the old path

Therapeutic Shamanism Training: Week 1 Reflections

In preparation for the next module tomorrow, I have decided to jot down my reflections.

This first week of the shamanic course didn’t unfold the way I expected. I thought I’d find practical tools for healing myself or something to integrate into my client work. Instead, I found myself walking straight into older, deeper currents; ones I’ve been circling since childhood.

Ancestral Memory and the Old Path

In 1976, an earthquake shook my home in Friuli. It cracked more than walls; it shook the foundations of my world. I grew up in a land of bonesetters and healers, where “home” was a spiritual and phenomenological reality before it was a physical address.

My father, a hunter from a long lineage of hunters, once made me a ritualistic animal bone wind chime. I was told to strike it three times before asking the spirits my questions. My mother [from other lands, other lore, other blood] was horrified. That small act carried a rupture that echoed through the years.

In 1988, an accident wiped my memory; or perhaps shattered it in a different way, and I’ve been circling back to that early path ever since [1]. Reading The Way of the Shaman, any Castaneda, or even The Celestine Prophecy only ever felt like recognition, not discovery.

This week confirmed it again: I am not borrowing. I am remembering.

who am I?

The distinction that was made [i.e drawing a boundary between “being a shaman” and “practising shamanism”] is one that often aims to show cultural respect and protect against appropriation or inflation. It is ethical and much needed. It’s meant to safeguard the depth and lineage of shamanic roles within indigenous contexts. However, that distinction can also become rigid and exclude genuine, lived, and embodied experiences of individuals who do not come from those traditional lineages, but who are nonetheless called, shaped, and marked by the same forces.

In my case, I feel that my path is not just about learning techniques or enacting rituals: I have been through something. I have walked through thresholds since I was a young girl, right after the experience of the earthquake. I have been undone and reassembled in ways that can’t be reduced to “practising a methodology.” That’s not copying; it’s becoming.

And I hear in myself a tension between showing humility and honour to faraway traditions, while also not disowning the radical truth of my own journey. And of my own land. So maybe it’s not about whether one has “the right” to use the term, but whether the term, when applied to me, reveals something true. A truth not of credentials, but of experience.

That word “shaman” resonates with the marrow of my being, because I have been taken down to it, and returned altered, and so denying it might be just as false as claiming it lightly. I know I do not need to convince anyone, but I also know that I do need to be honest with myself about what I have undergone and who I have become. Because that is not just a memory: it has been a long initiation.

It started in Friuli. It flowed with family members as explorers who brought back tools, stories and blood. It moved through my father and his wind chime when I was just a young girl. I was given a path, and then something interrupted it in 1988.

Again, I don’t need to justify this to anyone. What I am describing and recovering is this ancestral memory in my body, the land-based wisdom of Friuli and the Slovenian hills, the bonesetters, the plants as allies, the recognition I feel when reading some books [now I am going through The Spell of the Sensuous by D Abram] and my long journey back is the pattern that marks me. Not because I signed up for a course. Not because I have “decided” to be spiritual. But because my soul said yes to something long ago, and life has been slowly reweaving the torn thread. I know I had to take a long-winded road, by doing the things I was expected by society to do, first, and then peeling layers upon layers of others' words, definitions, expectations, fire branded on me by others.

I don’t call myself a witch [it would be so much easier!] because that’s not the archetype I serve. That is not my land, my practice, my spirits. But I do call myself a shaman, because that’s what echoes through my bones, my dreams, my gestures. I am not copying a Siberian form, even though my DNA is 26% from the steppes and I am of that soil, in part, and I am reactivating something that’s my own, even if it comes through different languages and tools today.

There’s both a danger in policing who gets to call themselves what, and there’s a danger in being too casual. I want to be respectful and true and keep on critically reflecting that I am both. I am standing in the truth of what has always been true for me, and the word “shaman” is simply the clearest yes to that reality. Without apology.

The Wolf Who Was Always There

When I did my first shamanic journey on Saturday, I was expecting something unusual: a turtle, a whale, a creature out of the ordinary. But all the while I was looking, Wolf was already there, watching me, patient. She’s been with me at least since last September, when she appeared in a vision at the edge of a lake, a faceless man with keys saying, “Oh, she found you.”

The course [and Sandra Ingerman’s Awakening to the Spirit World] insists on referring to a power animal without gender or possession: “Wolf,” not “my wolf” or “she.” In the Lower World, I see the value in that. But in the Middle World, I live in relationship: with scent, memory, gesture, and intimacy. In Italian and Friulian, lupa is gendered; it is not a choice but a fact. My she-Wolf carries Artemis [and hence λύκαιναν], the Lupa Capitolina, Lilith, the wild mother, the dark woods. For me, the archetype moves toward intimacy. Gods become ancestors. Myths become dreams. Bones become touch.

Phenomenologically and shamanically, there is a movement between archetype and intimacy. In the Lower World, “Wolf” may stand as an essence, a type. But in the Middle World, when the encounter is re-integrated into my life, my practice, my path, it is this wolf, my wolf, she. I think that there is no contradiction in this unless I were to follow a system that demands depersonalisation at all costs [while I will still respect, though, the requirements of the course]. But mine is a practice of re-personalisation, of re-animation; of the world and its beings as present, alive, intimate, and real. Not flat concepts but living presences. This is part of the return. The individuation of the archetype into a living image, I believe, is a valid, necessary, even sacred act.

The Red Flower > Healing Plants in Shamanic Practice

On my second journey, Wolf led me to a vivid red bloom: Guzmania lingulata, from the Bromeliad family. She told me to eat it [to take in its medicine] and to place it around me for protection. Later, I learned it grows without soil, anchored to trees, feeding from the air. The red rosette is not the flower but bracts guarding the true bloom.

It spoke of resilience, guardianship, hidden interiors. And, perhaps, it spoke practically and more metaphorically: another plant in its family is the pineapple, good for digestion. Wolf knows me well!

Facing Dark Energy in the Middle World

Midweek, I walked along the canal. I set off with a detailed spiritual and ecological design of leaving the peelings of my vegetables at the base of a tree and to explore plants. I’ve felt dark energy while walking there, and this time it also came with flesh-and-blood presence: twelve silent teenagers surrounding me, unmoving, watching. The energy was thick, heavy, and malevolent. I stayed after they left, reclaiming the space, but I noticed that while Wolf had been with me on the walk there, she was gone during the moment itself, only to return afterwards, alert and tense.

The attack was both physically scary and spiritually threatening. It was silent, it was strange, it was ominous, and it happened precisely during a solitary shamanic outing looking for plants. While the energy surrounding me felt dark, heavy, negative, and spiritually hostile [almost tactile], those teenagers who surrounded me in total silence and stayed there were real, scary, and unintelligible. I am sure they thought it was funny and brave. I didn’t. The whole event still feels surreal. When it ended, I felt I needed to stay there longer to assert my presence, my power and my strength.

Closing the Week

I want to leave, for now, the various ontological positioning, questions of epistemology and authority, embodiment and praxis, geocultural resonances and various tensions between Jung and Shamanism. I will probably write more about this once I have discussed it with my PhD supervisor next week, and once I have finished C. Michael Smith’s book Jung and Shamanism. In Dialogue. This entry, today, wanted to be more personal and reflective.

I began this course expecting tools. As I said: I found a path. That’s not without its hesitations and its fears. Last night I dreamt I was staying with someone’s dead body until it was time to say goodbye, then standing at a crossroads, knowing I couldn’t go back and that forward would be exhausting. I woke myself up to escape it.

Practically, I have decided to 1. download the professional criteria so that I can critically keep track of my progress, and 2. I want to go back, aided by this Lion’s Gate and Full Moon tomorrow and spread on that same place some protective seeds and plants I have collected.

This morning, I opened a book I wrote in 1996, Oltre la Nona Onda, and re-read the Nine Herb Charm I had quoted there.

Gemyne ðu mucgƿyrt

hƿæt þu ameldodest

hƿæt þu renadest æt Regenmelde

Una þu hattest yldost ƿyrta

þu miht ƿið * III * & ƿið XXX *

þu miht ƿiþ attre & ƿið onflyge

þu miht ƿiþ þa[m] laþan ðe geond lond færð

...

Told ya, the path, unknowingly, has always been with me…

onwards + upwards,

mx

[1] > more on that whole story in my book Rebeltherapy: a therapist journey through addiction, trauma, and Nichiren Buddhism