Learning Shamanism

 I thought I would do a post to celebrate Samhain (pronounced Sow-ein) as I am now committed to studying Celtic Shamanism. As a novice in this work I will give you some wisdom from one far more knowledgeable than myself - Glennie Kindred . The following information on Samhain is drawn from her books - The Earths Cycle of Celebration and The Sacred Tree. The references to Halloween are from various sources. Samhain has no truly fixed date, unlike the modern (Christian) festival of Halloween or All Hallows Eve, Samhain is celebrated on the second new moon after the Autumn equinox. This is both the ending and the beginning of the Celtic year and it falls around the end of October and the beginning of November. (In 2021 it falls on November 4th). Samhain is a festival that celebrates the affirming of rebirth in the midst of death and darkness. Samhain is a magical time when the veil between the seen world of matter and the unseen world of Spirit becomes thin, especially at dawn and dus...

I have been part of The Buzzard Tribe for a while now and am really learning a lot. I have revisited Journeying through one of the Foundation Courses and am learning from other peoples experiences on the Coaching Calls and the Facebook Group - As I am journeying with more regularity now I thought I would share a recent one - this is a journey I shared on the Buzzard Tribe Facebook group last week. "I would like to share a recent journey - it is quite long though. It involves my first experience of "shape shifting". I have been visiting the lower world for over 2 years now and I know some of the characters in this journey fairly well. They are Rabbit, my Power Animal, a wolf family, male, female and their 2 one year old cubs and a human family - Mog the hunter, his partner Mag and their 2 year old son, Rog. I have been feeling very under the weather with flu like symptoms for a couple of days so decided to journey and ask for some healing. I started with Rabbit at my Axis...

  This will probably be my last blog post for a while as I am focusing on developing my practise and moving deeper into the realm of Spirit. I will be adding useful links and book reviews from time to time but the actual spiritual transformation I am embarking on is a very personal journey which may not mean much to the casual reader. My journeys into the Otherworld will stay personal unless I decide there may be some benefit in sharing them. My last three posts have all concerned my search for the "right" teacher or teachers. Well, I believe I have found my spiritual home and my "sat gurus" - Jason and Nicola Smalley and The Way of The Buzzard Mystery School. For many years I have tried hard to convince myself that I could achieve what Carlos Castaneda achieved in his long apprenticeship with don Juan and I have come to realise that that will never be the case. Having spent hours and months working with the techniques of don Carlos and Victor Sanchez, I now accep...

 In my previous two posts you will have seen that I was in a dilemma about which path to take and which teacher to follow. As I write today, I believe Spirit has guided me to the right path for me at this time - I will go into how this came about and what this path is in my next blog post. Today I would like to clarify my journey and my gratitude to the various teachers who have helped me to understand the Shamanic Path and in doing so, have helped me to understand myself. I have approached Shamanism from many different directions - which is probably why I managed to confuse myself. My main teachers (in book form and from the internet) have either come from North America or from the UK. When I was younger I believed Shamanism to be the sole property of the First Nation peoples of the North American continent - USA, Mexico and Canada. I have since learned that Shamanism has been practised all over Mother Earth for hundreds of thousands of years - only ending with the advent of organ...

  In my last post I was having a wobble about the direction I should take on my shamanic learning journey. I was in a dilemma because I had found a book by Victor Sanchez which promised to make the teachings of don Carlos Castaneda more easily understandable to the layman. It was while studying these writings that I realised that at my stage of life (I am 69 years old), I probably don't have the energy or the time left alive to fully study and master the Toltec Way of The Warrior in the way I was hoping I would. So, the dilemma remained but it had changed. I still feel that I have reached a place of stagnation on my path and feel the need to connect with a human Teacher. With reference to the title of this post - Finding The Right Teacher - we should remember that our main shamanic teacher is Spirit. And Spirit can manifest in any number of guises - animal, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks and humans. So, I guess I was asking Spirit to guide me to a human teacher. If you have v...

 I am having a little wobble in my practise. Right from the beginning of my journey into Shamanism I have been aware of it's flexibility and it's absence of dogma. As I have stated before - Shamanism is NOT a religion . But, the weird thing is, following some sort of dogma is very attractive to the human psyche - which is why religions have been so successful over the centuries.  For some bizarre reason most of us humans actually like being told what to do. I suppose we are a bit like dogs - we seem to function better when we have been "trained". And the "education" system that has been set up in the modern, industrialised world is designed to do just that - to train us how to behave. But you should stop and ask yourself - just who benefits from this training? The children who grow up into obedient, conforming members of "society"? Or the elite one percent who own the corporations that depend on obedient wage slaves in order to maintain their wealt...

  Silence is one of, if not the most, important aspects of becoming aware of your true nature. It is also one of the most difficult and most controversial topics for all those who choose to explore a spiritual path. I am not talking about silence in the physical sense - where there is no sound being recorded by your ears and transmitted to your brain. I am talking about "inner silence". Inner silence is what don Juan calls "stopping the inner dialogue" and what the 20th century mystic Osho used to call "No Mind" and what is known in Core Shamanism as "Hollowing Out". Some spiritual teachers claim that it is impossible to stop thoughts and experience total inner silence - they are wrong, it is just that they have not succeeded in achieving this blissful state. It is not a "state of mind" , it is a state of "no mind". Because a lot of teachers and gurus have no knowledge of this state they try to convince people that they can ac...