Shamanic Quotes

Healing stories are magickal tales born from personal tribulation and victory, which are then shared. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

How has it happened that we've lost sight of this ancient woman shaman and what she represents? For despite the proof of language and artifacts, despite pictorial representations, ethnographic narratives, and eyewitness accounts, the importance - no, the primacy - of women in shamanic traditions has been obscured and denied. ~ Barbara Tedlock

In shamanic cultures, sychronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

I think that when you go on a shamanic journey, you're allowing yourself to have much more access to your unconscious or your sense of connection within the universe, whatever you want to call that. You've accessed places in your brain that you don't normally. You're still there - it's your brain. But you have access in a way that you normally don't. For me, doing that felt like being in a new environment. ~ Amy Hardie

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. ~ Terence McKenna

Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is also about retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong. ~ Robert Moss

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style. ~ Terence McKenna

Learning shamanism isn't just about acquiring techniques in how to do it, but also how to incorporate and deal with the
changes it brings to everyday life. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

In many shamanic societies, people who complain of being disheartened ... or depressed would be asked, ... When did you stop dancing? ... This is because dancing is a universal healing salve. ~ Gabrielle Roth

Historically, shamans have always been part of the society where they lived, taking care of its problems, whenever they were allowed to operate. For centuries shamanic cultures have been persecuted in the western world until they were almost entirely exterminated. They have managed to survive in secrecy or through complex esoteric camouflage. Nowadays there seems to be more freedom and this ancient knowledge can re-emerge and be used in our own cultural context and not relegated somewhere else. The world needs shamans able to function on the roads, among the electronic equipment and engines, in the squares and markets of our contemporary society. ~ Franco Santoro

Humans are a part of creation and shamanism is our way of connecting with the whole. ~ Will Adcock

According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree. ~ Jeremy Narby

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

As long as we string out the ecstasy of awe, we won't do the work required to mine its precious teachings. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

How come only curmudgeonly old men are considered endearing, discerning, and honorable? My own Shamanic journeying on this matter has shown me that at midlife women are invited beyond the nurturing Moon-Earth embrace into the vastness of the Milky Way, where we have light, darkness, stars, moons and meteorites at our creative, reflective, and destructive disposal. ~ Mary Trainor-Brigham

I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable. ~ Terence McKenna

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon! ~ Terence McKenna

The pathway to peace is an in describable journey of facing ones darkness, to find ones light. If they told you it's easier to give up, you met a fool; if they told you; it's easier to grow, you met the wise. ~ Nikki Rowe

The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society; their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The particular province of the shaman is the province of soul, that which feeds our embodied life, or fails to feed it. From a shamanic point of view, the relationship with animal allies, or animals that show themselves in animal forms, is a vital part of living. We're fully embodied, with full access to our natural soul energy. ~ Robert Moss

[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo. ~ Michael Perry

Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the 'invisible worlds' beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in any area of your life - from spirituality and health to work and relationships. ~ Sandra Ingerman

Perspective shifted on why it must 'hurt to heal', and a series of questions kept coming to mind. I found myself wondering if these medicines always 'hurt', or do they hurt so much now to show us how separate we are from nature? Perhaps these 'revelations in pain' are necessary in order for a personal apocalpyse to occur so you may have a shift in perception, and a greater understanding of your role in the whole? To realize that we are not foreign from nature, nature is where we come from and where we return to. ~ Jennifer Sodini

An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry - including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology - all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing. ~ Ken Wilber

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back. ~ Terence McKenna

The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world. ~ Hal Zina Bennett

Shamanic healing is a journey. It involves stepping out of our habitual roles, our conventional scripts, and improvising a dancing path. ~ Gabrielle Roth

Human beings have a natural urge to worship that "something greater" which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve the human community. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death, and every birth is distinguished by ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our epidemic alienation is, in good part, the felt negligence of that reciprocity. ~ Toko-pa Turner

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures. ~ Terence McKenna

To compare Tensegrity with yoga or t'ai chi is not possible. It has a different origin and a different purpose. The origin is shamanic, the purpose is shamanic. ~ Carlos Castaneda

This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed. ~ Terence McKenna

Some Indigenous Elders add lotus seed cakes to their diet in their final years, meditating on a branch continually blossoming, so that in their next reincarnation they'll have to deal with less opaque karmic mud. Thus we hope to gain a longer measure of time to bring our share of Heaven to bear on Earth. ~ Mary Trainor-Brigham

The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauhqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman's initiatory ordeal includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self's only authority.20 By connecting with our wounding, the imaginal journey makes it worthwhile. Healing images bring back the pieces, heal las rajaduras. As Hillman notes, healing is a deep change of attitude that involves an adjustment and abandonment of "ego-heroics." It requires that we shift our perspective. La ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

Margaret De Wys's Ecstatic Healing is a holy voyage--a remarkable testament of one courageous woman forced by her own sickness to discover the mysterious world of shamanic and spiritual healing. Her's is a journey of surrendering, a journey to faith, and a journey toward accepting herself as a healer. As in her first book "Black Smoke" Margaret writes with utter honesty, which helps us as we join her on her personal journey and question our own life journey as human beings and as healers. ~ Itzhak Beery

My interest at the moment is to use my dreaming self (which I also access in shamanic journeying) to engage with the Earth. In my waking rational life I often forget about the Earth, or I get worried or confused by contradictory information. With my dreaming brain I can have access to powerful images of what is going on in the Earth, from day to day. ~ Amy Hardie

Spiritual assistance isn't there to make things easy and have everything go your way, but to help you grow into the fuller version of who you are. Rather than revealing that you're on the wrong track, shake-up and breakup often indicate that you're really starting to get somewhere. Of course, it's hard to feel this way while getting battered around by the severe crosswinds of our time, but that's when you most need to know it.

In the Western world we lack a clear set of guidelines for times like these. We lack meaningful rites of passage. We fail to equip people for knowing what to expect at key crossroads of the soul. We lack substantial guides for teaching individuals how to stay with their deep inner truth when all hell breaks loose. We get thrown into extreme life-changing passages like birth, first blood, first sex, marriage, pregnancy, child-bearing, divorce and death with only superficial guidance, and no deep cultural support for grasping the full significance of what we're coming out of and going into. So disruptions along the way don't usually appear as well-designed hurdles of initiation in a spiritual journey. Usually they appear as impossible dilemmas that bust your ass and belie evidence of any greater design.

Major rites of passage in the Western world rarely come in the form of sacred rituals but are embedded within mundane circumstance. It takes special perception to recognize the initiatory path through the chaos. It takes a shamanic pe ~ Mark Borax

Health is being in harmony with the world view. Health is an intuitive perception of the universe and all its inhabitants as being of one fabric. Health is maintaining communication with the animals and plants and minerals and stars. It is knowing death and life and seeing no difference. It is blending and melding, seeking solitude and seeking companionship to understand one's many levels. Unlike the more "modern" notions, in shamanic society health is not the absence of feeling; no more so is it the absence of pain. Health is seeking out all of the experiences of Creation and turning them over and over, feeling their texture and multiple meanings. Health is expanding beyond one's singular state of consciousness to experience the ripples and waves of the universe. ~ Jeanne Achterberg

All Things are in constant relationship, and shamanic journey is the choice to put one's self in direct contact and concert with that relationship. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? ~ Gabrielle Roth

How can a nation nourished on diversity
breed its own shamanic tradition without retracing its steps to its varied ancestors? ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Consciousness is naturally shamanic. ~ Joy Manne

Remember that drumming opens portals to the spirit world, draws spirit in, and opens you up to receive it. ~ Michael Drake

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things. ~ Tom Robbins

There are chemical and other explanations for addictions, but speaking from my own observations (and I am a shamanic type), there is always some sort of disembodied spirit causing some of the addiction, riding your energy field, trying to impose their needs and addictions onto you. ~ Robert Moss

Acheron is the Greek Underworld river, timelessly flowing beneath Middle World consciousness, circulating through our bloodstreams in varying states from polluted to pristine. Freud was fond of this line from Virgil's Aeneid: "If I cannot bend the gods, then I shall stir up Acheron. ~ Mary Trainor-Brigham

I know I have different priorities when I am close to dreaming and coming out of dreaming. I notice I am connected to people in a different way, and connected to the earth. For me, I have exactly the same emotional responses when I go through into shamanic trance. ~ Amy Hardie

There are two great mythological themes that weave throughout human history: the heroic and shamanic journeys. In the former, the hero journeys out of the ordinary world into a realm of primal forces, finding and facing monsters and allies in a quest for healing.

In the latter, the protagonist enters another order of reality, a landscape of mystery and power to be pulled apart and put back together in a new and more powerful way.

These great stories remind us that the soul is not accessible merely through the rational mind. The thinking intellect is a small part of the larger self. The soul makes its appearance known in dream and deep imagery, in feeling states (dark or light) that transcend the usual boundaries of the self, and in the sacred time and space accessed in ritual and ceremony.

The entrance to this vibrant territory lies in another way of seeing, a creative and active quality of perception that engages our full capacity, across the threshold where mind, body, and emotions merge within a path of heart. ~ Sparrow Hart

With ecstasy, what we do Here, directly impacts what we can achieve There. ~ S. Kelley Harrell