Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Shamanic ritual and ceremony are the “power tools” used by shamanic practitioners around the world to create change and transformation in their lives. Humans engage in ritual and ceremony to ask for help from the compassionate forces of the invisible world to accomplish what they cannot do themselves or what they are no longer able to expend enough energy and resources to do themselves. Host and shaman, Christina Pratt, is joined by guests this week to share the use of shamanic ritual and ceremony among contemporary practitioners. This week we delve into the Conjure Dance, a very powerful dance ritual that grew out of the confluence of cultures in 18th century New Orleans. It is performed to bring about social healing, like the end of slavery, which was one of its historical uses. Join us as we explore the use of this ritual to create social healing in our time.

What we are taught about emotions in the “developed, Western world” will make the majority of us sick over time. This is the core teaching from a shamanic point of view. And perhaps more importantly, the second teaching says that emotional well-being is possible for everyone. It simply requires the discipline to break old patterns and the courage to risk trusting new ones. In other words emotional well-being requires warriorship of the heart. It takes great courage to let go of the over extended, empathetic coping mechanism of the child—after all, it saved your life. But the very same orientation in the world leads the adult into chronic poor health, coping addictions, and damaging relationships. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and she continues to explore why we are so confused about what emotional well-being is and how we can use shamanic skills to cultivate the emotional health and intelligence needed to live with authenticity and compassion.

Health in shamanic terms requires the interaction of body and spirit, mind and emotion. There is no physical health in shamanism apart from the dynamic interaction of all four aspects of being a human. A shamanic diagnosis addresses these four aspects of the human simultaneously, while also looking back to past events that could be a cause of dysfunction now. The interaction of the four aspects of being human was understood to be so deeply essential for health that shamanic peoples built the maintenance of all four into the social fabric and ritual structure of their cultures. Nowhere is this more challenging for us to understand accurately than in the realm of our emotions. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores our twin tendencies to either indulge or deny our emotions and how this distorts our understanding of what it means to be truly sensitive, empathic, or unconditionally accepting. Join us as she shares teachings from the helping spirits for cultivating emotional well-being in support of bringing your gifts to the world.

Traditionally “the ancestors” are helping spirits that assist the living in creating a world the descendants are honored to inherit. Yet in our immediate past and present are deep ancestral patterns of colonization, slavery, dominance of one group of human over another, and massacre for land and the resources held within the land. Unresolved human patterns repeat again and again until they are reconciled. The presence of this type of unresolved ancestral pattern can cause chronic disease, family patterns of addiction or abuse, or personal issues like chronic depression, hopelessness, and despair. “And these patterns can be held in the land,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “causing those who live on the land to unconsciously avoid the very things they need to do to heal and to release the illness of the past. Ancestral healing is needed to allow people and the land to heal and grow bountiful for those who are coming.

What is Shadow Work, really? Psychologically speaking the Shadow is an unconscious aspect of one’s personality that the conscious ego judges, fears or rejects to the degree that it does not identify the Shadow as part of the itself. Shadow work implies not only a shift of consciousness or insight, but also the transformation of the relationship that is dominated by judgment and fear. When people talk about doing shadow work they are largely talking about gaining insight through noticing shadow behaviors. “But shadow behaviors are not the Shadow itself,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “The focus is on a symptom and not the source. This means the sincere work of transformation results largely in a spiritual bypass. This relieves the conscious ego, which will not need to change after all, and leaves the Shadow Self largely intact, to undermine our conscious efforts and lay out a seductive path of self-destruction yet again."

What will it take for men and women to return from their respective circles, respective retreats on the mountain, and respective “Wisdom Schools” and begin to seriously work together to create a world our descendants will be happy and proud to inherit? Join us this week when Sparrow Hart, author of Letters to the River—A Guide to a Dream Worth Living, joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt to explore how we move from a culture of adult children focused on “me” and materialism, and gender wars into a culture of adults who are passionate about the gifts they have to give, committed to something larger than their self, and longing to come together to create a better world. Sparrow, a father and author, leads Vision Quests year round, is the founder of Circles of Air, Circles of Stone, creator of the Mythic Warrior Training, and founder of the annual Men's Wisdom Council at the Rowe Conference Center.

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.

Why are we afraid to feel? Why do we fear the emotional intelligence of the heart? The heart affects mental clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and personal effectiveness. It is no more a simple physical pump than it is simply the source of tepid pop songs and foolish dreams. The Chinese have known for centuries that the heart orchestrates the harmonious interaction of all of the body’s organs maintaining good health. Modern science has known since 1991 that the heart has a functional brain of elaborate circuitry that enables it to learn, remember, feel and sense independently of the cranial brain. And shamans who work in intimate relationship with the invisible world have always known that all true power is mediated through the heart. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she continues to explore the secret terrain of the heart and what is necessary for contemporary people—with our wounds of isolation, anxiety, alienation, and broken-heartedness—to awaken our courageous hearts.

The choice to love again precedes the healing. This is the confusion most share. The heart doesn’t heal so that it can love again. The heart chooses to love again and in that choice the heart can begin to heal. This choice to risk without safety or guarantees can only be made by the courageous. Whether you want to heal yourself, heal your clients or heal the world, healing requires courage. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the terrain of the heart and what is necessary to awaken the latent courage that resides there. Most people operate in the chamber of the heart that they feel most comfortable in. But in truth the heart has four chambers, which together nourish and sustain each other. When in balance each chamber gives us access to one of the four powers of the heart. Awakening the Courageous Heart is a shamanic process of transformation that is available to anyone with the ability to journey and a weekend to give to their heart.

Shamanic people believe that life emerges from a dream that the All-That-Is began dreaming in a time before time. Shamanic people speak of living in Oneness with all things and as contemporary people we are challenged to imagine that dream. But what if we were already living that dream? How would we act? How would we treat each other? How would we treat the earth? This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the topic of the upcoming Residential BC Shamanic Conference and Gathering this May with Rev. shaman John-Luke Edwards of the Wolven Path Tradition, a shamanic tradition rebirthed from nomadic shamanic traditions of northern Europe. Join us as we explore how we can return to our roots, live our everyday lives in a good way with all living things and allow the possibility of defining our dreams by the way that we live our lives.

Chronic illness in America is “managed” in our allopathic medical system, not “cured.” Today 75% of our health care dollars go to the management of chronic diseases, which are the nation’s leading causes of death and disability. Given that chronic illness is the root cause of deaths that could have been prevented, lifelong disability, compromised quality of life, and burgeoning health care costs, why do we continue to ignore the efficacy of shamanic healing in the treatment and, sometimes the cure, of chronic illnesses? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the application of shamanic healing practices to chronic illness of the physical body and the energy body. A shamanic approach to healing begins by viewing health and well-being through a different lens. Health is seen as the result of the quality of the relationship cultivated between the body/mind and the soul and, through that lens, both root cause of chronic illness and the remedies available are transformed.

Among the indigenous cultures of the Upper Peruvian Amazon, the Shipibo are one of the few cultural groups which has managed to maintain their language, their art and their ancient plant medicine. Dr. Joe Tafur apprentices under Maestro Ricardo Amaringo, a Shipibo shaman, assisting in ayahuasca ceremony and in all other aspects of treatment. A Colombian-American, integrative family physician, Joe works part-time as a physician in the United States and otherwise assists in management and treatment at Nihue Rao, a traditional healing center in the Amazonian Rainforest, established in 2011 in Iquitos, Peru. Joe joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week to share the work at Nihue Rao, the medicinal power of traditional Shipibo healing with master plants and the ayahuasca healing ceremony. Nihue Rao offers people from all over the world access to the profound healing found in the plants and traditions of the Amazon Rainforest.

Any spiritual practice can be misused as a “spiritual bypass,” or the means by which one jumps to spirit prematurely in an effort to avoid the challenges of life in the body, painful emotions, unresolved events from the past, or our responsibility to do what is uniquely ours to do with this life. The world needs our gifts. Our gifts require that we engage our whole life, with its messy emotions and past events that must be reconciled in a new way. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt as she explores what makes a spiritual practice practical and powerful. The fact that any spiritual practice, including shamanic practice, can be misused as a spiritual bypass is not a valid excuse to dismiss cultivating your spiritual practice. Without a real relationship with spirit the mind will fail to innovate and make the intuitive leaps needed to find the gifts in the past, the practical steps in the present, and a vision to a possible future.

“The fundamental precept of the New Story is that we are inseparate from the universe, and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else,” explains our next guest, Charles Eisenstein, writer, speaker, genre-defying social philosopher and countercultural intellectual. A growing number of very diverse people, especially those engaged in a shamanic life, find themselves in service to an emerging Story of the People that is defining the mythology of a New World. Charles calls this the Story of Interbeing and he joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to discuss the principles of Interbeing and the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Join us as we dive into “a deep wisdom we all innately know: until we get our selves in order, any action we take—no matter how good our intentions—will ultimately be wrongheaded and wronghearted.”

Every individual has gifts to bring to the world, though many will live their lives precisely running away from those gifts. Every individual has gifts to gain in this life, though we need to give ourselves to life to get them. Shamanism offers us both an attitude from which to view life and the skills to engage in it in a way that our gifts can be given to a world in need. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores our gifts and the shamanic path we can walk to cultivate them. First, there are the gifts we bring in to this life and how they can align us with our calling. Then there are the gifts that are here for us to gain if we engage with spirit to use what we came into this life with to become who we could be. We must each take responsibility for the powers we brought into this lifetime and cultivate our unique gifts for our well-being and the nourishment of all life on earth.

Short days and long, dark nights lend themselves to unpacking squashed impulses of authenticity, assumptions that diminish passion, and denied feelings. Winter is the time to entertain your deepest truths for the purpose of renewing your dream. Without taking some time each year for gestation to tend the self who is tired, feeling inadequate, too small, too weak, and without power the expressive self is not rejuvenated and realigned to live your dream in life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we attend to “adrenal fatigue” and “yin depletion’ by working honestly with our emotional life without indulgence or mental distance. With a renewed flow of our emotions we can replenish our stores of lifeforce energy and realign with our dream with the call for your unique genius that resonates in the Dreamtime.

Shamanic initiatory experiences often involve a break with reality and a time of madness, which is perceived of as a kind of test or challenge initiated by a helping spirit. The novice that allows a death of his/her sense of self moves through their own madness to the other side of that challenge transformed. The novice returns to a more ordinary state of consciousness and is acknowledged as a shaman. In contrast, in America similar breaks with reality lead into a dead end commonly referred to as a “messianic complex” in which the person perceives of them selves as a Savior or The One. This interpretation becomes a mental cul-de-sac for the individual with martyrdom the only way out. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the fact that how we interpret our own “madness” is culturally determined, thus those challenged by a diagnosis of mental illness may help themselves by ditching contemporary culture and interpreting their own experience through a shamanic cosmology in which no one needs to be saved.

“This is a good time to settle into yourself and go beyond the surface of your spiritual practices,” advises our next guest, Sandra Ingerman MA, a world-renowned author and much loved teacher of shamanism. She joins host, Christina Pratt, to explore the need to take our shamanic practice out of the contemporary box we have put it in, keeping us from our full power and potential. Sandy advises, “It is time for all us to stand up and do our spiritual work to shift our own consciousness and perception. It is time for us to stand up together as a global community so that we can create exponential change, which leads to healing for the earth and all of life.” Sandra is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

Your life magic is just waiting for you to notice it, to notice the natural (visible) and supernatural (invisible) forces that influence the events of your life. The way you interpret what is going on around you in the world, where you came from, and where you are going either opens your eyes to the magic or explains it way. “Believing in the magic in life is different from fantasy thinking,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “fantasy thinking is motivated by the need, real or perceived, to escape everyday reality. Believing in the magic in life is an attitude that opens our mind to possibility, our hearts to the flow of the forces moving around us, and grounds us in the full reality of the moment.” Our world is inherently, wonderfully mysterious. Join us this week as we explore finding your magic and allowing it to open the way in the very real world to the life your heart dreams of living.

Cosmology is the science of the origin and development of the universe. When we say “a cosmology” we are talking the way we interpret what is going on around us in the world as seen through the lens of how we see the origins of life, where we came and our world came from, and where we are going. There are purely scientific cosmologies and purely religious cosmologies and there are cosmologies cobbled together from religion, science, and wishful thinking. We all have one and we all use ours to understand and interpret life accurately. What if your cosmology is false? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores shamanic cosmologies and their formation through observing and participating with the natural world. The great value of living from a shamanic cosmology is that it supports life choices that are sustainable, connected to both the environment and Spirit, heart-centered, and tend to promote peace in diversity.

One of the great stressors in life is intimate relationships, both the having them and the not having them. We can cultivate intimacy with ourselves through our relationship with spirit in shamanic practice, but how does that renewed intimacy translate into our relationships with lovers, friends and family? For many the changes brought on by a healthy shamanic practice created great chaos in our most intimate relationships, which can then challenge the sexual sustenance and financial stability of our lives creating even more stress. How do we love in a healthy way? How do we maintain right relationship with our self, with spirit, and with those we love all at the same time? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she dives into the rich, nourishing, often frustrating, frequently heartbreaking realm of relationship.

“For millennia, people have entered the wilderness to encounter the Spirit, to seek their direction, purpose, or medicine,” explains our guest Sparrow Hart, author of Letters to the River—A Guide to a Dream Worth Living. “Each of us has a unique voice, a song we must sing, a vision we must enact. Each of us has the capacity to contribute joyfully, making the world a better place.” Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt explores the vision quest with Sparrow, Founder of Circles of Air, Circles of Stone, creator of the Mythic Warrior Training, founder of the annual Men's Wisdom Council at the Rowe Conference Center, father, and author. He is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. In Letters to the River Sparrow places the struggles and crises we currently face - personal, political, moral, ecological and spiritual - within the context of a mythic and heroic journey and in that act, shows us a way to the New World.

How do we redream our life when a spouse dies, a beloved sibling, or perhaps a child? How do we redream a life of love and relationship after a nasty, divisive, inequitable divorce? How do we redream life after time at war destroys our sense of the core goodness of humanity? Where do we begin when all that matters in life is tattered and in a shambles all around our feet? We accept that the Void is present and welcome The Original Dreamer into our life. And then we learn again to dream, just as we did as a child; we learn to dream reality into form. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we recover dreaming as a conscious act when the dream we have dreamt from childhood goes terribly awry. Join us and discover the art of dreaming well.

We must first change what we want if we are to release our fears of living well. We must decide that we want the path of our soul or our destiny more than we want to fulfill the roles that define who we are and who we should be. The good wife, good provider, perfect child, excellent lover, good girl, bad boy—whatever the role is, it’s and roles which means it is something we have learned to do to survive. Fear-based survival roles are never big enough or wholehearted enough for real life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she continues to explore a shamanic approach to learning to listen to your soul in ways essential to cultivating fearlessness and passion for a life lived well. Just because your culture has failed you doesn’t mean you need to continue to fail yourself.

One of the biggest challenges for us to understand in the New World is sovereignty or the supreme power to govern yourself. The sense that we have supreme power terrifies most people because we witnesses abuse and misuse of power every day at home and around the world. Add to that the fact that your supreme power carries with it your supreme responsibility to govern yourself, your energy, your thoughts, your choices, your physical health and most people are diving for the couch and some electronic device to escape. Why are we so afraid to live well? This is the question host and shaman, Christina Pratt explores this week offering shamanic remedies for the cultural issues that ail us and challenges for the soul cultivation that lies just out of reach. What better gift can you offer the next generation but the image of a life lived well?

The stories we have been told about where we go when we die shape our reality about death. Millions of people are terrified of death because they have been told a story of hell and damnation. Others face death without suffering because they have been told a story of the turning of the great karmic wheel and reincarnation. The beauty of shamanism is that we can actually go explore what is true underneath these stories that shaped the Old World. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt this week as she explores cultural stories about death and how to work shamanically in your own life to find your fear of death and dispel it. The idea that we would go anywhere but Home when we die has done great harm to humanity, caused great suffering, and created a logjam of frightened souls between here and the Land of the Dead.

Lessons in Courage, by Don Oscar Miro-Quesada, is a guide for changing our lives and bringing much needed healing to ourselves and our planet through the applied wisdom of Peruvian shamanism. This book offers us challenges, insights, and daily practices to aid us in becoming the people the New World needs us to be. Host, Christina Pratt, explores this new book with Don Oscar, originator of The Pachakuti Mesa Tradition (PMT), a five-part workshop apprenticeship series and tradition rooted in the Peruvian spiritual methods of sacred relationship with the Earth. Don Oscar is the founder of The Heart of the Healer (THOTH) Foundation and our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How is this shaman meeting this extraordinary need today?

How is shamanic practice evolving, as it has in every age, to meet the challenges of our time? The spirits gave us good council as we entered the New World, but what have we done with that information? Are we shifting our relationship with the Unknown in ways that allow us to truly guide the young through initiation into adulthood and the dying safely through the threshold of death? Have we embraced the path of the passion and true heartedness to effectively guide the reassembling of people struggling with PTSD and our epidemic of mental illnesses. Have we made any progress at all out of the lie of separation from God and begun to bridge religious separation and embrace diversity as our true savior? Have we accepted the piles of research that supports the ancient knowing that sustainable health is rooted in the ability to rest, fully relax and to nourish that which matters in life. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how to work with the guidance of spirit to change your story, live in new ways, and to write the New Story with our shamanic work in the world.

True shamanic trance states, those that actually clear the control of the small self, require intimacy with spirit. “Intimacy grows with contact,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “Intimacy is an embodied experience, not a virtual one. Your capacity for intimacy with anything—spirit, technology, a lover—begins in the cultivation of true intimacy with yourself, not the self you envision, but the self that you are in this moment.” This week we explore intimacy, radical acceptance, and how to cultivate the intimacy with spirit required for deep shamanic currents to move through your life and bring miracles to even the most basic, beginning journeyer.

What is it really, creatively, effectively like to do good shamanic work these days? How do you manage the demand that every class, ritual, and ceremony be offered online? Where do you draw the line between the old ways that actually worked and the new needs driving our shamanic practices to innovate? Shamanism has adapted through the ages so that it remains a vital and effective option to heal that which wounds us, our families and our environment. Join us this week as author and neoshaman, Kelley Harrell and host, Christina Pratt, for an exploration of the ins and outs and ups and downs of tending our non-local, shamanic communities. Kelley has served her local community in North Carolina and an international client base since 2000 through Soul Intent Arts. She is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

The axis mundi is an existential place or point wherein creation and entropy, the essential generative and destructive forces of the universe, exist as one within the Great Mystery. The axis mundi is an important concept in many philosophies and religions and it has a unique relationship to shamanism. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the axis mundi and why contemporary practitioners often stay on the surface of their practice because they avoid deep relationship with the axis mundi and it’s energy. We can use ancient sexual practices to cultivate our relationship with the energy of the axis mundi which is essential to a strong and deep shamanic practice. The axis mundi is not just a mental concept for the shaman; it is both a practical tool and a spiritual awareness. It is the place through which the shaman travels when journeying in an altered and often ecstatic state. Ecstasy is not the purpose of the shaman’s journey, however it is often a valuable by-product.

Shamanic Journeying is not an “out of body experience.” When this particular alternate state is achieved the journeyer has “a foot in both worlds.” The senses in the physical body and the dreaming body are fully engaged and drawing in the multi-dimensional communication from the invisible world. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores this common misunderstanding along with other misconceptions and expectations that inhibit beginning journeyers. Shamanic journeying is not a mental construct to be understood by the rational mind. Journeying is an embodied practice that requires surrender to the basic discipline. The discipline then frees the mind from ordinary thought allowing the senses, ordinary and extraordinary, to engage with the formless powers and heart felt meaning of the invisible world. The world of the shamanic journey is not here on the surface with the safe and familiar, but requires diving deeper into the realms of dreams, hearts, and the Unknown.

Where does the shaman’s power come from? In cultures all over the world shamans heal what our medical system can’t heal and transform decades of dysfunction through a ritual and ceremony. What is this power and how does the shaman access it? In part this comes from the shaman’s cultivation of a strong working relationship with spirit help, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. This is common knowledge in our contemporary understanding. But the piece we disregard is the internal action of initiation. The initiated shaman’s access to power is not moderated by an immature ego’s struggle between a crippling scarcity of self worth and an excess of externally defined self-esteem. Join us this week as we explore how we can change the old ways we understand power and learn to discern our own abuse and misuse of power from right action. We are here now in the transition time from old world into a new world. If we are to pick up the responsibility to make the new world better than before, then we must change.

How can we acknowledge the existence of evil, work effectively with it and still live our lives from a deep experiential knowing that we are One with All Things? To write a new Story for the People of the New World we must explore new ways and deeper ways to understand evil that leave behind antagonistic dualism. Can we find an understanding that allows us to come from a place of Oneness and work effectively with evil as it presents in our lives and our shamanic healing work. This week shamanic healer, Betsy Bergstrom, joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss her experiences encountering evil, how she works with it, how she understands it, and how her understanding has changed over the years. Betsy is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

“Creativity is a magical and sacred process. The process transforms the artist and the product transforms the world,” explains artist Mark Wagner of Hearts and Bones. Mark is an internationally known digital and traditional artist, teacher, and street painter whose work moves so deeply in shamanic realms that it has empowered the covers works like Michael Harner’s classic, The Way of the Shaman, and countless Shaman’s Drum magazine issues. This week Mark joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this final episode of the WSN series, Art and Shamanism. There isn’t a reason in the world to stop making art because it grounds our creativity in our bodies where it can then change the world. It feeds our souls, takes us on a journey, and connects us to the sacred. Join us as we explore the job and the power of art to move the people and in that act to shape a new story for the new world.

True power can be accessed through the spirit of dance in a freeform atmosphere. Anyone can access his or her power anytime. You don’t need to know how to dance to touch the sacred through dance. When we dance we can access the power to reconcile our inner conflicts, transform toxic stress into energy, and reshape the story that defines our path in the world. So why don’t we dance? Or why don’t we dance with the focus and intention required to enter sacred space and embody the Spirit of Dance? This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues in this third episode of the new WSN series, Art and Shamanism. She explores the many ways sacred dance is used in her shamanic teachings to create personal sovereignty and allow the True Self to manifest your life from the inside out. In the wise words of Gabriel Roth, “Only when you truly inhabit your body can you begin the healing journey… (and) dance from the inside out, not the outside in.”

Sacred sounds resonate with the original blueprint for life and for your life. Sacred song can be a direct path by which the shaman restores your resonance with your original self in your body in the moment, regardless of the stories your mind spins or the fears you believe in. Shamanic sound healing can be offered to others or practiced with the intention of self-healing, but either way you do not need to know how to sing. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this second episode of the new WSN series, Art and Shamanism, when our guest is shamanic sound healer and teacher, Lauri Shainsky, PhD. Lauri currently has a thriving practice in shamanic sound healing at Hidden Lake Retreat, outside of Portland Oregon. There she works with individuals and groups to rediscover sacred sound and how we can sing with the song the universe is singing of all life.

“Making sacred images co-creates reality and feeds into the soul and web of life…” explains visual artist, author, and shamanic practitioner, Faith Nolton. “Making paintings with sacred intention one has a foot in both everyday reality [the act of painting or drawing] and the spirit worlds [trance state]. Keeping a balance between the two is where the point of creation lies.” This is what makes sacred art sacred. The act of creating sacred art is an ancient and honored shamanic practice. Join us this week as Faith, shares her forthcoming book “Gardens of the Soul: Making Sacred and Shamanic Art" and the whys and hows of making sacred art whether you can draw or not. Pictures and symbols speak to our consciousness beyond the busy mind allowing sacred art to function as healings, blessings, or connection to the spirit world. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this first episode of the new WSN series, Art and Shamanism.

“There is a lot to understand about the results of bridging the powerful and ancient method of Soul Retrieval into a modern day psychologically sophisticated culture,” says author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman. “In Western cultures we are not always supported to live a life filled with meaning. We often cannot connect the dots to how our lifestyle has created emotional and physical illnesses we are dealing with today.” This is why the quality of training people receive to perform soul retrieval healings is critically important. This week Sandra Ingerman joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss what to look for in soul retrieval trainings and why. Sandra is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

How do we live a sane life in an insane world? First we need to question Old World definitions of “reality” and “sanity” without throwing away all we have learned about being human with the ideas that no longer serve us and lead us astray. Then we need to look around and see that the only life going crazy here is the humans. Nature continues in spite of us to create places of magnificence, places of inspiring beauty, and places of great stillness and silence. The medicine for our contemporary madness is right here, all around us offering the stillness for our jangled nerves, beauty to inspire our hearts, and magnificence to remind us why we are here. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues her exploration of the early mental health pitfalls to awakening from the collective dream and the role Nature plays in returning us to our sanity, our heart’s deepest truth, and our own true nature.

Being shamanic is not a pass card from the responsibility of living a grounded and sane life. Shamanic skills are actually a means by which we can live a sane life in an insane world. Part of our confusion comes from the standard practice of teaching anthropology students that shamans are delusional and quite possibly schizophrenic. After the 1950’s as research and researchers matured and shamans were actually given standard psychological testing, it was shown that while shamans do have more colorful “magical thinking” they are actually mentally healthier and more intelligent than the norm in their communities. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the early mental health pitfalls to awakening from the collective dream: too many coincidences, too many ideas stripped from context, to many voices and no physical discipline. Join us this week as we discover why the belief that mental illness is a shamanic initiation waiting to happen is just an urban legend.

The Amazonian rainforest is home to a system of healing and plant medicines as vast, intricate, and effective as Chinese Medicine or Western naturopathy. Our guest, medicine man, Roman Hanis, is committed to the integration of this ancient wisdom into practical application in our modern world. Through Paititi Institute and its team of shamans, permaculture specialists, and practitioners of other healing arts Roman is building intercultural bridges for the healing on physical, emotional and spiritual levels of all people from all cultures and from all spiritual traditions and walks of life. Join us this week and host and shaman, Christina Pratt, speak with Roman how with holistic models of education, consciousness transformation and indigenous sacred plant medicine we help support the formation and existence of intentional communities who seek the social and environmental lifestyle development supported by spiritual evolution and maturation on both collective and individual levels.

Indigenous shamans share a quality of connection with the world that allows them to simultaneously sizzle with spiritual power, remain entirely grounded, and express a contagious joy, even in the face of very hard lives. Their approach to the day is qualitatively different from most western-trained practitioners. Shaman teacher/healer, speaker, artist and author, Evelyn Rysdyk, set out to find out why. She joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new book, Spirit Walking a Course in Shamanic Power. We will explore the way shamans are in the world, extremely power-filled and incredibly tender at the same time. This is a quality of “reverent participatory relationship” that we must cultivate ourselves if we are to effectively address the illnesses of our day. Evelyn is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

If we are to write a truly new story for the people in the new world we must transform the communal shadow behaviors that shaped so much of the old world. In the old world story much of the authentic impulse to create change was lost in fruitless rebellion, following gurus, and playing the victim the old world stories require. “To remember the true power of right action,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “we must bring our own inner warrior out of the shadow and cultivate discernment. Only then will we be able to see through our cultural delusions, lies, and denial and rescue our truly enduring visionary energy from the false prophets of the old world stories.” Join us this week as we explore the use of shamanic skills to transform communal shadow energies into the allies we need to both see a new world and to create it.

Most of us are aware of the Shadow thanks to the genius of Karl Jung. However knowing and doing are two different things and, let’s face it, most of us don’t do actual Shadow transformations. We hope it’s taken care of in that one weekend workshop or that one year at the men’s gathering. Shamanic skills allow us to track the crazy logical twists and turns inherent in good Shadow transformations anywhere any time, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. They also allow us to transform these energies into allies, never to return to the shadows again. This is what really matters, because we all participate in communal shadow behavior. We will not be able to write a new story for the new world if we cannot learn to notice and transform our part of the shadow stories that shape our world, holding humanity in “us versus them” thinking around economics and war, food and the environment, and sex and the place we call home.

Shamanic healing allows us to get to the source of a problem or disease when that source lies outside of the purely physical or mental realms. When shamanic healing works it can feel like a miracle, but that doesn’t mean that it is a miracle. Shamanic healing works for very practical reasons that follow the logical flow of energy, emotion, and spirit. “Shamanic healing is not a magic bullet,“ explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. “It will not do for you any of the aspects of healing that you must do for yourself. And there will always be aspects you must do for your self.” Join us as we explore how we know when we need to call on shamanic healing, when we need to reach out to another modality for help, and when we must do the one thing we don’t want to do—hitch up our britches and take the actions only we can take to become the version of our self who is well.

“It’s not the year 2012 that is important. It’s 2013,” said Hale Makua, Hawaiian, Kahuna elder. “…what we decide to build on will determine the spiritual focus as well as our lifeways for much of the next several thousand years…We have some hard decisions to make, and we have to make them now…We are now in the position to create a new world for our descendants, and especially for the next seven generations. This will require a massive shift out of the negative and into the positive polarity, and at all levels of our lives." Join us this week as author, teacher, and paleoanthropologist Hank Wesselman, PhD, and host, Christina Pratt, explore Hank’s new book, The Bowl of Light, and how we could make that shift. There is much needed wisdom here in the heart of the teachings this great Kahuna elder passed on to Hank. He is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series. In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance. It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

The most direct path to living your soul’s true purpose is both individual and communal. As individuals, people often feel lost, fragmented, or unknown to themselves. Others may feel whole, but have lost the simple art of connecting deeply in inner dialogue with their soul. Living in this way, at a distance from one’s self, creates anxiety daily and the life path that unfolds leads further and further away from the True Self. Individually we must relearn the skills of deep inner communication. Communally, we must come together to tend the critical gates in life: birth, adulthood, and death. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares her experience teaching communities to tend the gates for each other and individuals to engage in meaningful inner dialogue with heart and soul. Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina, asking what soul healing Last Mask Center offers for individuals and communities, why these teachings work, and how our passionate expression of our soul’s purpose is exactly the medicine the world needs at this time.

When we are not aware of our soul’s true purpose or simply not aligned in our actions, contemporary life can fill quickly with diseases of the soul. People, high and low functioning alike, feel a sense of alienation and betrayal that runs deep while the source of those feelings remains a mystery. Many are so depressed or fatigued that they don’t have the energy to care about what is authentic or what aligns with their heart. Many others find that, though they are doing all the right things, that passionate sense of meaning and purpose just isn’t happening. “Contemporary life is filled with so much promise of happiness and fulfillment, but to access what life promises, we all need skills, healing, and support in our transformation,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. Many are betrayed again and again by the failure in our culture to offer valid and effective paths back to our soul and its purpose for being here. Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina about finding the most direct path to living your soul’s true purpose.