Shamanism and Nature and the Nature of Shamanism

Chapter 3 The Shaman as Healer

In the two preceding topics I have touched on the healing function of the shaman, but I would like to try to be a bit more precise about it. Shamanism is one of the most natural forms of healing. Sometimes a shaman may heal through herbs, sometimes through voice and sound, sometimes through touch, sometimes through presence and sometimes through journeying (there will be more about journeying later). A shaman’s stock in trade is being able to communicate, provoke, invoke and expand the life energy in someone else. In a culture such as ours, where life energy is a quite foreign concept, much of our understanding about health and healing lacks the primary ingredient – a basic understanding of the life energy and how it moves in us. Anything that blocks the life energy leads to illness. Shamanic healing consists of devices, processes and inputs that activate the life energy and help it to move more fully and more strongly through us.

In the final chapter, in which I discuss shamanic initiation, I talk more about the life energy and the precision that a shaman needs in working with it. Initiation into shamanism, as well as other traditions, leads to a significant increase in the amount of life energy that the nervous system is able to accommodate. If someone is unable to accommodate this increase, the resulting imbalance can emerge as forms of schizophrenia, psychosis, paranoia – the traditional sorts of psychological disorders.

It is through the life energy that a shaman heals. A shaman’s touch releases from the body whatever is preventing the life energy from flowing. This process is quite familiar to anyone who has had bodywork from us or the people we train. A bodyworker works with the deep tensions and releases them. The most common forms of body work, such as deep tissue massage, work with the outer tensions of the body, but they do not affect the fundamental inner life energy currents in the way that other forms of touch can. It is the shaman’s work to enter into the deep life energy currents as they are moving through the body and to release what is held.

When I was in the desert about a decade ago with the Pitjantjatjara people, I needed some attention from the medicine man, Ilyatjara, because I was running a very high fever. He and an associate of his, Sam, sat with me and worked on my belly. The touch was exceptionally precise, of a quality that I have only ever experienced with trainers in deep tissue bodywork – people with international reputations and twenty years experience, who can just look at you and see where it is that you need the touch. Both the Pitjantjatjara medicine men and these bodywork trainers have the capacity to go straight to the point where the holding is, give the correct amount of pressure and delicately work to allow the release of energy. Much of a shaman’s training is with his own and then others’ life energy.

A shaman uses the basic senses of seeing, touching and hearing, but in an expanded way that goes well beyond that normally experienced in this culture. It is possible to see in a way that people’s inner structures are revealed. Some people see in colours. A number of children who have lived at the Centre have precise capacities to read people’s colours, and I sometimes use them to check my guesses, because I don’t always see the colours. My own dominant mode is not visual. For a shaman, the sense of hearing expands and absorbs other sorts of information. It takes in the sound of trees and what they are saying, it takes in the message that blows in the wind. These things are not audible in the conventional sense, but they are audible as an inner hearing, sense or feeling. Much of a shaman’s training is about developing an extra dimension to each of the five senses. As a shaman in training you learn to deepen your sense of touch, so that when you touch someone you can feel the deep inner structure, feel into that person’s karmic history, and read out whatever it is that is in the way of the person’s healing. You learn to feel the source of people’s trauma and distress, whether it is infancy, birth, intrauterine experience, conception, genetic memory or past lives. This extension of sensitivity is developed for all the senses. While taste is used infrequently, in some processes people do experience a different sort of taste that arises from their own internal processes – but it is not one that I am very familiar with, so I cannot say much about it.

A shaman undergoes rigorous training of the senses. People who spend twenty years in the desert with a medicine man (or in the mountains or on the plains, or wherever it is that the training is happening) learn very significant things. In some cases, they learn to listen to the spirit of the place – to hear what the rocks or the mountains are saying, to listen to the voice of the waterfall. In many traditions, the shaman will have a number of allies. They may be power animals or they may be totemic animals. In Australia, it may be dingo or possum, honeyant or eagle, kangaroo or wallaby, emu or echidna, depending on which animals live in the locality. The allies may be the elements. Someone may be particularly associated with fire or water, air or earth, or a mixture of them. Nearly everyone is aware that, astrologically, they have a mix of elements. You might be very earth, or all air, or air and water, or fire and water. You have a composition in the cellular matrix that was implanted at conception and then given a very strong hit with a particular overprint at birth. This individual mix of elements creates a characteristic cellular vibration. Someone who has a lot of earth characteristics will be able to more easily read the rocks, feel the earth’s heartbeat and listen to the deep message of the earth than someone who is air, who is much more oriented towards the wind.

The extended capacities that a shaman brings to healing often obviate the need for other diagnostic processes, or give a different account of what is happening, than X-rays might, for instance. It is also possible that they may give the same sort of information as X-rays do. If you have ever looked at X-rays, you will know that often you cannot see what doctors can see. A doctor might say, "See this consolidation in the lungs", but you cannot notice anything different. They have learnt how to read the subtle information in X-rays. A similar subtlety is needed to know and work with the life energy. Shamans have learnt how to read what is happening in the body. They notice the form of a body, how the tissue looks, the colouring, where the breathing is happening in the body, where the breathing is not happening, which parts of the body are in the person’s awareness and which parts are out of their awareness. This lack of awareness is revealed by seeing how they move, where the balance is out of alignment and where the body lacks its natural grace. This is where the person is unconscious, the part of the body that has been repressed out of their knowing. It is also the part of the body that people frequently injure.

As a shaman moves to revivify his or her own life energy, several things happen. They can sometimes become quite ill, because the increased life energy moving through them pushes up the anti-life energy that is in them. This is something that Freud called the "death wish", that is, those sources of dying that live in us. They can be quickly pushed up to the surface by certain shamanic practices. This is a major reason why having someone to refer to, who knows the maps in those areas, is very useful, because if you go to an orthodox medical practitioner with what is basically a shamanic complaint, the treatment will be of no assistance, because it will counter the symptoms, which are actually the healing. This is something that it is extremely important to be aware of. If you suppress the symptoms caused by an increased life energy ejecting that which has been stopping that life energy from moving, then, on the one hand, you are opening up a process, while on the other hand, you are closing it down. As the life energy increases it starts throwing out old memories that are held biochemically in the tissue. These can be held in the cell, in the joints, in the bone, in the blood – anywhere in the body. Because they are essentially toxic, as they are being thrown out they produce all the symptoms of illness. If you then believe that you are ill, rather than in the process of healing, it compounds the difficulties if you take an additional set of chemicals that seemingly heal, but actually press the toxins back into the body.

Ionce visited an MD who works as an anthroposophical medical practitioner. I talked to her about a range of symptoms I was having, and she totally understood. I had avoided going to anyone, because I was waiting to sense someone who could actually understand that what was happening in my body was actually a process of purification rather than an illness. I knew I was on the way to increased health, but at the same time, I was having to cope with a lot of distress in my body.

So a shaman will often have very different perspective to what is happening in the body. A person might be getting night sweats and tremors, and not know what to do with that. If they close it down they may actually close down an important energetic awakening. Only someone who can look at the body, and see that the energy is being awoken and beginning to flow, can give you the important information that you need. An effective shamanic healer will always be someone who has been through a similar sort of awakening and understood its interiority – someone who knows how it lives in the other because they know how it lived in them. There is a big difference between this sort of person and someone who has learnt it as a concept, and is just giving you their conceptual notion of healing.

Sometimes purifications go in cycles. When they are increasing, particularly when the genetic memory is being purified, they can become very disorienting, because the body can have many symptoms that are not medically classifiable. A medical practitioner or specialist often won’t be able to even give your condition a name, because it is not an identifiable cluster of main disease states. It is a recognisable cluster of energetic purifications, but Western medicine’s repertory of diseases does not include energetic purification. Skilled Chinese medical practitioners will be able to recognise it.

Genetic memory is what Jung calls the "collective unconscious". It is easy to think of the collective unconscious as something outside ourselves that suddenly descends upon us or that we fall into. It actually lives within the genetic structure as bioelectrical information. It is energetic, vibratory information that derives from the accumulated history of evolutionary experience – and not just human evolutionary experience, but also animal evolution. The big advance in healing is now happening in the area of genetic reprogramming through natural means –through light, sound and movement. The work is already well under way in a number of places around the world as a form of technological shamanism. It is taking many of the things that shamans do around the fires at night with the light of the stars, the beat of the drum and the chant of the voices, and using modern technology to create an interlocking vibratory matrix of sound, movement and light to bring about external structural change. The people doing this work are gaining the necessary information from their own genetic information. As people access a direct awareness of a neurobiological circuit in the body and the brain, they literally start to live out the information from their own genetic structure. Traditional shamans have always been able to do this, but they have not had access to the language of science and psychology, so they talk about it as the knowledge of the gods, or as the knowledge of the spirit. In the West, the model that is more appropriate for us is the concept of genetic memory.

I realise that I am expanding the conventional notion of shamanism and putting it into a modern context, but that is what is needed for Westerners. In modern life it is not an option for most people to spend twenty years hanging out with a shaman in order to learn – and basically you don’t have to anyway. There are far quicker ways of doing the training, of sensitising your nervous system, than some of the traditional ways. The traditional ways have been the best that shamans have known, but we now have shamanic information, not just from one culture (as a traditional shaman has), but from hundreds of cultures. There are people who have trained cross-culturally as shamans. Some people who have trained in the West in a range of healing skills such as yoga, deep therapies, hypnosis and psychoacoustics, have seen that they are dealing with the same sorts of things that shamans deal with. All these people have developed their skills and knowledge from the starting point of asking themselves, "How do we get into deep communication with the life energy that manifests in people, in the land, in plants and in animals?

It took me fourteen years of training to reach the stage where I knew I had opened into shamanic knowing. I am confident that the training can be done more quickly. I needed fourteen years because initially I had no teacher other than nature. I only survived my searching because I found a – my wife, Rachana. If you have no-one who understands the profound energies that get released during some shamanic openings, you can become very lost. In the previous topic I mentioned Robert Masters acknowledgement that had he not had Jean Houston’s assistance at one stage he would have died from the amount of energy that was moving through him. I know that to be true. If you cannot navigate certain openings when they happen, you need to find a way of closing them down without drugs. Many people have openings that propel them into such strange and remote spaces that no-one around them can related to them.

I once worked with a severely epileptic chap. In an episode of epilepsy the biological energy fires up far more quickly than the nervous system can handle and far more quickly than the person’s consciousness can expand. It moves so quickly that it races beyond control, overloads the brain and causes seizure. At first we taught this man to befriend his own life energy, to not be fearful of it. He needed to realise that it was a key feature of his being and to work with the negativities he had developed about it. Secondly, we taught him how to start to open into his rushes of energy. He did an immense amount of healing until a full moon night (which is the traditional time when a lot of these openings happen) he awoke from sleep with so much energy coming up that it literally pushed up about five unresolved incarnations at once. He was rocketing around from one to the other. It was quite extraordinary to see him moving between incarnations without him having any sense that that was what he was doing. We spoke to that part of him that was not there, in the present, and brought it right back into the present – and he was fine. The massive surges of energy had been potentially purifying, but because he previously had no way through it, he just had to close it down. As he learned to gradually open and expand his consciousness to encompass the energy, he was able to find a way through and then purify the genetic muck in him. On the other side of that process, he was a different person. While he was in process his sense of who he was took him from being about three or four years old and calling to a person from that time who he believed me to be, to suddenly going back to being a soldier wounded in a battle, to going back down to neanderthal man. He soared around many different spaces of consciousness with no-one home in the present.I understand why people are scared when someone goes into those spaces in the ordinary world. No-one is home. You don’t know where they are, you can’t relate to them. Normally such a person is temporarily certified and the process is closed down. When this happens it causes immense inner pressure in the body as the process tries to reactivate. We have worked with people who have been struggling to find clarity with what they later come to see as an opening that has been closed down pharmaceutically. In shamanic openings, there are no guarantees of happy outcomes.My first yoga teacher, in talking of her own preparation, spoke of a time in Tibet when she spent three months in a cave in total darkness with two dishes provided each day – one for food and one for her excreta. She came out of that a very strong and clear person, but she said that some people went insane, because they could not process what was released inside them.

You may be thinking that this means that shamanism is dangerous. There is risk involved, but we need to remember the number of people who go insane in ordinary life, that is, the number of people who have spontaneous awakenings and openings and then cannot handle the amount of energy coming through them when they have no guides to help them. In the previous topic I mentioned Julian Silverman’s work with schizophrenics in San Francisco. He took the approach that schizophrenia indicated a shamanic opening and treated it as that rather than insanity or derangement. What emerged from this was a large number of people who really knew the inner structure of the shamanic journey.

As a shaman opens and incorporates more energy into their being, they also become a channel for more energy. Initially, when that energy is passing through them, they often shake, shiver and sweat. As their nervous system becomes more acquainted with that pulse of energy, a lot of those symptoms will drop away. They open further, and even more energy comes through them, and then they may go through another set of symptoms. If you do not have a teacher, the only thing that gets you through is just pure blind faith, good luck, pigheadedness and the fact that you choose to see it as part of your healing and your opening rather than craziness – because you can take your pick. This can be a disorienting time, because the levels of energy that move through you can cause you to lose a certain point of reference.

My own reflections on all of this have led me to the point where I consider that it is now possible to experience these openings very systematically in a step-by-step preparation. Some of the ancient mystery schools were organised in ways that led students or apprentices through stages of expansion. Those who had the knowledge, the inner circle, would keep watching the development of the others, and then every now and again invite a new person in to the next step – which would be, literally, their initiation.

Many shamans use their allies to give them information that they need for their healing work. You can get that information without allies. The ally is just a strategy that a particular culture has for allowing you to open into certain knowledge spaces. You develop an affinity with an ally to the point where you get inside the group consciousness of the ally. If you get inside the group consciousness of the dingo you might get the quality of cunning. If you get inside the group consciousness of the eagle and you might get the quality of being able to feel things at a distance, or the quality of greatly sharpened vision. However, you can get that information without allies. Consciousness is so rich and giving that any belief structure that you set up for yourself will provide you with the information that you need to validate that belief structure. If you set up the belief structure that the world is a horrible place and live that out, you will get the guaranteed result that the world is a horrible place. If you set up the belief structure that people cannot be trusted, you will get the precise outcome in your life that will guarantee the truth in that belief. Beliefs do not just live somewhere etherically in the mind, they actually live organically in the tissue, they are encoded neuroelectrically within you. As you change those sorts of energetic matrices in the deep layers of yourself, then the world will start to respond differently to what is imprinted there.

This all means that you can design your own shamanic preparation if you have the guts. You can choose to see the world operating in a certain way. You can look at any capacity that a shaman has in any culture, see the way in which they get that capacity, and if you don’t like what they have to go through you can design another pathway. All you need to do is create neurological pathways to get you to certain states of consciousness. There are hundreds of different ways of getting into different states of consciousness. Take speaking in tongues, for example. The Pentecostalists think that they have the monopoly on that, but if you want to learn to talk in tongues, all you need is the knowledge of how to go into deeply altered states and program yourself to receive that capacity.

I have worked for many years now with people, playing with these techniques and I know that it is possible to design pathways in. To learn firewalking in a culture takes a long while. you have to spend a long time in the culture and become part of it. There are people now who teach firewalking in a day. They have discovered how to shift you into another reality in which your nervous system operates differently. This is what a lot of shamanism is about – being able to shift the point from which you are operating, being able to do it quickly and being able to think on your feet. If you are doing it out of a textbook, don’t bother. If you are out in the bush learning shamanism out of a textbook, chances are that something else is going to come up, and if you cannot think on your feet and cannot navigate in that space, you can get quite lost.

There are a lot of things in nature that most Westerners are unaware of. Shadow beings, for instance, are not well known. You think you see them and the wonder if it is your imagination. You never see them front on, it is always out of the corner of your eye. Your peripheral vision processes things differently to your direct vision. When you see them out of the corner of your eye, you think, "That can’t be there". When you turn and look, you won’t see anything, but the first look is trustworthy because it gives you different information to the second look. If you want to take a second look, do not turn your head. Keep watching out of the corner of your eye and you will see it. It is then a matter of whether your belief system will allow you to see what you are actually seeing, or whether you say, "That can’t be real, I’m only imagining it".

There is a forest above the Centre for Human Transformation. A friend and I were once up there doing a few little rituals to help us expand. At one point he turned around to piss against a tree, and right at that moment a three-dimensional shadow went past. It was about two metres long and across and one metre high, and it had a trunk-like appendage and three distinct sections. I had never seen a three-dimensional shadow before. I said to my friend, "Did you see that that?" He replied, "No, what happened?". He missed it. However, I have learned to trust my observations and I was left with my experience of this mysterious phenomenon.

Later when I was out in the desert, I asked the Pitjantjatjara, "Are there shadow beings". They told me that they know about them. They have a word for them, they know where they live, they know how they move and they know how to interact with them. There is nothing in our culture, apart from largely ignored myths and legends, that gives us this sort of information. So when we get that not-quite-certain sense that we have seen or felt something unusual, we tend to bring in the rational mind and dismiss it, rather than just allowing it as a valid observation.

This sort of thing happens with sound as well. You may hear a sound that you don’t recognise that your neurology reacts to as something unusual. Your hair stands an end, you shiver a bit and you don’t know what it is. The way to find out what it is (and here I am jumping ahead a bit to the next topic, "Contacting the Inner Shaman") is to allow the image of that sound to form in you. You have that capacity, and you will literally see what it is. We have several things that live in the surrounding forest that create extraordinary sounds. Every now and again someone will hear them and say, "What was that?" We usually reply, "Drop inside and find the image of it". Often, when the person does this, they give us a precise image that is identical to descriptions that many others have given. However, they usually refuse to believe that it is an existent thing. They tend to think that it is their fantasy, even though each person who has heard it has given a similar account. This image-making capacity that we have is trustworthy. It isn’t a mere trick, or just some sort of memory out of a book that we read when we were a kid. I suspect that it is some sort of primal evolutionary hunter’s survival capacity.

I remember another time being out on the property with a friend who was very psychic, and we were looking for a place to make a fire for an all-night occasion that we were planning. We were walking in a part of the forest that was relatively clear when we heard something walking about five metres away in dense bush. It was two-legged and was walking through the bush without any difficulty. I checked my neurology, he checked his, and we said, "Let’s go". We both had a powerful certainty that we were best off away from there. It was not just a fear reaction. If you develop skills in this area you get to recognise the difference between a fear reaction and a precise indication that there is something present that may not be in the physical realm in the same way that we are, but is nevertheless perceivable.

Rachana and I run a fifteen-day program called "Returning to the Source", which explores the depths of shamanic preparation. At one stage in the program participants spend twenty-four hours in deep trance in the forest, and some of them have the skills to enter into profound communication with some of these phenomena. If you are able to be there without fear and with the clarity that whatever manifests in your consciousness is doing so to teach you something, the process can be very prophetic and transformative. There can be a point of stillness in you while you are in that space, rather than being overrun by a point of fear. If your fear starts to become very strong, you will attract forest energies that feed on that around you, and that is when the freak-out comes, because things start to get weird.

A: You say that you know the difference between fear and internal thoughts that are telling you, "Get out of here". What is the main thing that you look for to help you differentiate the two. My experience is that fear can play really funny games on you, but just ignoring it can be dangerous.

Daricha: The general rule of thumb is that it is going to be your fear far more often than anything else. However, you need to develop an inner focus that is independent of the fear. Danger doesn’t go hand in hand with fear, so much as not having the right focuas or attitude. In the previous discussion there was a quesiton that led to discussion about whether things are best left unexplored inside your being. Someone said, "Sometimes people don’t want to remember things".I replied that such an attitude is a death wish for a shaman. If you want to keep certain things unknown inside yourself, then that is the doorway in for things from the outside. It becomes a hole in the etheric that can just blow you away. That is where danger lies. It’s not that you need to think that you are fearless–although you do need to have a fair dose of courage.

Another thing to be aware of is that it often makes a lot of sense that if you are not sure about something, you get the hell out of there. If it turns out that there is something that you need to encounter, it is best to do it when you are ready, when you feel really convinced that you can do it. If it descends upon you before you feel ready, there’s nothing that you can do other than deal with it as best you can. You can’t get away because it is right there impinging on your consciousness. It can be very puzzling in some ways, because it won’t be at all clear if it is coming from outside or inside. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, you still have to deal with it.

A: That is what I mean about the danger.There are things that feed off your fear, and naturally, when you are in fear, you are open and creating a hole for whatever it is to enter.

Daricha: This raises an issue that I haven’t yet touched on. Traditionally, shamans work with the spirit. This may involve work with spirits that are trapped inside you, causing you damage. Things that exist in our past are like spirits from the past, or unresolved incarnations. You may hold a genetic memory from down the family lineage, that you can easily see as the spirit of something else, an unresolved element from that spirit that still lives in you. Whether you see it as a literal spirit or as some genetic carryover of an ancestral trait that is trying to live out through you, perhaps destructively, the shaman’s work is the same, that is, to be able to reach into that layer in the life energy and lead the person closer to it–to open it up, let them see it, and then bring it out and to let it move. It is quite common, for instance, for people who are working through clearing their birth trauma to whip into the trauma that their own mother was having as she was giving birth. On the other hand, people will sometimes move more into a far more collective experience, where it may be the suffering of a whole number of women that they are encountering. It is as if something in the personal realm triggers them into the transpersonal. Those energies are profound and very disorienting until they are healed. This is the shaman’s realm. Working in there, moving into those spaces, being able to sense and identify them, and then being able to move them through the person so that they are no longer lodged and living through them in an unconscious way.

A: So you actually inherit stuff that iss not really there?

Daricha: Absolutely! Why do you think the world is in such a mess? Genetically we are programmed with so many things from the past–fear and anger, hatred and greed, and the divisive race consciousness that sets one race against another. Race consciousness actually lives in the blood, which is the reason for the concern about purity of the blood that people who become fixated on race consciousness have. Their concern about the purity of the blood arises because that is where that form of consciousness lives. There is another part of the deep unconscious that lives in the bones. There is another that lives in the marrow of the bones. Different qualities are held in different parts of the body.

If you do inner work on yourself you will reach a stage in which a lot of the stuff that you are clearing actually isn’t yours in terms of what you have done in this lifetime. While you certainly will have done things that caused you stress, under that you will find the layers of genetic programming. This is well known in homeopathy. Homeopaths will talk about the fundamental miasms that generate disease, for example, the syphilitic and the gonorrhea miasms are like subtle vibratory breakdowns in the inherited energetic pattern of a person that lead to certain psychological predispositions. Most human beings are run by unconscious programs, and many of those unconscious programs go far beyond the personal. You just have to look at how people respond to things like going to war and calls to nationalism. These responses come out of the cultural unconscious. People are hooked in there. We feel "proud to be Australian", or any other nationality, but we are not born Australian or German or Japanese. These cultural identity imprints are grow in us and are then reinforced from the outside. It is one are of self-knowing that we need to deal with.

B: How do you deal with a person who sees things entirely in terms of their own direct concrete reality?

Daricha: It depends completely on the level of awareness that the person has. If the person has no reflective awareness of the nature of consciousness and the different levels and ways in which consciousness can manifest through experience, then you are often pushing right uphill, because not only do you need to help them clear certain things, you need to help them get a perspective on what is happening –and in this whole area there is absolutely no substitute for intelligence. Some people can be intelligent about their experience, really want to learn and be open to hearing, while other people are just stupid about their own experience. They are so attached to the interpretations of the culture, to the interpretations from the past or to their own version of their story that, despite working with them and getting some shifts and change, they won’t really understand what it is that is flowing through them. I have reached the stage now where I will only work with people who really want to change and who are ready to be right on the edge of their experience, because otherwise it’s a waste of time. I have much better things to do than push people. I once sent someone away saying, "You are not desperate enough yet". When I was asked, "Why do I need to be desperate?", I replied, "You don’t really want to change. I can see how dysfunctional these patterns are in you, but you want to get better and keep those patterns. Well, I know that you can’t, but you won’t accept it, so you need to live it out for a few more years until you are so desperate that you are cracking apart at the seams. Then maybe you’ll come back. On the other hand, maybe you won’t. It’s your life." I don’t know what else to do.

B: What I really want to know is how can you talk to someone who is just not familiar with the notion of experience beyond the personal.

Daricha: The basic thing is to help people discover the levels of their experience. They start by dealing with the first layers of the personal story. Once they have cleaned that away they can start to dive in deeper. What happens is that if people keep diving inside, then their own consciousness comes to teach them. It is inevitable, as day follows night, that if you keep going in, you get the information. You have to, because it is encoded in you. If you sit silently and do something such as vipassana and quiet your mind, then you get information and understanding.You start to see how the unconscious works, and how patterns fit together. Suddenly you are you are understanding things about yourself. You will think, "Oh, my God, I’ve been living all that stuff out all these years!"–and you start to get shifts.

C: Do you think there are particular shamans for particular people?

Daricha: Yes.

C: So if a person doesn’t get something from a particular shaman it’s not necessarily a matter of intelligence. It may be just that he is not their particular shaman.

Daricha: Yes … but sometimes it is their intelligence.

It certainly does happen that people come to me and I can tell that I’m not suitable for them. I refer them to someone else who works differently from me and whose work I know to be good.

Let me say a bit more about being a shaman. Obviously, not everyone has the mark of a shaman in them, but some people are drawn to it. For some people it is deep in them, because they have travelled that pathway for many years. Magic is deep in some people, and rather than the spontaneity and natural ways of shamanism, they will be attracted to the solid structure of certain ways of magical practice. Other people may have deep fears from past incarnations about things that went wrong for them, and they don’t want to know about any of it. This is wyou hear, "No! It’s nonsense, it doesn’t exist, I don’t want to hear about it". They may just need to take time out. For a whole incarnation they will do something else–go into politics or make money. There are a few shamans around, but not many of them describe themselves in those terms.

E: From what you have said, I would suspect that there are an awful lot of shamans around, even if they are not calling it shamanism.

Daricha: I think there are a lot of people who have begun their opening, and there are a lot of people who have part of it functioning, but I don’t see many who have the capacity to think on their feet and be able to move quickly, succinctly and deal with situations as they arise. Imagine a situation where there are a dozen people in a room who have been doing some deep inner processing. The group leader says to one participant, "How do you feel?" "I feel OK", she says. The leader replies "There is something not quite right in your body". Suddenly, the woman starts to act as if she is possessed by an animal, and goes totally into animal consciousness. I have not seen many people who I would trust in that situation, but for me that is one of the tests of a fully functioning shaman.

E: You mean a test for a shaman?

Daricha: Yes, it tests whether the person is a shaman or is just someone who has picked up a bit here and there, and who has some of the attributes of a shaman, but who does not really know what they are dealing with. A shaman needs to be able to talk to that energy and demand that it leave, and then cope with what happens as it starts jumping around the room, moving in and out of other people until it as is conncets with what they need to learn. If I had to set up a test of a fully functioning shaman, I would say, "OK, guys, handle that". Then I would sit back and give them marks out of ten. Knowing what to do in such a situation is full-on shamanism. Anything less is still moving towards it.

This is idiosyncratic on my part. Other people will have other criteria for what makes a shaman, but for me this would be a good test. It is a situation that demands a highly developed ability to be able to think on your feet, to encounter something you have never encountered before, to draw on the wealth of potential information that the situation is presenting, to hang out on the edges, to call in whoever or whatever you need to give you the energy to confront this, and to keep balance with those 12 people in the room, all of whom may be quite scared of what is happening. That is the level that I want to see in shamanism. Firstly, because managing such a situation is a profound healing act, and secondly, because if you cannot think on your feet in that situation, then you are provoking something through your work that you cannot deal with–and you are leading others to spaces where you know you are not safe.

This scenario that I have described is a good example of some of the sorts of things that we do not give enough credence to and that need to be dealt with in human beings. Those sorts of things do exist. I have seen them come out and dance around a room and been able to see who they are going into. I’ll sense something like, "That guy has a hole in him. He’s inviting the stuff in because he’s so scared.It looks like he’s next. I’ll need to hold him and help him deal with it.

E: What happens is the shaman is not good enough?

Daricha: I don’t know, I’ve never been with one not good enough. I hold to the basic rule of don’t go where you can’t skate.

E: But some do.

Daricha: It is certainly possible for a budding shaman to get out of their depth.

E: How do you know, before you work with a shaman, if he knows what he is doing?

Daricha: You don’t. You have to suss them out. Ask yourself, "How do I feel about this person? Where can I meet them? Where do I feel I can’t meet them? Where do I feel a bit strange with them?". "If I am in a really tight spot, do I feel that this person can be there for me?". That is how I test them. Consequently, I don’t work with all that many people. I have had very few teachers in my life. Those that I have accepted have been people who were tops in their field, because I demand that sort of thing in a teacher. Other people don’t. They get carried along by a bit of pallaver and advertising, and away they go. There is no substitute for feeling–and there are no guarantees.

E: It seems like a very risky business.

Daricha: So is life. You might be run over by a car tomorrow.

E: It worries me that the shaman might think he is prepared and ready to control everything, when in fact he is not.

Daricha: As I have said, you have to test someone until you feel a level of trust that enables you to move forward. Traditionally there were people who were recognised in cultures as keepers of shamanic knowledge. You apprenticed yourself to these people and trained with them for possibly 30 years. They would throw you into the deep water every now and then, but they were always there to pull you out.

F: Would these keepers of shamanic knowledge stop some people from becoming shamans?

Daricha: Of course. If you are a good shamanic teacher and you notice that an apprentice cannot use the power wisely, then you just don’t teach them any more. It is more difficult in this culture, where the exchange of knowledge is related to money. You go along, you do this group, you do that group, and you pick up a few things. After a while, you call yourself a shaman or something similar and people come along. What to do? It is no good setting up a government licensing board! But we do need to start to pay attention to this realm and to works in it and to those who claim to be able to work in it. Having done some training under the guidance of a shamanic teacher doesn’t replace the need for taking responsibility for your own development. You have to develop good sense in the area–a sense of caution and a sense of danger. You need to be able to discriminate between when to put your foot on the accelerator and when to put it on the brake. Sometimes you are going to say, "No, time to stop". Other times you are going to say, "Yippee, I don’t know what is happening here, but here I go!". We are all going to die sometime, and chances are that we are not going to live fully before we do. What stops us all the time is our fear. We keep pulling back and somewhere in our incarnation (it may not be this one, but five incarnations down the road) you have to be prepared to say, "I don’t know if it’s going to kill me, but I’m up for it!". Sometimes we are going to feel like we are dying as the old is leaving us. The old personality gets split apart by the new energy coming in, and that can be scary. However, there are some very fine writings on shamanism now, and you can get to know at least some of the things that shamans go through. I have had times when my whole nervous system has been on fire for a day and a half, until I have reache a point where suddenly I twigged, "Ah, here’s that point that the Buddhists get to when they talk about burning up your karma". You literally burn it up inside! And once I could name it, once I had a fix on it, once I could say, "Oh, it’s alright, I’m just burning up karma", I felt OK. Now maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t–it doesn’t really matter. The important thing was that having a bit of a handle on what is going on often helps immensely. It makes it less scary. On the other hand, sometimes we have to not know what is going on, because that is how our most vital learning occurs, where our most significant breakthroughs happen. Sometimes you may have a certain opening where you are totally on your own and you just have to discover from your own being where you are with it.

There is no golden guarantee that you are going to have sanity instead of craziness. There can’t be any guarantee. A lot of young people start opening up when they get into psychedelics or hallucinogenics, speed and whatever, and they just get thrown into spaces they cannot handle. They are basically shamanic states, but they get lost in them. The people around them don’t understand the phenomenon, whether itis their friends or counsellors. Some counsellors may have read a book on shamanic states, but there are very few shamans working as drug counsellors, people who actually know those states from their own being. If you ever find one who does, then you will notice that they are terrific with the kids, because they know those states, they know the doorways to go through and they know where they can actually help someone.

The issue of drugs leads me to an area of huge importance for our culture–childbirth. When a woman is having her baby, it is actually an opening into a whole energy realm. The post-natal depression which is widespread throughout our culture is caused by the lack of understanding of what is happening in the birthing process. When drugs are used in the birthing process they force closure on the mother when she is trying to open. What is supposed to happen is that as the baby’s head comes out of the mother’s lower hole, the top hole–the top chakra–will open, and the mother receives a whole ray of cosmic mothering energy. Our mothers are not getting this, which is why they want to go back to school, and back to work after they have their baby–why they don’t feel fully at ease in the role and office of motherhood. They are not getting what nature brings them at that time. Women who have natural, positive birthing experiences almost immediately feel much stronger, much more mature.Others are off to professionals all the time, wanting to know from somebody else, or from a book. They do not have that inner knowing. Whatever happens for the mother, also happens for the baby, so most of us had our first opening and our first introduction to this life process closed down. Every day the new members of our society are born drugged. This is where our drug problems come from. People do not understand that when a newborn is coming in as nature intends, it is fully alert, vibrant and fully connected with its environment. Most babies are born drugged and surrounded by people who are fearful. Most of us were drugged because our mothers were drugged, and the people around them were fearful because of the total dominance of the left side of the brain and the denial of the right side in our approach to birthing practice.

The nervous system is gratly affected by the tremendous pressureof childbirth. We are really stretched as babies. In that time of immense pressure, drugs are introduced that often make babies unconscious or lead them away from experiencing the fullness of the birth. Then as they grow up and start experiencing pain in their lives, their organic system is programmed to seek chemicals that will actually take the pain away. The whole birth practices of the culture are acts of generating the drug problem. Healing the drug problem will not happen without immense changes to accepted birthing practices, because those deep imprints into the neurobiology at birth are the ones that we then come to act out. It is one of the totally unrecognised contributions to the whole drug problem, and if you analyse the rise of certain forms of obstetric intervention, you will see correlations with drug use patterns twenty years later.

G: If it keeps going like this we are going to have a race of very strange people.

Daricha: We already have a race of very strange people.