Shamanism: are we just hijacking somebody else's culture?

Carrot's picture
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So the last few days have been intense for me, because I keep ending up around people who are either energy healers, or into shamanic healing/journeying, or other things along those lines...I'm not sure why, suddenly, after years of always making sure to avoid people like that, because I was afraid of becoming demoniacally possessed, a thought my mom put into my head at an early age, I've suddenly come into contact with so many people who do these sorts of "practices" just in the past week.

I think it might have something to do with my being open to Sliver, that 63 year old friend of mine who did things like sit in the middle of a PETA protest, eating turkey legs...yep, that is typical Sliver behavior...she just loved causing trouble. She used to tell me that I was a witch, to which I instinctively would say "I know, I can tell, and so are you..."

Sliver is a witch...we had this strange connection where I would think of her, and a second later she'd call me, or vice versa. She always knew instinctively too when I'd be randomly stopping by for dinner (we had a deal worked out where she'd feed me dinner several times a week in exchange for weed, which I was getting as a tip at one of my jobs back then,) anyway, I never had to call her ahead of time, Sliver knew when I'd be over.

I have other friends I'd consider witches; women and men who have such a strong intuitive connection with you that you never need to call each other to find out what they are doing, women and men who intuitively know what herbs to recommend for what ailments, people who make the energy inside your body shift, just being near them.

But being a witch is one thing; all cultures everywhere have practiced witchcraft in some way or another; claiming to be a shaman is something totally different. I'm not sure what is so different about it; I suppose all cultures also had shamans...but shamanism as it is taught, here in Portland, and I'm sure elsewhere, stinks of culture hijacking, particularly of Native American traditions. I don't know why it feels so wrong to me, the way white people talking about the Mayan Calendar and 2012 feels so wrong to me (excuse me, but last I heard, the Mayan Calendar was written about and for the Mayan people...it has nothing to do with you, you middle-aged Age-of-Aquarius wannabe hippy...) but I've been seriously distressed lately with white people who want to be shamans, and who think that taking a year-long or two-year-long class in shamanism makes them a shaman.

When I've read about shamanism, it seems that you where recognized by an elder as a shaman at a very early age, and then, for most of the rest of your life, or at least your growing-up years, you where trained to be a shaman. It wasn't a weekend workshop or a seminar you could take, it wasn't even a two-year program...shamanism was a lifetime of becoming. I have this same beef with midwifery school, because, in reality, a school cannot make you a midwife in X number of years; in fact, a school can't make you a midwife at all; becoming a midwife is a serious spiritual training, which probably ideally begins at birth...

I did not begin training to be a midwife at birth...or did I? My mother claims I was born breech to show everyone that mine was to be a different life, a spiritual journey. She claims I chose to enter this world butt first to show everyone, including her, that I would never conform to "regular" society. My mother is probably right.

I may have began training even before birth...if I chose the family I was to be born into, as some people claim happens, then perhaps I chose it all...

So in that sense, perhaps those people going into shaman training have also chose every event in their lives ahead of time, leading up to shaman training, so that they would be ready, when the time came, for shaman training...

Who am I to judge, anyway? I love the people I've been meeting lately that are into these things, especially when they have fires with me and teach me Sioux songs for talking to God, and especially when I realize that they are just as in love with life and continuing life on this planet, and destroying civilization, as I am. I can't judge that.

But I just did.

Love ya,
Carrot

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Wombels's picture
Member of the Progressive U Alumni Association

A shaman is a guide which can open doors in order to visit other planes of reality.

Some can heal or cleanse whatever sickness which one carries inside.

Manny of these people have been literally erased by various religious institutions together with the knowledge they carried inside, still, nothing has changed since

shamanism is still strongly present all around the world.

The English have done their best to wipe out all written material which was to be found in India. Still writings of which some date a few thousand years are still being kept away from westerners. They are written in a Sanskrit code only few can translate.

Those writings and their content make the Bible look like a cheap children’s comic book.

We are all part of the same energy source, some around can work with those energies, luckily enough those are mostly people with good intensions...lol.
If the wish to do so they could actually suck all life out of one’s physical body...whoehaaa.

Most individuals don’t like to wonder in these areas, while the realities which are involving shamanism are the actual key for a better future and understanding of all upon this globe.

It is said,

Can’t help it - tangoterje

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