I am very fortunate to be a participant in Betsy Bergstrom’s 2 year shamanic training in Middle World shamanic skills. Betsy’s training is designed to help shamanic practitioners like me to sharpen our disciplines, learn new skills to support our work and find fellowship and replenishment among our colleagues. Betsy has dedicated a lifetime of work to studying the Middle …
The Shamanic Worlds: Claim Your Birthright
Many decades ago anthropologist Michael Harner developed and presented to the Western world the cosmology of Core Shamanism. As a result of his study and experience with shamanic cultures around the world, he determined that all have some things in common. One of those commonalities he described is the division of our experience of existence into Ordinary Reality (OR) and …
Is Shamanism Real: And What About Dreaming?
Thanks to the sponsorship of the amazing Rubin Museum I discovered the fascinating documentary film Edge of Dreaming. In this film Amy Hardie documents, very intimately, a year in which she transforms from a “rational” scientific documentary film maker, into a dreaming, shamanic-journeying film maker. In the course of that transition, she experiences a convincing dream-based prediction of her own death …
Is Shamanism Real?
I love the Internet. It has completely changed the way we communicate with one another, and created open doors for ideas and interactions that we couldn’t have dreamed of a few decades ago. When previously I’d have had to write you a letter or produce a flyer to let you know what I was thinking or what classes I am …
Setting Out
I’ll confess right up front that I’ve struggled to get to this spot, my first blog post. And I’m not even talking about my usual struggle with semi-colons versus commas, Arial versus Verdana or even my titanic passes through the thesaurus looking for the word that perfectly describes the nuances of my idea. I mean that I’ve struggled for years …