For about seven years of my life, I felt as if I would barely get through one initation when another would begin. Looking back now, I ponder why it all happened and why I seem sometimes still to be floundering in the wake of it.
The experience I'm sharing on this page is one of about four I've had in my life, where there was absolutely no doubt that something beyond the reality of the senses had manifest and proven it's existence. God. Universal Life Force Energy. Great Mystery. Goddess. I don't really need One name for the thing that makes all One.
I share this experience because it's a good example of how every single thing in a person's reality can be shifted in one instant; irrevocably shifted. Reality, as I had known it, stopped right then and there and I've yet to find a replacement paradigm.
How do people become Shamans?
....Touched by Spirit; Transformed by Spirit
Question on healing: How do you know if you have had a sacred initiation, or shamanistic experience?
Healing Facilitation Response: It comes to me to share one experience because, for me, it has been true of all initiations I've gone through that the change occurred in an instant, though it may have taken years to integrate the lessons.
The thing that always stands out; the thing that lets me know it was an initiation or transformative experience is that I will be incapable of continuing life as it was before, in some significant way. It's as if the map has been changed and, where there were roads before, none exist after.
On rare occasions, the Shamanic experience will include what I call a direct energy transfer, or a direct dispensation that can be felt at a cellular level in the body and which effects a cellular change that is spiritually specific.
Holding The Sacred:
I stood with my hands outstretched.
It was heavy, black, old and odd....this Sacred Artifact placed in my hand and.....
that very instant, the instant flesh touched stone, the world changed for me.
I began to physically shake and deeply sob simultaneously.
I did not know why I wept.
I felt like I was coming home,
or home was coming home to me.
It was reunion.
It was family.
Whatever this was, this precious something that was touching me,
burning me, flowing through me, changing me at a cellular level....
it was family and it knew me even though I had forgotten it.
There was a scent, precious and sweet. Supernatural.
It lasted but seconds. It was not of this earth.
I could use a great deal more words. I am a word merchant. That would not be a problem. The problem is that, no matter how many words I used, I couldn't convey the power of that few moments. I could not say all that I felt and knew.
It changed me, this touch from another time and place. Even years later, I had not done what I knewn I was to do with that change. I seemed stuck in the knowing but unable to bring that into service when the purpose of the experience was so I could be of greater service.
Now, it is time. I am learning that I have survived the holocaust of my soul. I am discovering that I can walk with this energy and offer the gift of service from that place of transformation that so utterly transformed me.
Does your soul want you to come?
Spiritual health disclaimer: Shamanistic experience can bend the boundaries of reality to a disturbing degree and it is my feeling that only those trained to do so should enter shamanistic states deliberately with the use of mind-altering substances. There are safer ways. Drumming is one way; integrative breathwork another. My own shamanistic experiences and Sacred Initiation experiences have all occurred in a a chemically un-altered state.