An interesting question. A quick glance at any “new age” publication, tabloid, or newsletter would lead one to feel that it must be a noble, and seemly easy, profession because everyone seems to be a shaman and/or healer. However, being a shaman is not so mainstream, as say a lawyer, but then, being of the law profession, is not only noble—at least in the oath that they take, but profitable. And your local shaman doesn’t usually seem to be on the same social-economic scale as your neighborhood attorney. In fact, it seems that the only ones that make the Big Bucks are the ones that make you a shaman. So, why would anyone want to be a shaman? And by the way, what is a shaman?

To some, the shaman may be a cosmic voyager bringing sacred knowledge and lore to a community of souls. To others, a trickster or a magician that may heal you, but may also, harm you. And to others, a religious practitioner that works with, and is friends with, the unseen worlds and the elements of fire and water. But most importantly: “There can be no shaman without a surrounding society and culture. Shamanism is not a single, unified religion but a cross-cultural form of religious sensibility and practice…There were probably shamanist communities in the past but we have only vague ideas about what it must have felt like to live in them.” (1)

So again, we arrive back at our original question. Let me attempt to answer it by briefly telling about my own journey, as well as my wife Sherry’s, into the spiritual, and to be more specific, the world of the shaman. This quest has taken both Sherry and I, sometimes alone and sometimes together, throughout the world, ever seeking the magical ones, those spiritual elders, if you would, shamans, that would be willing to share their knowledge and wisdom with us. And never has it involved lying on a floor with a bandana over our eyes and being taken on a “journey.”

But it has involved: being “put out” on mountain tops alone, fasting—more often than I would ever want to, crawling into caves and holes in the ground seeking “medicine and sacred waters”, climbing pyramids only to be “hung” over the side, downing three bottles of posh (cane alcohol or what I call shamanic white lightning) in a two hour ceremony with a friend of mine and a Zinacantec (Bat) shaman, being shot at, clawed by a “shape changer” Jaguar under a pyramid in the Yucatan jungles, having an exorcism at midnight in front of a mausoleum in Japan, chased by killer bees after almost dying on a mountain peak in Peru, and taking the Shamanic botany, not my cup of tea, no pun intended. Personally speaking, I never experienced much of a difference from my own “normal” level of consciousness.

We’ve also been in NW Coast Long (Smoke) Houses during the winter “dance” season—where we were the only non-natives, have been visited by an Archangel and two assisting angels, helped mend the fishing nets of one of our teachers, walked up rocky mountain paths in the dark to “bathe” in ice cold streams, initiated in a mountain lagoon ceremony, sacrificed blood to a river and the waters responded by rising two-fold, and the list can keep going on and on. The point is that not once was any of this just an in-door mental exercise but it always involved the body and mind in an interesting dance of fear, exhaustion and ecstasy.

And across the board, every healer, spiritual elder, Indian Doctor or shaman that we have ever worked with always said: “I am happy to share this with you…(and many times) I don’t know why I’m sharing this with you. Our own people, even family, are afraid of it and do not want the responsibility.”

When we accept this spirit path in life, there is great responsibility and always in the recesses of mind, fear. And then there is patience. Days after days of oral teachings, many times stories—and the same stories over and over again. In other words, this path of the shaman takes work, sweat (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual), time, tears, laughter, focus and a questing spirit with an open heart and mind.

And let us not forget about the training, not only the mind but also the body. One of the aspects of spiritual power is heat, that inner heat (fire) that transforms your body internally. Not only a re-wiring of the mind but a “re-furnacing” of the body. This serpent fire, whether we name it Kundalini, mana or the tappas of yoga, arises from “an excessive indigestion of sacred power… Such fire and mystical heat are always connected with access to a certain ecstatic state -- and the same connection is observed in the most archaic strata of magic and universal religion. Mastery over fire, insensibility to heat, and hence the ‘mystical heat’ that renders both extreme cold and the temperature of burning coals supportable, is a magico-mystical virtue that, accompanied by no less marvelous qualities (ascent, magical flight, etc.), translates into sensible terms the fact that the shaman has passed beyond the human condition and already shares in the condition of 'spirits'." (2)

(1) The Shaman, Piers Vitebsky, pg. 11
(2) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade, pg. 335