Last week, in one of those women's magazines that are inevitably found at the hairdresser's and similar places, I read that nowadays, on the one hand, people are expected to lead a very sensible life—healthy eating, exercise, balance—but on the other hand, there is a tendency toward “controlled excess,” toward excursions into loss of control and intemperance when it seems permissible, such as during Carnival. The reason for this is a longing for passion, devotion, and “real life,” for intense emotional experiences that are necessary for a fulfilled life.
This week, I witnessed how, during Five Rhythms dancing, a room filled with around a hundred people, with few exceptions, literally went into ecstasy. Feeling ourselves was one of the requests made to the dancers during the course of the evening. And at least two of those present burst into tears as the evening progressed, without it seeming to matter at all that this was happening among complete strangers. An astonishing closeness developed, almost without words, without any expectations or demands, without any ulterior motives – at least that was my impression. It reminded me of the atmosphere at shamanic seminars and similar events, which have fascinated me for years. Often we know next to nothing about the people we meet, about the environment in which they live – and yet in a certain way we get to know them better and become closer to them than to many people in our immediate surroundings. And this closeness feels good; it makes us realize that, whether we like it or not, we usually walk around wearing a mask in our everyday lives, that we often lack a degree of honesty there – which we simultaneously miss sorely.
So we want to feel ourselves, to be connected with ourselves. But paradoxically, for many people this is apparently only possible in ecstasy, in a state in which we are, by definition, outside ourselves, outside the controlled framework, or at least outside everyday life.
A teacher once said that we are incarnated to experience feelings – but to make things a little more complicated, God also gave us our minds. To feel ourselves and our emotions without distortion is what we strive for – and at the same time, we stand in our own way, needing to take a detour via extreme experiences to get to where we always wanted to be.
When asked why she wanted to work as a shaman, a friend once said it was because it made her feel alive. At first, I found this statement quite strange – don't you feel alive otherwise? Is it legitimate to use shamanic work for others as a vehicle for your own well-being? My own search for the motive behind why I want to do shamanic work ultimately led me to the realization that it is the longing for connection. Of course, we know that everything is connected to everything else; after all, that is the basic premise of shamanic work. But we cannot always feel it. And so I finally came to the conclusion that, at its core, it is also about feeling alive, just as my friend said. Being connected to everything that is, to everything that lives, is the deepest expression of aliveness. wissen wir, dass alles mit allem verbunden ist, schließlich ist das die Grundvoraussetzung schamanischen Arbeitens. Wir können es aber nicht immer spüren. Und so kam ich schließlich darauf, dass es auch mir im Kern darum geht, mich lebendig zu fühlen, genau wie die Freundin das gesagt hat. Das Verbundensein mit allem, was ist, allem, was lebt, ist der tiefste Ausdruck von Lebendigkeit.
And it is this connectedness, this shedding of our everyday masks, that brings us closer not only to everything that is, but also to ourselves – which is what makes shamanic work possible in the first place. Shamanic work is only possible when we let go of all masks, only when we are fully and consciously ourselves.
And at the same time – one of the many paradoxes in shamanism – we are not ourselves at all. For being outside of oneself, ecstasy, and loss of control are also part of it, as Mircea Eliade has already pointed out. “When you are not yourself, you do really good work,” one of my teachers once said. When a spirit works through me, it is only partly me who is doing something, but on the other hand, a deeper state of connection with the spirits, with people, with everything, is hardly imaginable. In any case, shamanic work – at least for me, who is normally quite head-driven – works best when I park my mind somewhere else and, if possible, don't even allow it to play the role of a commenting observer. In the middle of such a situation, it may have been an extraction, someone once talked to me. At first, I didn't really understand what the speaker wanted from me, but I promptly fell out of this “other” state, feeling astonished as the focus of my eyes completely changed and my mind snapped back into place, at least for a few moments. Only then did I realize how different this “other” state is. It is also not the trance state we know from shamanic journeys; it is a third state somewhere in between and at the same time with much less self-awareness than traveling and everyday life.
A brief side note: Because this state is so “different,” it is no wonder that I am not the only one who repeatedly finds that I can hardly remember the details of my work afterwards. This also proves that the “shamanic amnesia” described in ethnological literature is not a protective claim made by shamans in traditional societies to maintain the distance of reverence and strangeness between the shaman and the client, but a real consequence of the work. Sometimes, after working, people ask me how the exact wording of this or that sentence was or what exactly happened here or there – and sometimes I don't even remember exactly who I was working for that night, let alone what I said or did. Some things come back to me, but the memory remains fragmentary.
Back to my question of why I want to work shamanically: Am I just looking for the “kick” and the loss of control like those who go overboard during Carnival, or those who jump off a bridge with a bungee cord? Am I a case of “housewife shamanism” after all, one of those people who, in the middle of their lives, wonder if their career, children, and household are all there is, and then spend their unused capacity on shamanic weekend seminars? I must admit that this question has been on my mind in recent years, and the fact that my child is indeed almost out of the house makes things a lot easier.
No. On the contrary, I believe that the essence of the above-described search for passion, devotion, deep emotions, and “real life” is ultimately the same longing that drives me: the pursuit of feeling connected at the deepest level. Whether we seek this connection externally or internally is ultimately up to us. In any case, I am deeply grateful that I have found a way in shamanism to experience this connection, this bond between myself and everything that is and lives, so directly – and to be able to do so in my work for others.
Mitakuye oyacin!
... I was so happy and grateful to have finally understood. But then another one of those sentences came from the spirit world, concise, profound, unexpected, putting things in a completely different light: “You are completely alone.” Alone? When I had just come to the conclusion that it was my longing for connection that drives me?
Death, my otherworldy allies have said several times, is the origin of all life and “our common home,” ultimately the most fundamental form of connection. Birth, on the other hand, is what immediately leads to being alone. Life is separation, simply because we travel in separate bodies and with separate self-awareness. We have chosen to live, to live as human beings, in order to have experiences that are only possible in this way – and this includes the connectedness that we left behind with this very decision and yet still long for so much. We can only live consciously when it is not automatically there, when we have to explicitly return to this continuum of everything-is-connected-to-everything every time.
(Summer 2015)