tide of hatred in the United States? Using our shamanic skills we can draw on our helping spirits to support us in small, everyday acts to shift the story playing out around us. For the more experienced practitioner we can engage in large acts of ritual, healing, and ceremony that reach the very source of the hatred and focus the power of transformation there. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the small, subversive daily acts that allow each of us to engage hatred where we meet it and the larger shamanic acts needed to disengage today’s hatred from the historic roots that nourish it. Large and small, it is work we must all engage in or we have learned nothing from history. Hatred ultimately costs us our souls.

Feeling fear—whether real or imagined— initiates a variety of chemical responses in the body that support the needed physical response, either fight, flight, freeze, or focus. It is a natural response to specific or immediate danger to our physical well-being. But why do we feel paralyzing fear when there is no imminent danger? More importantly how do we work with fear, whether brought on by specific danger, a perceived psychological threat, or flashing back out of time in a PTSD induced response to life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the terrain of contemporary fears and how we can use our shamanic skills to address fear, to discern what the true source of a fear is, and to transform the patterns of fear that allow illusions to run our lives.

This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares case studies of shamanic healing with people who found a path to health and freedom by engaging their four wisdom bodies. Shamanic skills allow us to develop and to work in all four wisdom bodies: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body simultaneously. When one wisdom body is out of balance, deficient, or dominant it can throw our whole experience of life out of alignment with our power and greater truth. Join us as we explore what it feels like to trap your processes in the dominance of one wisdom body, the distortion that creates, and how real people have used their shamanic skills to open to new wisdom and cut a direct path to health and well-being.

The Mental Wisdom Body is largely locked away in our inability to distinguish our self from our mind. We are more than our mind and until we can tap the “more” we cannot refine our mental wisdom body. Our guide to access the wisdom of the mental body is the Seer, or Visionary Self, who teaches us how to get out of our own way and allow the innate expression of our unique genius to rise to our awareness and unfold. The wisdom of the mental body teaches us the right use of the past, the discipline of non-judgment and the practice of self-reflection without blame or shame. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to refine the mental wisdom body and train our brains to release the chokehold it has on our hearts and our deepest, most passionate vision for why we are here.

You have a vision that you love and the wisdom to live it, but where does the power come from to make it real? The power comes from the Teacher Self’s ability to see through his/her own stories to awaken the vast, complex, and intricately interconnected wisdom of Spiritual Body. The strong heart of the Teacher gives us access to our power to step into our own self-mastery and sovereignty. And the Trickster trips up our mind, slips us a heart mickey, and wakes us up on the real road to our authenticity and purpose. When we live far from our heart’s true longing the voice of our spiritual wisdom body becomes hard to hear. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we awaken the spiritual wisdom body and engage it in creating the world our hearts know is possible.

The Emotional Wisdom Body is a world unto itself. It is every bit is vast, complex, and intricately interconnected as the mental wisdom body but functioning on an entirely different logic. Our guides in engaging this logic are Crazy Woman and the Warrior Self. The true code of the Warrior Self is to feel your feelings, honestly and courageously, to refuse the seduction to deny emotions or indulge them, and to learn to discern what is really going on. While the true code of Crazy Woman is to recognize when we are in a moment of crazy logic and to follow its path without out needing to know, getting an explanation, or securing a guarantee. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to access the emotional wisdom body and express the courage of the heart.

When we live far from our true nature the voice of our physical wisdom body becomes hard to hear. The guidance that could bring us to robust well-being gets replaced by the long suffering voice of the Martyr, who can always work one more hour, and the seduction of the Addict, who convinces us that there is a good reason to do it one more time, again. With shamanic skills and the guidance of the Healer and Death we can find our passion, to say no to our old stories, and recover the courage to love. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to access the physical wisdom body and use its guidance to carve a path back to our true nature and the vital well-being that is our body’s deepest knowing.

Shamanic skills allow us to engage with the world around us, each other, and ourselves in a nonordinary way that integrates intelligence and intimacy, vision and practicality. Shamanic skills are unique in that to use them is to engage all of our four wisdom bodies: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body simultaneously. There are many diverse and powerful modalities to practice and most don’t allow you access to all four wisdom bodies, except at the highest levels of mastery. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores not only how we can access all the wisdom available to us, but why it is so important to see ourselves, our world, and our shamanism through something more than our mind’s eye. As one of our greatest minds said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”

Whose life do you want to be living? And how do you live the life that is an expression of your unique genius? To have the energy to live authentically we need to cultivate a vital and robust energy body. To do that we need to attend to both the energy that we are, the energy bucket, and the energy we bring into the bucket. Qi gong, time in nature, and naps can fill the bucket, while a day that requires you ignore your body, work beyond your ability to think, and drink caffeine to survive the day usually empties the bucket. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how cultivate the different dynamics of good energy body hygiene, part four of our series. Shamanic skills and awareness can help us to focus our energy on practices that are efficient and effective in cultivating good energy body hygiene.

Conserving and protecting your energy resources are essential to live well. Healthy energetic boundaries are necessary to respond flexibly to what the day offers while staying focused on your vision in the face of multiple distractions. When you choose to ignore your boundaries or to shield and over-fortify, you lose or waste energy throughout the day and experience miscommunication and dissatisfaction in relationships. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we create healthy boundaries, part three of our energy body hygiene series. Shamanic peoples understand the energetics of relationship with the physical and the invisible worlds. Healthy boundaries with both worlds allow focus and resources to flow into you, your relationships and your path to your destiny.

Grounding is a choice. It isn’t something you heal, its something you do. Good healthy, daily grounding can change the patterns of both stagnant, depressed energies as well as scattered, fragmented energies. To ground is to show up and be present in your body, which is the first step to everything else that really matters. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how to ground, part two of our energy body hygiene series. Energy body hygiene is the foundation of living well in today’s world. Without solid grounding not matter where we are, what is going on, or what altered state we are in, we are unable to discern the truth, which is a dangerous place to find yourself in your shamanic work.

To live well in your human body you must think of it as an energy body and a physical body. The world looks physical and solid, but in reality it’s all energy and it’s all connected—and so are you. Whether you are engaged in religion, spirituality, shamanism or just plain living life you are still an energy being living in an energy world. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores energy body hygiene and the interface with physical life that makes up the basics of living well. Energy body hygiene is the foundation of the ability to accurately discern multiple energies in a rigorous shamanic practice, to clarify reasons you may feel like an empath when you are not, and to cultivate the energy that you need to live your true, authentic life.

We need shamanism now for the same reason we needed it in the beginning. The “first shaman” came in many forms to many different peoples around the world, but they all came for the same reason: to teach us to be better humans. The humans couldn’t figure out how to live here in a good way with the environment and they couldn’t figure out how to live together without killing each other. Sounds pretty much like humans today. “This is why shamanism matters today,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “because it answers the question how? It gives us ways to transform.” With all of the great people doing really good work today we have to remember that nothing will change until we all become different people. Join us this week as we explore how we can change ourselves to become the change needed in the world now.

We are spirit incarnate. The first decision that we make in life, when we are very smart and still part of the Oneness, is to take a body. This body exists in an illusion of space and time, but a convincing illusion that we call life. We experience space and time and fear and love and we make up stories. Some of these stories become masks that we wear; the good mother, the best husband, the start-up billionaire, the disinterested in your world ‘cuz I already know everything ayahuasca raver, the person you believe you should be, or the person you are afraid that you are. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to engage more deeply in our shamanic practice to shed these masks that we hide behind, step up to the calling of our true self, and respond as the medicine needed for the ills of our time.

“We all suffer. We are all sacred. We are all bound together. We are all fallible. We are all capable of redemption.” And we are all capable of making peace. In his excellent new book, Talking Stick: Peacemaking as a Spiritual Path, author, educator, and peacemaker, Stephan Beyer gives us the guidance and practices necessary to use our shamanic skills to embody peace. Join us this week as Stephan and host, Christina Pratt, explore how our own hierarchical and transactional thinking propagates non-peace in our relationships day by day. Stephan explains that to become peacemakers, “We must learn to have a listening heart; we must learn to have an undefended heart; we must disarm ourselves. And then we can begin to disarm others.”

In this time of profound ignorance justified as American politics, escalating racial violence, homicidal cyber bullying, and ever-present aggression against women, it is easy to forget that ritual matters. It is easy to forget, in the face of humanity’s collective madness, that love matters and that ritual can bring our love to bear on the world. “Humans carry the triple fires of passion, truth, and clarity,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “They are all required in equal parts to muster the fierce love necessary to be the medicine for the people and for our time.” We go to the fire in ritual to renew our own fires, to release the things we carry that block our flames, and to let go of the things we do that put our fires out. Join us this week as we explore the approach and embrace of our winter solstice fire in ritual.

Sleep is profoundly peaceful. In this time of escalating racial violence, cyber bullying, and aggression against women, we have no frame of reference for the serene, peaceful, and ineffable nature of sleep. Half of the adults in America struggle with sleeplessness and the related health risks while children stay up all night online, unlearning their natural ability to surrender into sleep. As a whole, our culture has lost the art of sleep and with it, our access to our deep dreaming and yin restoration. Our guest, Dr. Rubin Naiman, explains “our challenge is to appreciate the physiological mechanisms of sleep without sacrificing its essential transcendent qualities. … we must learn to be comfortable with its mystery.” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest this week as they explore finding, befriending, and entering again into deep intimacy with sleep and dreaming.

Appropriation is theft; it is to take something without the owner’s permission. Cultural appropriation almost always involves members of the dominant culture taking from cultures of minority groups. This includes taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts and the unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, stories, cuisine, traditional medicine, rituals, and ceremonies. Spiritual appropriation involves assuming the right to work with helping sprits, deities, and religious symbols from another culture. This week host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, explore appropriation in contemporary shamanism, why it is harmful, and unnecessary. Through education and awareness of history, respect, and the willingness to take to steps to create right relationship, contemporary practitioners can create depth and authenticity in their practices.

Everyday fear-based thinking is fertile soil for the seeds of evil to germinate and take root. Chronic fear and anxiety nourish the roots of the current cultural collusion and disrupt our natural ability to heal, transform, and simply ask for help. Yet the constancy of the earth below and the radiant energies above never fails us. They are ever-present, supplying the Greater Source energy any human can use to release fear and purge the evil grows like weeks contaminating what should be the beautiful garden of imagination and vision of the mind. Earth rituals and blessings, from the every simple to the wonderfully complex draw Beauty into the foundation of any life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores shamanic ways to revision the concepts of good and evil and to move us body and soul into the next paradigm of the right use of power, creativity, and connection.

We feel natural shame when we fall short of our own inner standards, especially when others get hurt. It is a natural response of the heart to draw us inward to the source of that pain, to renew our own inner integrity, and to assess what we must do differently to rise to that inner integrity in the future. But when we have internalized standards from friends, family, culture, and religions that do not resonate with our heart’s inner integrity and truth, we can feel a kind of toxic shame that debilitates or paralyzes us. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the “pool of true reflection” and other shamanic practices that assist us in discerning the difference between natural shame and toxic shame and how to use either to restore the inner integrity of your own heart.

Grief itself offers us great compassion. It comes and goes, tailoring itself to each heart that is experiencing loss and bereavement. It takes its time, never forcing us to do it all now, for if it did we would surely not survive. Grief has profound importance in the health of the heart. It shows us where we have made a heart connection, even when we didn’t mean to. It shows us where we gave too much and where we regret not really showing up. To grieve fully is to grieve enough for the heart to cleanse, renew, and return to the serious business of intimacy with life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores grief as a part of the fall season, as a process that touches each of our lives, and as a ritual to cleanse and restore the greater capacity of the heart to love, connect, and make meaning in our lives.

Abandonment by a caretaker breaks the heart of the child who is ignored, dismissed, or truly left behind. The desire to assuage this once-broken heart leads many adults into escapism, distraction, and unhealthy relationships. This desire can be refocused to lead us to the first step onto the spiral path. At its heart the spiral path brings us to understanding presence and our own inner embrace. This week, host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues this exploration of how we can use shamanic skills to cultivate presence in body, mind, heart and soul. When we succeed in cultivating presence where there was only fear, we emerge from the spiral path able to intimately connect and joyfully engage with friends, family, lovers and our self.

Fear of abandonment is often at the root of the poor quality decisions made by otherwise mentally healthy people. The cycle of abandonment, betrayal, and heartbreak is often learned in childhood and repeated in adulthood. For the adult with helping spirits and shamanic skills, abandonment is actually the first step on the spiral path that brings us to understanding presence in the way that only a heart, once-broken, can embrace. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to use shamanic skills to engage the spiral path, gain the allies that lie at wait in your discomfort, and discover the pleasure of pure presence at the heart of it all.

Learning to cut and clear the energetic cords that are commonly created in relationships is a fundamental skill for living well. For the most part working with cords is a skill people can learn with relative ease, even without psychic skills. But what happens when cords don’t clear so easily? Some cords remain, some regrow, and some never really clear, leaving the issues unresolved even after extensive work. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, healer Mary Mueller Shutan, as they discuss Shutan’s new book The Complete Cord Course: Working with Cords through Energy Work and Shamanic Healing. Join us as we explore the relationships through which we generate cords, basic skills for clearing them, and practices we can all do to create and maintain energetic health.

A cult is a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. The practice of this devotion can be beneficial or harmful. What makes the difference between a cult that benefits its followers and one that betrays and causes harm? Is there a different between a shamanic community and a cult? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores what are the fundamental differences between cults that facilitate well being and those that are ultimately dangerous to the mental and spiritual health of their devotees. Most importantly, what do we learn from the damage harmful cults do about what humans truly need for the well-being of their heart and mind and how can we use shamanic healing and practices to repair the soul once that damage is done?

The shamanic healing form, soul retrieval, can result in the direct and immediate return of our personal power and our sense of purpose in life. This sudden and literal change in personal power requires a sudden change in our boundaries throughout the relationships we have cultivated in life. This change is rarely welcome and often met with resistance, derision, or out right anger from the people in our lives, both personal and professional. And often the greatest resistance to this change comes from within, fueled by our fear that we will be abandoned or excommunicated by those we thought loved or respected us. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the tender territory of relations we find ourselves in after reclaiming our personal power through direct repair of the soul. This territory requires new life skills, a new attitude, and deep devotion to the spirit of your own heart.

Many questions arise as humans open their awareness to the possibility of a world larger than the here and now. “How do I know I’m not making this up?” is usually the first question. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she draws on decades of experience and the wisdom of many colleagues to address listener questions about intuition, working with spirit guides, and how we make sure that we aren’t just making this up. The deeper truth of working with spirit is that at times we do make things up, we can lie to ourselves, and then at times we are open and brilliant in our communication with the invisible world. The difference between delusion and inspiration is your willingness to learn new skills, to devote yourself to practice and discipline, and to sacrifice the self you have out grown for the person you could become.

The strength of the earth element is seen in our relationships with our selves, our intimate partners, and our community. It speaks to what it means to truly live in our bodies and not in our heads. Where the earth element is weak and uncultivated within, we are uncertain and ungrounded, creating false structures to stabilize our lives. The more we lie to ourselves about our lack of true foundation, the larger and more complex the false life we are crafting becomes for the person we are not. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week for the final episode of our five part series about engaging with the seasonal spirits. The seasons draw the unique richness from each stage of the cycle of a year on earth. The earth element speaks to the quality of our center and stability of our relationships. This week we complete the cycle of how to work with the seasons openly and skillfully to bring a simple elegance, rich blessings, and a refinement of presence to the core of our lives.

“God lives in the heart while trickster dwells in the mind,” is a teaching of the Kalahari Bushmen. When trickster is in the head it oversees the heart and leaves us feeling mixed up and frustrated. The remedy is to lift the heart through the heat of the dance so that it holds the mind, allowing the thoughts and feelings to work together in a good, clear way. This week we explore how the Bushmen investment in community life creates the context to truly lift the heart and bring the mind into alignment with right action. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she continues to explore the Way of the Bushman, clearly rendered in Bradford and Hillary Keeney new book, and how we can use these teachings today. We can learn to step away from our alienation and disconnection when we know we need the community to be “fully cooked” the community knows it needs each individual in the dance to bring in the energy needed for healing.

The teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen or San are the oldest spiritual, shamanic, and healing practices in our world. The San do not believe that "words" can change the world. They give little importance to written words or fixed oral tradition, but emphasize the way n/om (the vital force or spiritual power or shaking medicine) touches us. Bradford Keeney’s fieldwork with the Kalahari Bushmen (San) in Namibia and Botswana started over two decades ago. Today he is recognized as a Bushman healer or n/om-kxao and is able to participate in and have access to the world’s oldest living religion and healing tradition. Bradford and his wife Hillary join host, Christina Pratt, this week to share their new book Way of the Bushman as Told by the Tribal Elders: Spiritual Teachings and Practices of the Kalahari Ju’/hoansi. Join us to explore the power and inspiration in the ancient wisdom of a people who have never declared war on other people nor harmed the planet.

There are many ways to look at the symptoms that the dominant, contemporary culture diagnoses as mental illness. Illnesses of the spirit or the soul can be more clearly seen through the lens of a culture that values both. When we look at schizophrenia through the lens of a shamanic culture we can see something entirely different than a sever mental illness. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest, award-winning author and environmental journalist Dick Russell as they discuss his new book, My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism. In this book Dick shares his journey with is son, Frank, beyond the Western medical model that diagnosed Frank as schizophrenic and into the realms of shamanism. Dick shares their experience together forging a healing relationship with the renowned West African shaman, Malidoma Patrice Somé.

Humans are messy. And love is one of the messiest bits of human life. So what do we really mean when we strive to rise to shamanic principles for living, like loving all life or mediating our power through the heart? What does love mean from the fundamental perspective of Oneness, not separation? How do we need to understand love to become truly new people crafting a new world story? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the ways shamanic practice can change our understanding of love from one of pop song, emotional drama or the intellectual labeling of distinct kinds into the current of life itself. True shamanic practice requires a level of intimacy in action that contemporary people find offensive to their sense of individuality and ego. Yet climbing over that offense and stepping into the fear it is hiding is necessary if we are ever to allow our soul to truly love.

Rebuilding a new life from the rubble of your old one is at once an exciting and a scary prospect. Whether you tore your life apart on purpose or your life self-destructed for you, you are still faced with the same challenge: How to create a new life of greater alignment, abundance, physical health, and soul-nourishing meaning? Nothing will send you down the rabbit hole of popular culture’s myths about living the life you want than googling “how do I live my soul’s purpose?” Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she looks at the most common myths about what it takes to create a life that is aligned with your soul’s calling and shares the wisdom gained in two and a half decades assisting people in using their shamanic skills to be clever and courageous in creating a life of meaning a purpose that is better then they imagined.

There are many different types of spiritual awakenings, from kundalini rising to shamanic initiations and everything in between. This often misunderstood range of human experience is explored beautifully and thoroughly by spiritual healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, in her new book The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and The Conditioned Layers of Reality from Findhorn Press. This guide is unique in helping the reader to understand what experience they are in the middle of and how to shape the experience into a meaningful transformation. Drawing from her extensive training in multiple healing forms, Mary joins host, Christina Pratt, to share the different layers of going to sleep, the many ways we wake up, and how to free your awakening process to become the direct revelatory path it is meant to be.

How do you rise up when you have lost more than you thought you had to lose? How do you avoid the contemporary pitfalls of falling into a deeper pit of depression, grasping for anything to make it look better than it is, or recreating a shiny new version of the same life you had before? We have to find an ignored inner self who stands between the Lost One who doesn’t know how to go forward and the Blissed One who just wants to stay in the flow. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to go forward and cultivate a truly new life from the rubble of our old one. By co-creating with spirit through our shamanic skills we can use the dynamics of physical life to ground our visions in reality and the patterns of our emotional life to expose false beliefs. Then the mind can balance the discipline and imagination necessary to rise up anew.

Gender is a charged issue in the contemporary world and will continue to be as long as we think we understand gender when we don’t and believe that others “should” be like us when they are in reality unique. For many bringing shamanic skills to bear on the issue only confuses things. It is important to remember that from an understanding of reality based on Oneness like the understanding shamanism offers, gender is a non-issue. Gender variance is expected and accepted in ancient shamanic cultures without pause. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we can use shamanic skills to work with the four wisdoms to understand and align our own gender expression with our deepest truth and find the deep damage that is always at the root of our intolerance.

Personal transformation efforts often fail because all that is really needed is change. And often our personal efforts to change fail because what is required is actually to transform. What is the difference between change and transformation? And more importantly how can you accurately discern what you need to do to bring balance and health to the different aspects of your life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores techniques for using shamanic skills to clarify the changes or transformations we desire and a viable path forward to manifesting them. The key to both to accepting your reality as it actually is, trusting your power to change, and risking the Unknown to transform.

Not all who die leave the realm of the living easily and these souls need help. From the beginning of people the shaman has served this role, the “psychopomp,” and transported the souls of the dead home, assuring their safe and complete journey through the death process. Each traditional culture defines the psychopomp’s work in its own way, influenced by that culture’s beliefs about the soul, death, and the process of dying. However shamanic people hold the universal belief that the souls of the dead need to move on to the Land of the Dead or they become a source of stress, physical illness, and mental distress for the living. As our world continues to amplify the conditions that cause a soul to need help crossing—violent death, unlived lives, despair, addiction, and spiritual ignorance—those who are able to escort the soul are needed even more. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and her guest, David Kowalewski, Ph.D., psychopomp, university professor, shamanic healer, speaker and author.

How can we use our shamanic skills to respond to suicide? From a shamanic perspective there is tending needed for the soul of the dead and healing needed for the community left behind. No matter how alone you feel there will always community left behind. How do we clean up the energetic mess than is so often left behind by violent death? Perhaps even more important, how can you use shamanic skills to respond to your own suicidal thoughts and impulses? This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the shamanic perspective that not all suicides are the same. Some, for example, are the ultimate refusal to participate in the world as it is, while others are the choice to die on one’s own terms at the end of a life well lived. Many begin with soul loss and they all end with the loss of a unique genius and its gifts from the world.

There are times that we simply need to fall apart. …not having a bad day, call in sick, fall apart, but losing more than you thought you had to lose falling apart. There are these moments when we realize that the construct of life we have created to survive and to thrive is in and of itself the problem. Sometimes life will conspire with us and take, piece by devastating piece, everything from us. But some have survived such trauma in life and keep it together like a vice because they have no one to fall back. They cannot let it go, even when they need to to get at what they want the most. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we can use shamanic skills and the wisdom of the Trickster to crack open the already wounded heart and transform, even when we are sure that is the transformation that will kill us.

Shamanic possession is not actually possession at all, but the intentional embodiment of spirit help with whom the shaman has already developed a working relationship. Unlike possession, or the unintentional intrusion of some type of foreign spirit into a person’s energy body, which is considered an energetic illness or unhealthy state in shamanism, embodiment is an effective, working, altered state the shaman is able to begin and end at will. To truly understand shamanic practice we must recognize the equal importance of journeying and embodiment without carrying forward the bias of decades of academic research into shamanism. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores embodiment from the n|om of the African Ju|’hoansi to vitu of Finnish women to the embodiment dances of the helping spirits of shamanic peoples around the world. Simply put, there are gifts embodiment offers us as contemporary practitioners that our journey states cannot. And there is joy and the sacred to be found the intimacy of embodiment.

Summer is the season of joy, enthusiasm, purpose, and radiance. Ancient peoples around the world have used the Summer Solstice Fire to focus this innate energy in the summer season into clarifying the actions necessary to fully manifest their soul’s calling. This work begins in gratitude and celebration of life itself. For those who were prepared and chose to act skillfully, last winter solstice provided a unique opportunity for sudden realignment with your path. This week we will revisit this arc and explore how to work skillfully with the Summer Solstice, which is a fire of heart and action, to more fully manifest your calling and its power in your life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, will add part five to the four part series in the archives on using shamanic skills to find your calling and—more importantly—to live it.

Do you find yourself in mid-summer grumpy about the weather, bored, and facing a life empty of joy, purpose, and the radiance of your true calling? If so, the skillful person looks to the heart. Imbalance in the heart is indemic in our contemporary world that rewards arrogance and disdains heartfelt devotion. Through shamanic skills we can engage with the spirit of summer to determine the path necessary for balance and wholeness in the heart. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week for part four of our five part series about engaging with the seasonal spirits. The seasons draw the unique richness from each stage of the cycle of a year on earth. Summer is the season of joy, enthusiasm, and creativity. This week we explore working with the season openly and skillfully to bring a simple elegance, rich blessings, and a refinement of presence to the core of our lives.

Where people gather in community there is Shadow, even in spiritual communities. Where there is unacknowledged Shadow there is sex, often good and exciting, and usually inappropriate. At its worst this Shadow driven sex moves hand in hand with great abuse of trust and misuse of power and it tears spiritual communities apart. Author Marsha Scarbrough shares her passionate, sexual, painful journey in her new book Honey in the River: Shadow, Sex and West African Spirituality. Marsha explores this all too common experience with honesty, vulnerability, and maturity so that we can get past our overly simplified victim/perpetrator stance and see the movement of spirit, shadow, love, and the Trickster in the mix. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, and her guest Marsha Scarbrough this week as they discuss shadow, sex and the Trickster and their movement in our lives.

In shamanic cultures around the world it is the Trickster who made the world as we actually find it; not a perfect Eden, but complex, messy, beautiful, and painful. It is the crazy logic of the Trickster, life saving and sacrifice demanding, that can help us to navigate where our blindness, deafness or simple stubborn refusal to do what we know we need to do gets in trouble. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this replay of a favorite show on the Trickster. Author Lewis Hyde writes, “The Trickster cannot be trusted. It is a contact that puts us slightly at risk; we open ourselves to disruption whenever we call on him.” But it is that opening that allows miracles, the impossible, surprise and the reversal of fortunes. The Trickster reveals the short cuts that allow us to get to the full, loving expression of our soul’s true purpose in spite of ourselves.

What are the ethics for receiving shamanic healing? Much is written about ethics for practitioners, but is it really ethical to drop all the issues of your life in the lap of any healer and ask them to heal you in one session? Is it ethical to get angry about a session when the healing offered doesn’t play into the story you carry about your woundedness? Is it ever ethical to ask for healing, which is always an effort of energy expended, without offering anything in exchange for the healing energy spent on you? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the very prickly issue of the ethics for receiving shamanic healing. This week we slash expectations for magical cures and effortless life changes in the hopes of revealing how contemporary people can come to an ancient healing form prepared, informed, and ready to do what is needed to follow up responsibly.

Every human has the ability to imagine, to learn from dreams, to feel insight and intuition, and to “see” at a distance. “These many forms of visioning are our birth right and they enable us to fully connect to the universe,” explains our guest Itzhak Beery, an internationally recognized shamanic healer and teacher, the founder of ShamanPortal.org, and cofounder of the New York Shamanic Circle. Itzhak joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week to discuss his new book, The Gift of Shamanism: Visionary Power, Ayahuasca Dreams, and Journeys to Other Realms. Itzhak feels that the Big Shutdown of the Senses in today’s media driven, virtual world causes personal and community memory loss that results in the lost of trust in our senses and our innate selves. He feels shamanism reconnects us with nature and our deep inner experiences of wholeness.

Dying is part of life; it's that simple. When death is accepted as a natural part of our journey, an extraordinary amount of energy can be set free for you to be happy, discover your purpose, and help others. Shamanism shows us that the end of life is just as important as the beauty of birth at the beginning. Living in fear of death contorts our lives, robbing us of Death as a great ally for how to live well “It is not death but an unlived life that should terrify us,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “this becomes ever more clear with each ancestral healing.” When we understand how our unlived lives and unreconciled relationships bind us here at death, we understand what is needed to live well. Join us this week as we explore the power in shamanic work, yours or with a practitioner, to transform your fear-based beliefs about life and change the story of your life.

Shamans are made by spirit, through initiation and training, to become the answer to the prayers of the people. What could the world community of shamanic practitioners and healers, contemporary and traditional, become if they truly believed they were the medicine for the illnesses of humanity in their time? Shamans don’t just drink ayahuasca, do ceremony in workshops, and heal individual people one at a time. They restore health in communities, balance and harmony to the earth and remedy the old dream where it has, in reality, become a nightmare. Join host, Kate Smith, and her guest, Christina Pratt, as they continue their discussion of the transformations we must engage to become the New People who share the shamanic skills needed for us to create a more beautiful and sustainable New World.

What are the next steps that the world community of shamanic practitioners and healers needs to take in order effect cultural transformation on the global level? What could we do if we really believed without a doubt that we are the shamans of our time? Join host, Kate Smith, and her guest, Christina Pratt as they explore the shamanic skills necessary to become people who are able to live sustainably with our environment in deep rapport with Nature, rise to the challenge of living peacefully and intelligently heart-centered, and connected to a Greater Source that truly connects us all. Ancient shamans had the skills to shape the dreams of the people so that they were the living expression of reciprocity and gratitude. What will it take for contemporary shamans to step up to their heritage and become the medicine for our time?