Know Your Story

Shamanism has three goals, at least according to me.  These are (in my order of importance):

1. Know who you are,
2. Maintain a close connection with Spirit, and
3. Serve others from a place of respect, love and compassion.

Why doesn't service to others come first?  Well, because (again according to me) one can't serve others without first know her/him self, and without maintain a close connection with Spirit.  Shamanic practitioners are sometimes referred to as "hollow bones"; that is, a conduit through which Spirit can flow to others.  We work with Spirit, the Spirits of nature, beings from the lower and upper world.  Without that connection we are, at best, good conversationalists.

So, let's take a look at knowing ourselves.  We are all screwed up; at least I know that I am.  I look at my parents and how they raised me and my four younger brothers, and they were a mess.  They had no idea what they were doing; but neither did their parents . . . And guess what, my three boys probably think that I'm a mess too.  Try as I do not to repeat the mistakes that I think that my parents made, I'm creative enough to invent my own.

I look at my students at the university where I teach.  They are 18 and 19 years old trying to pick out a major that they will study for the next four or more years.  Sad thing is, they really don't have enough maturity or experience to pick a life-long career at that age.  I didn't think that I really knew what I wanted to to until I was in my mid-30's and changed my career.  I left the business world and got a Ph.D. so that I could profess. Now that I'm in my 60s I sort-of-kind think that once in a while I have my act together.

In Western cultures we spend an inordinate amount of time planning, and that means planning for the future but very little time looking at how we got where we are today.  That's too bad, because if we can change our stories, we can change our lives.  Part of that requires that we look back and see what our story is.

You might want to try an exercise that I spent a couple of hours on this past weekend.  I decided to diagram a road map of my life.  I knew where it started so I drew a straight line until I came to the first big fork in the road.  The early forks in the road, decisions that were made, were made by my parents, but they affected my life.  So I drew the fork in the road and put a question mark on the path not taken and continued along. Sometimes I realized that I took a path, decided that it was the wrong one and backtracked and took a different path.  I labeled and dated all of the paths so I could keep track of the major decisions and see how each fork in the road led to other forks.  Some of the paths had smiley faces, others had sad faces with tears, or mad faces; I included my emotions on my map, not just places, events, accomplishments and failures, and decisions.   At the end of a couple of hours I had several pieces of paper all taped together.  Then I put my map away.  

Actually I was tired of looking at it. But the next day I got it out and started to analyze it.  I looked for repeating patterns, both good and bad.  I appreciate the good patterns and hope to replicate them, and identified the dysfunctional patterns so that I could make sure that I don't repeat them. There are some life lessons, like high school, that I really don't want to relearn.  You know, got the t-shirt and I'm not going back there again.

I also found a couple of stories on my life map that I want to change.  For those I'm going to take some shamanic journeys, cut etheric cords and change the outcomes of those events.  Guess what, time isn't linear and we are affected by events in the past (obvious, no?) and also by events in the future.  Shamanic journeys give us the ability to move in time and make changes to our stories.

Anyway, you might find the life map exercise enlightening, that means one that you can learn from.  In any event, live in peace and joy, and don't just let life happen to you.  

Dave