The Shaman Within by Claude Poncelet PhD

Author:Claude Poncelet, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

SHAMANIC PRACTICES FOR THE WORK ENVIRONMENT

When working shamanically inside modern groups and institutions, it is critical to maintain the integrity of and respect for traditional shamanic knowledge, in terms of the nature of nonordinary reality and how to communicate and work with spirits. It is also essential to focus on the ethics principles outlined in chapter 1 and to always strive for impeccability. At the same time, our working environments today are vastly different from traditional shamanic societies, and we must find new ways to work shamanically in them.

Practicing shamanically in today’s work environments requires daily—sometimes hourly—work, awareness, and attention. It is very difficult and requires much practice. We tend to be “asleep” and forget to do our shamanic practice when we are at work; we forget that spirits are all around us and that everything is sacred and interrelated. Remembering the spiritual dimension in everything is perhaps the real challenge in bringing shamanism into professional life, not the practices themselves; it certainly was for me.

The professional-life practices I learned from spirits are based on shamanic principles that will be familiar to you by now. An important one is that everything that has form in this world has a spiritual dimension. This includes man-made objects, such as buildings, cars, and computers, as we saw in the last chapter. It also includes people and our organizations, from small groups to corporations and nations. Because we have prejudices about ordinary reality, it is sometimes difficult for us to admit or recognize the spiritual dimension of modern objects, people, or groups. We may not want to believe that a big, ugly truck speeding on the highway has a spirit, or that the U.S. Department of Defense or a political party or a big multinational oil company has a spirit, just as we tend to resist the idea that Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden had a soul or spirit, just like anyone else.

Another principle that applies here is that everything in this world is connected—that everything we do to bring harmony, anywhere and at any time, has repercussions elsewhere. The same holds true if our intention is to bring about disharmony.

Many of the shamanic practices I use in my work take place in the Middle World, the nonordinary aspect of the physical world of space, time, and matter. This is the world where we work with the souls of the dead and where we do long-distance healing and divination. Just as we can meet and work with spirits of nature in the Middle World, we can meet and work with the spirits of the workplace there. This is how I have effectively worked shamanically in the corporate world.

Obviously when I participate in a business meeting, work with a client, make a presentation to a group, fix a car, or, for that matter, cook a meal or climb a snowy mountain peak, it is not possible or appropriate to take my drum, lie down with a bandana over my eyes, and journey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.