Shamanism, Wounds, and the Search for What Endures
The first steps of my inner journey led me to dreams and shamanism. I wanted to understand my pervasive sense of loss. Shamanism seemed to answer the great riddle posed by human suffering. It explained the unexplainable, and in doing so, maybe (I hoped) it would make the unbearable bearable.
Shamanism and the Fear of Loss: Searching for Proof That Something Endures
To my reckoning, the root of suffering was death: the inescapable fact that we will sooner or later lose everything that we love, up to and including our own lives.
But if a shaman could really navigate from the physical world to the spirit world and perceive the evidence that consciousness endures after bodily death, that would reassure us all that there was ultimately no reason to grieve. What better way to transcend bereavement than to perceive the proof that nothing is actually lost in the universe?
The shaman's wisdom tells us that everything that exists possesses consciousness and all consciousness endures.
Bereft of society’s compass, we have to trust our inner guidance. We have to understand and feel the connection between our thoughts and our experiences, or it'll always seem like manipulating “the outside” is the only way to direct our lives.
Our lives become as big as the stories we tell ourselves. If we're caught in situations that feel limiting and create frustration and pain, our poorest option is to let our thoughts and imagination endlessly spin around “what is” and never open ourselves to a broader vision.
When I follow my inner guidance, it brings fresh and vital insights when the answers my society offers feel out of alignment with who I am. Small inner steps can, little by little, carry you into an entirely new reality.
Over time, through dreams, shamanism, and mythic storytelling, I learned that my “ill-fitted” inner life wasn’t a flaw but a calling.
God Enters Through the Wound: Pain as the Catalyst for Inner Guidance and Healing
As is true of many seekers, the pain I carried served as the impetus for my spiritual search. The shamanic saying "God enters through the wound" echoes the Sufi mystic Rumi's line: "The wound is the place where the light enters you."
The wound obliges would-be healers to connect with the unseen world to regain spiritual equilibrium. It serves as our impetus to seek answers to questions that haven't been asked before, to blaze our own paths when none of our culture's tried-and-tested roads offer salvation.
We learn to listen to our inner voices because no one else can soothe or clarify our restless longing and unease.
Mythic Storytelling as Medicine: Turning the Inner Journey Into Creative Work
My own wounds, and the search they launched me on, became fertile soil for my mythic visions. Storytelling painted a landscape that nourished my inner discoveries and gave them a place to flourish.
Throughout my life's many twists and turns, one point on my internal compass remained clear: to use my creativity to illuminate the inner world of the soul and depict the journey of self-discovery in dramatic, emotionally cathartic ways.
I felt called to take an inward plunge and then share the fruits of that deep descent with the wider community. That, to me, is the essence of any art form: to explore how inner and outer realities intertwine and reflect one another: dreams and waking reality, inner conflict and outward strife, soul realizations and the unraveling of external knots.
The core conflict always lies at the friction point between personal sovereignty and the relinquishment of power to external authorities, including god figures. Not to deny the idea of divinity, but rather to honor the divinity that expresses and discovers itself as us.