The Traditional Healer

Are you one of the many who picture the traditional shaman as a wise old man beating a drum or a crone grinding herbs while possessing an ability to bridge the physical and nonphysical worlds? Do you believe that shaman has many skills, but when we try and imagine how these skills can be used in the fast-paced, multi-media, information age culture, we may come up blank? The old and the new worlds are different, as different as the Earth and the moon. What, then, are the similarities of past, present, and future shamanism?

We need to develop a connection with the physical world that the shamans of the past had with their internal connection to the Earth. At the same time, we are living in an age in which we’re overloaded with information, possibilities, and stimulation. Just as the shaman of old traditionally bridged worlds, the 21st Century Shaman must be able to bridge not only the physical and nonphysical worlds but develop new skills to access and filter the wealth of information we are presented with daily.

Historically the shaman used his/her non-physical inner senses to enter non-physical reality, usually working within specific tribal traditions and most often traveling the realms of the astral world. The shaman typically resided within the context of an agrarian or hunter-gatherer society and, even today, the majority of traditional shamans live largely outside the influence of the Industrial or Information Ages.

For most of us, the traditional techniques of old do not easily fit into our daily lives. Instead, we may attend weekend workshops or month-long trips to visit a shaman in the jungles of Peru. But shamanism can play such a vital role that we need to learn how to carry it with us no matter where we are. This calls for new techniques that easily work in our daily lives. New approaches to shamanism are, perhaps, more relevant now than ever before in human history. It is predicted that the earth’s vibratory rate is increasing and that the veils between ordinary and non-ordinary reality are thinning then new techniques are needed to help us enter the increasingly accessible worlds of non-ordinary reality. We must learn how critical knowing both inner and outer worlds is to our continuing future as human beings. It is time for us to learn to fine-tune our intuition, creativity, and imagination in new and different ways, reflecting the change in worlds. Everyone, from the most gifted to the least, must learn to use non-ordinary reality to solve the problems that are coming at us from our ordinary reality.

If we restrict ourselves to our five physical senses to sort and sift through all of the information increasingly available to us, decision-making will become an ever more cumbersome endeavor. With the runaway expansion of information, we will be required to make more decisions at a faster and faster pace. If we learn to use the inner senses, we will be able to bypass the complex pile of information and rapidly find our answers from other sources such as intuition, high self, spirit guides, etc. In addition, by opening shamanistically to our inner senses, we have a wealth of information at our fingertips: personal, global, and multidimensional.

Our lives are becoming increasingly complex, true healers are difficult to find, and more and more of us are seeking relief from pain that originates outside of ourselves. The 21st Century Shaman will create many paths into a new future by learning how to release emotional limitations, redevelop lost inner senses, and conscious contact with our unseen friends and unique spiritual ancestry. Thus, the 21st Century Shaman must not only be able to bridge worlds but he or she must comprehend and thrive in the age of information.

The shamans of old understood and used their inner senses to navigate the many and varied dimensions beyond their physical world. As we dive deeper into the 21^st century, shamanism will become more important than ever. The deeper the dive the more the need for new techniques where most traditional methods no longer apply. Becoming a 21st Century Shaman is not exclusive to some partially enlightened techno savant who lives with one foot in Tibet and the other in Silicon Valley? Anyone can become proficient in the skills of the 21st Century Shaman. We have the skills but we will spend centuries learning to understand them. Since we are the first 21^st Century Shaman we are creating paths that future generations will follow.

Everybody in the 21st century will have to use the shaman’s skills to travel their unique paths. The signposts along these paths may have different names, but the skills to travel them are all the same. The rules of our present world are constantly changing, and the only way that any of us are going to be able to adapt to this constant change is to understand ourselves.

We are multidimensional beings living in a physical world that is connected to many non-physical worlds that we regularly, day and night, conscious or not, visit. We created this reality and we created ourselves in it to experience its challenges but along the way, we forgot that we created our lives and we began to look outside for solutions to the very problems that we created to learn to solve. One of our purposes is to learn who we really are because we are not who we see in the mirror each morning we are exponentially more. The skills and knowledge of the 21^st Century Shaman are within us. We put them there to be found because we knew that the unseen worlds would begin to affect us.

If the name 21^st Century Shaman does not work for you try another. It is the inner work that is the magic and miracle of it all. We human beings can change ourselves for the good, the bad, or whatever. It is totally up to each of us so when you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning see if you can get a glimpse of the real you looking back. When you see yourself looking back you will know that some in the future will call you an adventurer, others a 21^st Century Shaman.