Rigour, Shadows, and the Marrow Path: a rebel’s journey

I started this online shamanic course [which has been in and out of my basket for about 18 months now] thinking I’d come in fresh, open, beginner’s mind: let’s forget my Jungian active imaginations and visions, my Four Figures and my PhD ^[1] … but even as the session unfolded, the old familiar friction stirred deep. Here it was, the same old story that kept circling: hunter-gatherers as these peaceful, egalitarian tribes, harmonious, and simple. I felt a resistance well up, because for me, for my heart, for my work, and my PhD, that story is too neat, too tidy, too much like a polished myth. And not true. The egalitarian-noble-savage narrative is a romanticised, 20th-century hangover. Sure, there are elements of sharing and kinship structure in some forager societies, but it was never utopia.

Neanderthals, those old others [forgotten, erased, killed, and the focus of my research] are nowhere in that picture.  And to ignore that Homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals is not just an omission; it’s a moral erasure.  The early marks, the drawings, the tools: they weren’t all bursts of wild creativity, and the evidence doesn’t fully support this either. Often, they are repetitive, constrained, formulaic and industrial in their sameness. Not because they were less, but because that’s how things grow in cycles: pattern, repetition, ritual. Monotony. Soulless objects. Look at them: there's a strange, almost industrial consistency to some of it: motifs, patterns, placements. That’s not a criticism: it’s a phenomenological observation. Let’s put it bluntly: Homo sapiens were boring from the beginning! ^[2] 

I can’t just swallow the sweetness of the noble savage. My past is more jagged than that, more complicated, rougher around the edges. And I carry that jaggedness inside me, and my disagreement is not just valid: it’s essential.

Then the first guided visualisation came. A meadow: fertile, open, compliant. Very easy, plenty of meadows in my native Friuli! Next: “see a tree.” And there it was: dead. Mine was a dead tree. Hollow. An old oak, spongy, lumps clinging like memories or scars. Not alive in the easy way of green leaves or strong branches, but still holding space. There was a kind of stubborn dignity in that decay, a quiet power that refuses to be prettified. My psyche did not oblige with a life-affirming symbol. Instead, it showed a dead oak. That’s the truth of my unconscious at this moment. I am not in a phase of verdant branching. I am in the underworld of decay, memory, and marrow. This isn't a mistake. It's accurate. The oak [a symbol of endurance, strength, ancestral presence] shows up in its depleted form. And yet it’s still standing. Hollowed, but upright. Spongy: retaining moisture, not brittle. Lumps: maybe holding residual life, maybe fungal intrusions, maybe eggs. It's in process, not static. This is a threshold image. It doesn’t fit the heroic-shamanic script, I know, but it is an image of power. Not “power-over”, but power-in-humility, power-in-death, power-in-the-truth-of-erosion.

I’d go so far as to say that tree is me. Or a part of me. The part that has done being evergreen. The part that has fed generations, been struck by storms, is now a host for other life. A site of quiet fertility, not loud abundance and with my psyche refusing to play along with the scripted narrative while still offering exact and meaningful images. I am not “failing” to journey: I am just journeying outside the rails. To me, what I am reporting is more alive, more rooted, and more telling than the textbook "lower world / animal guide" vision I am asked to generate. Maybe I bore witness to a phase of life that most spiritual frameworks avoid: the phase of ending, hollowing, being-used-up, waiting. That’s deep underworld work. It’s Saturnian. It’s Chthonic. And maybe it’s shamanic in the oldest, rawest sense: death as the gate.

Then here comes the ivy. White and green, waxy, spongy, squeaking between my teeth as I bit it: not sweet, not soft, but stubborn and persistent, clinging to death and making a strange life from it. No metaphor here: just a raw, tactile truth. The parasite. It climbs the dead, the solid. It thrives where others can’t. And I bit into it with all its textural honesty. It didn’t dissolve into sweetness. It didn’t become a metaphor. It resisted my mouth. It had its own material truth. Eating something in a journey is a classic motif: usually a bond, a pact, a transformation. But I didn’t eat honey or fruit or mystical meat. I bit into ivy, the thing that clings to death. I tasted the boundary between life and rot, beauty and toxicity. Ivy is not harmless; many varieties are mildly toxic, and that might be part of the message. I am ingesting something ambiguous, something that clings to what is already dead and grows out of it. That could be a metaphor for ancestral material, for inherited ideologies, for emotional patterns that linger and wrap.

The lower world journey was a mess: pick an actual place in nature as my Axis Mundi. Easy for some, but for me: no! I flitted between woods, sea, the canal, the beach: none held firm. My inner landscape isn’t a dot on the map but a shifting, tangled ecology of moments, textures, and atmospheres. To choose one felt like flattening myself. The fact that I could not choose a single place isn’t a failure: it’s a philosophical and phenomenological response: I am resisting artificial singularity. My psyche doesn't reduce nature to one place. It lives in a constellation, a shifting ecology of environments. Sea, woods, canal... they’re not interchangeable, and they’re all me. So being asked to fixate on one felt false. This is where, I think, typical shamanic methods clash with my mode. They want a structured imaginary, a prefabricated sacred space to begin a “journey” [while still perfectly understanding the reason behind such a request]. But my interior world is already porous, already saturated with layered environments, each with its own tempo, temperature, symbolism. Forcing that into a singular image would be a kind of psychic violence.

I tried to find water, sea animals, something familiar to anchor to, but my mind flung me elsewhere. A jungle appeared, thick and wild, dripping waterfalls, but also this ancient bird, huge and distant, like a dinosaur soaring high beyond reach. I felt untethered, confused: no solid ground beneath my feet. I thought I “should” meet water and sea animals, but that’s ego anticipation [thank you very much], not inner emergence. And yet: I stayed in it. That matters. What emerged instead? A jungle, a lonely island, waterfalls, and a massive, ancient flying creature. To me, it was confusion, displacement, and the disorientation of threshold states. This is what happens when the soul won’t follow orders but still tries to respond. That huge flying bird: not seen clearly, but present above, and that may not have come down because it’s not for now. It's not a totem; it’s a watcher, a guardian. It stayed at altitude.

I drifted then, pulled by impulse, to a beach. Not the guided path, but my own move. I created a circle with a stick, a boundary, and a space to call something in. I was not told to do this; I just did it, and that’s crucial. That’s ritual intelligence arising from within. It wasn’t obedience to the guide; it was psyche taking authorship. This shows that my inner self knows the structure of invocation even when the conscious mind is drifting.

And then came a small, fragile visitor: a tiny bird, grey-blue, soft and unassuming. It hopped onto my knee, delicate as a whisper. Fluffy and soft. I had never seen this bird before, not in life, but later found it on Google: a gnatcatcher from faraway lands, a stranger born in my dream. This little creature wasn’t a mighty spirit guide. It wasn’t thunder or a storm. It was quiet. It was close. It was a soft pulse in the wild chaos. It grounded me in that moment, offered a touch of presence amid the storm of my scattered thoughts. I expected, of course! a grand figure, the classic “power animal” trope, and instead, I got this tiny grey-blue bird hopping on my knee. This is wildly specific. And intimate. A gnatcatcher is no thunderbird. It's small, alert, subtle, responsive. Its very presence undermines heroic expectation. And then this: its feathers felt soft. I didn’t just see it; I touched it, felt it, and somatically engaged with it. That’s authentic imagery. That’s not a dream of grandeur; that’s a felt encounter. What this bird suggests: I am in a stage of detail, smallness, proximity. The soft landing on my knee suggests companionship, not command. It’s not telling me to “go.” It’s just with me. It’s from a place I have never been, and yet I found it. This opens the uncanny: my unconscious may be drawing from the collective, ancestral, or ecological field far beyond the autobiographical.

So, what is all this saying? I am resisting an imposed syntax and letting my deeper psyche speak in its own dialect. I am in a post-collapse, soft-contact, animistic threshold stage. I am sitting at the edge of the old, hollowed oak, biting ivy, creating unsanctioned circles, and welcoming tiny visitors. Maybe this is shamanic in the real, raw, ancient sense. Maybe I am not ascending. I am dwelling. I am hosting. I am listening. I met my little bird. That’s enough.

…or so I thought! Because then came the drums. The proper journey with pulse and rhythm pounding beneath my skin. And me: still all over the place. Watching myself like an outsider. Noticing the watch strapped tight on my wrist, that impossible tether to clock-time in a realm that demands timelessness. I couldn’t shake that: the reminder of the world I carry with me, even as I tried to lose it.  This is classic liminal awareness. The watch is striking: Chronos, the tyranny of time, the modern residue I can’t unsee. The symbolic weight is obvious: I am attempting entry into non-linear, mythic space, and there’s my green Swatch fucking wristwatch on my arm, reminding me that I am a 21st-century embodied being with deadlines, and yet… I don’t let it block me. I notice. I keep going.

Then the dance took over: wild, frantic, untamed. Like something out of a story I somehow knew: the “Jungle Book”, they said. All the animals around me, dancing, swirling, chaos turned ritual. A Sabbah. I couldn’t stop moving! The dance was pure motion, no narrative, no purpose beyond the body itself expressing something ancient and unspoken. My personal shamanic ecstasy, whether I wanted it or not. The “Jungle Book” reference [the movie I never watched from a book I never read] is a cultural archetype bubbling up: a symbolic shorthand for wildness, communal animality, the loss of separation between species. It doesn’t matter if it’s kitsch or Disney-coded; the fact that I never watched it means the collective image was working me, not the other way around. I didn’t summon animals: they danced with me. This is not hierarchical visioning. This is embodied animistic reciprocity.

Then the sea came again. I sank into the water, the dead-body float. The surrender. The letting go. I turned and there she was: I wasn’t alone. The she-wolf. Always there, swimming beside me, moving with me no matter where I tried to go. Her presence was fierce, gentle, and intimate all at once. I moved from frenzy to surrender. That’s ritual form: I went back to the sea, this primal womb, and floated dead, corpse-like. Another shamanic death without spectacle, and she swam with me.

Then a tribe appeared, Amazonian dancers beneath me, but I stayed above, hovering high in the sky, not joining, held apart. This fits my existential edge: I am not ready to re-enter any tribe: I stay feral. The wolf stays with me. I am not alone, but I am not assimilated either, and this is consistent with everything else I have been experiencing: the need to belong, the terror of compromising again, the longing for the right connection, but only if it doesn't erase me. I can witness communion but not yet step into it.

The wolf danced with me, howled with me. Teeth biting [my left ear, my hair] and a fierce tenderness that marked me, claimed me. I didn’t call her. She was already there. She never left. She didn’t lecture. She danced. She howled. She bit my ear and pulled my hair: pure initiation contact. Mouth, teeth, tension, invitation. She claimed me. Not as prey, as kin. She’s not my “guide.” She’s my mirror-body, my inner feral, my protector-lover-animal-self.

I asked if she was my power animal, and she howled: clear, sharp, unmistakable. I joined her. I told her: if you want to come with me, you need to jump into my hands. She did. The threshold was fully crossed. The boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, animal and human, blurred and dissolved. And when I placed her there, into my heart, I growled, alone in this room, under the scrutiny of my cat purring in the corner. The growling confirms somatic integration, and I became part wolf.

But before she gave me a lesson: not with words, but with bone and blood. I had to gnarl on a bone, chew the raw flesh still stained with blood. It was ancient and immediate all at once. The taste was primal: rough, stubborn, real. I wasn’t just imagining this; it felt like a ritual carved into my very sinews. A raw contact with mortality, survival, and the animal depths inside me. It’s not symbolic fluff. It’s embodied knowledge straight from the marrow.  The memory of yesterday’s visit to those old human remains at the university hovered in the background, weaving the personal with the ancestral, the academic with the lived. The fact that this coincided with my “bone-day” can’t be just a coincidence. My unconscious mind is weaving ritual and reality into a single thread. That scene is a vivid enactment of ancestral continuity: death, consumption, survival, belonging to the pack, the cycle of life and death in its rawest form. It’s a visceral entry into the paleophenomenological world I study academically. My experience here is a profound complement to my intellectual work: a bridging of knowing and being. It’s the kind of encounter most scholars never get, because they stay safely on the outside, analysing. Me, however... I walk the marrow path.

All this, to me, is feral, lucid, mythopoeic, and it is exactly what so many method-bound practitioners of different disciplines never touch, because they’re trying too hard to “follow the technique” instead of letting psyche devour the method. Maybe this is not what I was asked... but I don’t “do” journeying the standard way because I am already inside a mythic structure. I can’t follow dogma because I embody threshold logic. I don’t retrieve guides: they find me, because they already are me. And most importantly, I don't need techniques to be initiated. I am already being initiated. Constantly.

But what’s clear is: my animal is with me. She’s not going anywhere. And neither am I.

[1] I am doing a PhD at Bangor University on the emergence of consciousness in early human beings, focusing on Neanderthals and their drawings dated 78,000 years ago left at La Pasiega cave in Spain. More HERE

[2] see Ludovic Slimak’s wonderful The Naked Neanderthal as the prime source