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The darkened room began to fill with smoke from
the burning sage. The cold New York City winter
outside suddenly seemed far away. The smoke, I was
told, would cleanse the room and all in it. I looked
around at the circle of faces. Besides the friend
who accompanied me, I recognized one other person.
Lorna Roberts, a shaman I had met a few months
earlier, loomed before us. She was talking about
the significance of the ceremony we were about to
perform, a fire ceremony, a ritual of purification
and transmutation. Working with the fire in this
sacred way would release us from the energetic bonds
that tied us to the past. I had read her written
instructions beforehand, and was ready to shed a
bit of personal history. My mind began to drift
and fill with images related to the issue with which
I was working. I remember thinking how interesting
it was that faces, places and circumstances from
20 years ago, and supposedly long forgotten, were
now very vivid. Lorna’s commanding voice carried
me back to the room.
“Oh winds of the south,” she was saying,
beginning her invocation of the four directions,
her words at once mystical and poetic.
“Is this woman is a witch?” I wondered.
“How did I wind up here?”
Several months earlier I had experienced intense
and upsetting spontaneous psychic phenomena which,
combined with other upheavals in my personal life,
had left me emotionally raw and questioning my sanity.
My old ways of trying to keep things together were
not working. Things seemed out of control. And that’s
how I came to be sitting in this dark, smoky room,
with a strange woman who was now blowing smoke from
her pipe. I was searching for answers. I was looking
for myself.
Soon it was my turn to approach the fire. Having
never done this before, I was a bit nervous and
self-conscious. I knelt before the fireplace. Staring
into the flames, I saw and heard again many of the
images and names that had appeared to me earlier
in the evening. I’d brought a small piece
of paper with some names written on it to put into
the fire, and I gently placed the paper in the flames
and watched it be consumed, thereby releasing that
part of my personal history to the universe.
“OK, I felt something,” I thought as
I walked, still self-conscious, back to my seat.
“Now what happens?”
What happened over the next few weeks was astounding,
life changing and affirming. Years of guilt and
shame seemed to be lifted. I was functioning in
a way that I’d been praying for.
I spent the next eight years learning from Lorna,
her magnificent fire ceremonies, and an ancient
body of knowledge. That night proved to me the power
of shamanism, and it put me firmly on a path of
self-discovery. It taught me that the unseen world
is alive. But shamanism is not all about smoke and
fire. Ritual and ceremony are often an important
part of it, but the work really begins when the
fire goes out. We must then return to our everyday
lives, and integrate the energies that were called
forth and released, or absorbed, during the ceremony.
Shamanism, according to Wade Davis, is arguably
the oldest of human spiritual endeavors, born at
the dawn of our species’ awareness. It is
a system of direct revelation, without dogma or
doctrine. A shaman, writes Michael Harner in The
Way of the Shaman, is a man or woman who enters
an altered state of consciousness, at will, to contact
and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality in order
to acquire knowledge, power, and to help other persons.
The role of the shaman is to bring balance to a
person, a community, or the earth.
Do you need to be a shaman, or have the assistance
of one, to tap into the wisdom of non-ordinary reality?
It can help, but I believe that we are all wired
to do the things a shaman does. I’ve seen
it happen countless times, whether it is at the
fire, or through a seemingly unrelated incident
afterwards. Perhaps in the future we will all rediscover
our own inner shaman.
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