Tag: shaman

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Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

A Shaman Minute #1, Spiritual Cleansing

In addition to other MySpiritCare articles on spiritual cleansing, here, here, and here, I hope to make this an on-going series of brief spiritual practices you can easily incorporate into your daily life, whether you meditate, or seek a more active way of connecting with Spirit. I call the series “A Shaman Minute,” because it only takes a minute (or maybe a few more) to do these beautiful spiritual exercises.

Here is a sacred way of doing a brief cleansing ceremony in preparation for establishing spiritual protection for yourself and others around you. It is a wonderful way to start the day and to help develop a daily spiritual practice if you’ve been wanting to.


It’s all about water.

It is THE source of power for women, and a very effective grounding substance for men.

Our bodies are made up mostly of water, and from the water we are born.

I always teach in my classes that the first thing to do is to “clean the vessel,” that is, to wash up, to cleanse, spiritually speaking. There are dozens of ways to do this, but I’ll give you a simple and effective one.

Pour a few ounces of water into a clean bowl and hold it up as high as is comfortable while asking that it be blessed and cleansed by God, Great Spirit, or whatever divine term or team you prefer to use. Ask for your guides, angels or others you are familiar with to bless and cleanse the water.

Now, place the bowl of water on a table or, if you are outside, on a rock or somewhere up off the ground. Dip your hands into it and pause a moment to feel its life force. Then, lift your hands out of the bowl and rub them together lightly, as if tenderly washing your hands. Bring your hands to your face, with your eyes closed, and feel the pureness of the water on your face. Rub your arms with your wet hands, and pause a moment to feel the cleansing spread throughout your entire body. It is good here to also prayerfully ask for help and healing, for guidance and protection, for strength and focus. Allow yourself to feel the act of being cleansed by the sacred water.

This is the first vital step to building and maintaining a wonderful daily habit of connecting with Spirit, and it only takes a Shaman Minute!

Aho and Namaste.

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditation, Guided Meditation, The Shamanic Journey #1

 

 

 

 

Meditation, Guided Meditation and the Shamanic Journey

By Bob

I’ll write many articles about meditation, guided meditation and the shamanic journey, but this first one is to provide you with a quick overview.

Few people can agree on what constitutes a state of mind different from either the waking or sleeping states. Generally though, I’ll use the term “altered state of consciousness (ASC),” which indicates a state of awareness different from the normal waking state. (More on Wikipedia) And that’s where meditation and the shamanic journey can both be loosely classified. Anthropologist Michael Harner further delineates a “shamanic state of consciousness” in his classic book, Way of the Shaman.

Both practices can be quite beneficial to one’s well being. Research on positive gains resulting from meditation are widespread, while results from more and more studies are currently being reported on the benefits of shamanic-like practices, including drumming. These include the powerful production of helpful endorphins and other naturally-produced body chemicals that boost the immune system.

Generally, meditation induces relaxation, peace of mind and a sense of well being, and is undertaken as a service to one’s self, where healing, understanding and wisdom can grow. This, of course, will eventually influence those around you in positive ways, so your practice is a service to others, in one way of considering it.

The shamanic meditation / journey is undertaken to broaden one’s awareness beyond ordinary reality in order to actively be of service to one’s self or to someone else through healing procedures or ceremonies, and to discover knowledge or to otherwise connect with archetypal beings or energies which shamans have identified for thousands of years. Often, in seeking healing for someone, a shaman will encounter spiritual beings who agree to return with the shaman in order to be of service to the shaman’s patient. In other instances, the shaman may seek to recover a patient’s soul part that splintered away during a traumatic experience in the person’s past. This is called “soul retrieval.” And in still other cases, the shaman may, while in the altered state of consciousness, attempt to remove through a ceremony known as “extraction” an illness, disease or other energy matrix which may be harming the patient.

These practices, while potentially seeming odd to some people in modern America and other Western cultures, have successfully served humankind since the beginning of its collective consciousness. And now, thanks to Harner and others in indigenous and traditional cultures who are willing to share their knowledge, these practices are making a comeback.

Though I don’t see meditation or shamanism as complete alternatives to modern medicine, they are certainly effective aids in any healing process, and can be seen as complimentary approaches in a rather recent trend in medicine to incorporate treatment for the “whole person,” mind, body and spirit. This “integrative medicine” approach is certainly well overdue, and is bringing civilization full circle to the roots of healing.