The Making of a Shaman: Part 1

Problems linked to illness, such as psychic crises, but also pains of a physiological nature, (fever, migraines, rheumatic pains) can be assumed to be just so many initiatory trials. Uncovering the religious significance of illness and physical pain constitutes in effect shamanism's essential contribution to the history of the spirit. Mircea Eliade Journals 1956

The Shaman As Storyteller

I did not seek to become a shaman. Rather, a number of experiences at different moments in my life led me to actively question the nature of reality. That search eventually developed into a sense that destiny was calling me. For thirteen years I journeyed, studied, prepared, and paid attention, until I was initiated by Spirit and ready to teach. Until that time came I did not teach as a shaman, nor did I call my work shamanic. Only as I was unknowingly taking the final steps in response to the energies that called me to the heart of this land and deeply into my own heart, did I call together a group of men for a shamanic adventure called "Journey to the Heart of Being”. Little did I know what that journey would entail.

The events that took place during that time not only changed my life, but also gave me a number of extraordinary stories to share with people – stories that could be told in sacred places, in wild country around fires at night, when seekers met with an openness to hear the truth of lived experience, and when a doorway opened to allow moments from another time to come into the present.

Shamans have always told stories. One of their major ways of teaching has been to share their own experience in story. Stories of journeys through time into other dimensions, travels in consciousness beyond this life, into the realms of the dying and the dead, stories of learning the process of remembrance, of coming into being, remembering who we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. In a culture such as ours, where the monochrome of literal thinking is washed over our mental processes, where reliable guides are few, the stories that come seem bewildering, fantastic, unbelievable, and at times psychotic and severely weird. These reactions tell us more about our culture at this time in history, than it does about such stories and the persons who are telling them. Sometimes, in inappropriate contexts, the stories seem tales of madmen, and their madness. And sometimes this is true, for few complete their shamanic preparation without visits to places in themselves that the unknowing, the unprepared and the cultural arbiters of truth will label in this way.

In the first year or two after my initiation as a teacher, I did not know what to do with the stories I carried, until a good friend, who over time also became a fellow traveller and at times a worthy opponent, simply said, "Just keep on telling the stories”. He had spent many years with indigenous shamans of this land, and had some inkling of the power of stories that come from the interaction between the Spirit of this country and the human heart.

So, here are some stories – stories of the making of a shaman, of a man blessed and challenged by Spirit, who was foolish enough, courageous enough, and wise enough to dive into the beyond and to allow himself to be touched by the deep mystery. Some people want to know if the stories are true – yes, they are. Others want to know if the stories are the truth – that is a different question. Many times after men and women that I have journeyed with over the years have encountered aspects of the deep mystery, they will relate their experience and then ask, "Is it real?” My response still remains a simple question, "What did you experience?”, for experience and reflection is all we ever have in regard to these realms. How others choose to judge our experience is another matter. The arbiters of intellectual fashion, social taste, acceptable human behaviour and cultural knowledge, along with the guards who stand at the borders of acceptable human knowledge, will wholeheartedly label these stories in harsh ways.

In the shamanic world, some perceptions can be mistaken, some accounts can be incomplete, and sometimes, because of energies moving in us of which we are unaware, we are deluded. Shamanic storytellers describing both their own and others’ experiences certainly have to come to terms with this. This issue is centrally important, but it is a matter for another day and a different book. It is enough to acknowledge it here.

Contemporary shamanism that does not derive from one of the great indigenous traditions still exists within the great flow of Spirit, out of which these traditions come. Seekers who have been formed in contemporary ways, who through Spirit’s guidance have found other paths into the Source, also have stories of how we come from the stars and of how we exist simultaneously across several different dimensions, each with its own laws and separate reality that weaves in and out of the one that most westerners think is the only one.

Often these stories are of different states of awareness, of challenge, confrontations with forces that can rip us apart, dismast out sails, and leave us rudderless on the ocean of life. There are also stories from eternity, that realm outside of the third dimensional flow of time, and stories of the great heart of which we are all a part.

The stories that follow provide understanding for one way in which a contemporary shaman was formed. They are also the stories that I sense are appropriate to share with a wider audience at this time.

The Young Lad

The young lad was feeling quite excited and a little edgy. It was the annual Sunday School picnic and the next race was cross country. Twelve years old and a little overweight for his age, he was called "heffalump" in honour of the elephant in A.A. Milne's Christopher Robin stories. Living on the edge of a small country town, his playgrounds were the nearby paddocks, tall gums and Sandy Creek, an intermittent waterway where he and his friends explored duck's nests and tried to catch rabbits with natural traps made from The Bush Boys Book. Filled with diagrams of things to make such as a stretcher from two hessian wheat bags and small limbs of trees, it was a source of continual fascination. They made billy carts and careered down the hill, broadsiding just before they fell into the creek. Being overweight and not particularly nimble, he was used to not doing too well at sport. The old shoes he wore, with the soles tied on with pieces of string when he played football, didn't really serve to help his movement in that sport.

The race began and off he went. The course went through a paddock, around a billabong, over fallen trees and back to where it beganÑpossibly up to a kilometre in all. Some older boys were also in the race, as were some younger ones.

Years later, he didn't remember very much about the race except for two things. Firstly, he wonÑsomething that had never happened before, and secondly something strange happened to him. He remembered looking at the sun during the race and it was like the energy of the sun entered into him. After that his life changed.

Several months later a mysterious serious illness descended upon him. In the country town of 1950's rural Victoria medical facilities were scarce, and it was decided to keep him at home during the strange paralysis that affected him. He could move only his eyes.

His mother, a devout Christian, could only pray for his wellbeing. His father, a dairy supervisor, was away in the surrounding rural area, staying overnight with farming families, getting up at 4.30 in the morning to test the milk that the cows gave. The doctor could not recognise the symptoms. It didn't seem to be poliomyelitis. After a week, as suddenly as it had descended upon him, his body released the symptoms, and his movement was restored.

It was only in his adult life that he saw the strange conjunction of these two events and the extraordinary transformation in his body energy that followed.

Within two years he was the high school's junior athletic champion and competing against representatives from other schools. He started playing football with the "midgets". He tried tennis, but didn't have his own racquet, joined a cricket team and swam in school contests.

By the age of 16, he was chosen to represent the regional area in a state football competition and was judged best and fairest in the league in which he played.

In cricket he alternated between wicket keeping and bowling. Unable to choose between them, he did both. Continuing as school athletic champion, in one day he won races in 100, 220, 440 and 880 yards and was placed in the long jump, high jump, javelin and shotput. He ran 8 kilometres each morning and organised his own training regime based on a book by Percy Cerruty, who coached Herb Elliot, a world record holder, and Merv Lincoln, a local boy made good.

His 440 race came in under the state record for his age, but the track hadn't been certified for distance so it was never registered.

In winter he would play two football matches a week, train two nights and the two other nights would bicycle 12 kilometres to the family's favourite butcher, for fresh meat for the family's meals. Buses were few, cars were relatively rare and he had energy to burn.

The student was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Having finished secondary school, he was now at first year of teacher’s college. He entered at the age of 16, being within the age limit by only four days. He was the youngest student in the college, and a little overwhelmed by the citywise students who were three, four or more years older than him.

Somewhat socially shy, he held himself slightly aloof, trying to hide his enthusiastic rural innocence quite ineffectively.

His spiritual upbringing had been intensely religious. His parents had been Open Brethren, who in moving towns had moved to the Baptist Church where his mother was organist and his father was church deacon, secretary, Sunday School teacher and lay preacher who conducted a religious radio program called "The Way of Life”.

Growing up in that family had been a continual challenge. His normal boyish exhuberance and childhood pranks were considered expressions of a deep wickedness in him, and his equilibrium had been upset by consistent threats of being sent to the boy’s home. At eight years of age he was sent off into the night with his clothes packed up in a suitcase, tearfully arriving on a nearby neighbourhood doorstep, and chokingly explaining that "his mother no longer wanted him as a son, and could he stay there overnight until something happened”.

A later exclusion from the family, where he had to address his mother as "Mrs …” and sleep in the outside woodshed set the stage for a deep internal insecurity as he approached adolescence.

So much of life was sin. Especially fun. Lipstick was the work of the devil. Nylon stockings, gambling, cards, dancing, booze and films were all sinful and sin would lead on death to everlasting hellfire. Sex was the greatest sin. It was not even mentioned. The family’s attempt at sex education was his father thrusting a Christian tract, "What every Christian boy should know”, into his hands and closing the bedroom door while he read it. When his father asked "Any questions?”, he knew better than to break the family’s code of silence in this area.

Most neighbours were sinners—and Sunday meant no games, staying inside, Sunday School and church in the mornings, Christian Endeavour in the afternoons, Church again in the evenings.

Adolescence was a continual playing of one parent off against the other, gradually opening up to films, playing football on Sundays, and having a girlfriend where his feverish, raging, suppressed sexual desire struggled for contained expression.

And here he was at the Cricket Ground with 30,000 people and Billy Graham. Christian renewal crusades had been part of the family’s life. Pastor Nicholson, a hot gospeller who drove a Jaguar into town and set up a large circus type tent where he pulled in huge amounts of spirit energy with " turn or burn” sermons, was his introduction as a six year old to fiery spirit force that could heal, turn people’s lives around, bring visionary insight, tears, release, love and salvation. But always in the context of sin. Billy Graham was the star in that tradition. The carefully orchestrated music, the deep sonorous voice of George Beverly Shea, brought forth God’s Messenger, Billy, whose mission was to save souls for God.

"There was a woman who came to the Crusade, who accepted Christ as her saviour on that night and when she left, was killed by a car. Thank God she was saved that night. If you died tonight where would you go? Is your name written in blood in the Lambs’ book of life? Jesus is waiting to receive you back into the fold. Won’t you say yes to Jesus.”

The student had been saved before 13 years old at a Sunday School Mission. He had "given” his life to Christ, but this was something else.

The energy of spirit was moving in the crowd. The spiritual orator was orchestrating feeling and massive things began to move in the student’s body. It began to shake subtly, with a shiver in his legs, his belly started to churn, and deep emotions were moving. He tried to keep them under control but they kept growing, the shaking became stronger as the preacher’s voice became more strident and demanding. When the request/demand to give your life to Jesus, choose the light, let go of sin, came the extraordinary ball of fiery, emotional energy blew up into his heart, the choked back tears became a flood, love poured into and through him. Filled with energies he had never experienced before he sensed that this was "the Holy Spirit and he stood up, crying, shaking, trembling, confused, elated, wanting, healing, cleansing and walked down the aisle engulfed by spiritual energy, releasing him from the past, and opening his heart.

He was ushered into a room with a counsellor who spoke with the newly converted student. He enrolled in a 10 session correspondence course, tithed his money to the Church, listened to the weekly evangelical radio program, joined the Evangelical Union at Teacher’s College, went on Christian retreats and conventions.

He was a card carrying Christian, and he still harboured deep, deep sexual desire.

1974: The Philosopher

Although it was all much too complex, too involved and unfamiliar, for Ira to grasp in all but haziest fashion, he gathered that Lewlyn was suffering acutely, from his own renunciation of holy orders, the collapse of his religious beliefs and aspirations, and particularly from the negative mood about life that had overwhelmed him of late. Life had become empty of almost everything worthwhile, empty of everything except sensation. Love had become glandular relief. He was profoundly disenchanted and pessimistic. Henry Roth. " From Bondage."

The philosopher was in deep trouble. His life was falling apart. Having recently turned 30, he had looked at his life and did not like what he saw - someone unable to love deeply, but feeling lost without love. Although he had had a golden run in his career and taken up a teaching position at a tertiary college at the age of 26, four years later he looked at the rest of his life and plunged into deep despair.

He sat in a chair and could not think of a single reason to move. He lost 12 kilos in 2 months, and dragged himself through meaningless days.

Philosophy had caught up with him.

His mother had always maintained that "the devil" had got him when he went to university. His Christian faith did not stand up to rational examination, and that, in conjunction with the church's attitude to conscription and the Vietnam War, reflected in the attitude of some of his hardline former Christian acquaintances-"better to kill them over there than when they reach here" - led him to leave the church. In four years he had gone from seriously considering theological training to being an outsider.

He found meaning for a time in radical philosophy and left wing politics, joining the Labor party and becoming the secretary of the local branch, only to leave when Labor came to power. An anarchist by inclination, he distrusted those in authority, including his own authority as a teacher. He abolished essays, compulsory attendance at tutorials, and passed everyone who enrolled in the subject. "Now that compulsion is out of the way we can get down to the serious business of learning." The students had other ideas, took him at his word, and mostly stayed away from his classes. They weren't really interested in "the life of ideas", just getting their qualifications. His own journey into the life of ideas had been very intense. He had completed a three-year university degree in four years of part-time study, while he was building a house, umpiring two football games on a Saturday, teaching in a secondary school and trying to work out the meaning of being married.

He had married his adolescent sweetheart at the age of 21, and his own childhood in an emotionally distant dysfunctional family, left him unable to be present in the intimate moments of sharing between a man and a woman. Not knowing how to talk about his inner emotional life he basically only knew two feelings; being turned on and pissed off - and dissembling about both of them.

His formal philosophical training had been both abstract and impersonal. As one of his teachers had said early on, "You have come here expecting that philosophy is about the meaning of life - it is not. It is about words and their meanings and how we use them." But he kept using his mind, looking for meaning. Was it in literature, art, psychology, politics, history, class struggle?

The birth of three children had confused him even more. How could he be present to them when he couldn't even be present to himself? Their openness, and wish to be close to him was unfamiliar, and he struggled to be present as a father. With the added pressure of study and work, life's demands all seemed too much. Unfathered - his own father had been away three weeks out of four - he had no organic understanding of how a father might be, and fumbled with what he needed to do.

In his second year of university teaching, a new philosopher joined the staff, a man destined to become one of the world's finest moral philosophers. Through him he was introduced to the European philosophers, and in particular, the existentialists Albert Camus and Satre and the idea that life had no intrinsic meaning, that we had to create meaning in the world through our actions. Somewhere in there was the philosophy of despair and the question of how to create meaning in a meaningless universe. He was led to ponder, "If life has no meaning, then the only real question is ÔWhy do we keep on living, or why do we not kill ourselves?'"

This question shattered his entire intellectual and lived edifice, for he had no answer to it. After four years of teaching philosophy his malaise was all-encompassing.

A visit to the doctor brought no relief, for there was no physical cause of his dis-ease; his sickness was not of the body , but of the soul. When asked by the doctor how his marriage was, he practised his usual strategy of emotional non-availability and replied, "OK".

Such situations in life are often labelled a "breakdown". And it is true. The fabric of his existence, the meaning he had given to his life, his fragile emotional grasp on human intimacy, his sense of a viable future, were all breaking down. At 30 years his life no meaning, no purpose, no destiny, no vision, no faith, no joy, no intimate connectedness, and it would seem, no future.

Fate stepped into this abyss.

A close friend told him that his life was like the silhouette of a deciduous tree in winter against an evening sky, and suggested that he begin yoga. So there he went. An upstairs refuge in a busy city, the Gita School of Yoga had been founded by Margrit, who had lived in the Himalayas in the 1940s with her guru, and she was the first person to bring those teachings to Australia. The first lesson was an hour of asanas, followed by Yoga Nidra - deep relaxation on the border of sleep. He walked down the stairs after the lessons, feeling elated. He had found a refuge. Things could change. Diligent daily yoga practice began to turn his life around.

Then fate stepped in a second time. He met a philosophy student who had just returned to study after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. She had also been into the abyss. They discovered each other, and Spirit blessed them in a way he had never known but had always thought possible.

He was drawn out of himself into a whirlpool of energy, a cascading circle of delight, that intensified as the pleasure circuits of the body opened. As the body began to receive the pleasure it had always craved, the will and intellect receded, and the feeling heart emerged, drowning in another's being, swirling in the throes of acceptance and repair, and then bursting into a palace of delight.

Their bodies, so familiar, in unison sang a prayer to existence, who answered and swept them into her arms. They were coming home, returning to love, being healed, regenerated, blessed, touched by angels, recovering the songs of their immortality. As the bodies were taken over by the primal evolutionary energies, there was a continuous flow of tears, laughter, sadness, bliss, uncontrollable shaking, hearts opening, eyes connecting, souls touching. Stars cascaded in their brains. Their bodies recovered their meanings and purposes, and their souls asserted their primacy, as the philosopher and his partner were born into love.

His life changed.

Destiny decreed that they would not journey together, and within a short time they went their separate ways, each aware that the breath of Spirit had entered their lives.

Two years later the philosopher found a book, New Age Tantra Yoga, and came to understand that he had been touched by the hand of Shiva and taken into the temple of the Goddess, Shakti. The serpent power, the kundalini, had awakened.

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