With climate change, the techniques of weather shamanism are essential to our collective survival. We need to make changes to safeguard the vitality of the world.
The spirits of the weather want us to work with them. In times past people all over the world spoke to, prayed to, and worked with the spirit of weather, but today our culture has forgotten him. Our culture now sees weather as chaotic interactions of purely physical forces.
Humans affect the weather by our psyches and emotions; our perceptions and experiences. Due to erratic mental and emotional energy that humanity sends out, the weather spirits are no longer able to give rain where it is needed, and withhold it when it is not needed.
There are still viable cultures around the world that carry on in the knowledge that everything embodies spirit, a normally unseen life force and sentience that inhabits rocks, animals, plants, trees, places, rivers, storms, mountains, oceans—everything. Many of these cultures work with the spirits of weather and understand the need to honor and relate to the spirit world for the overall maintenance of harmony and balance of society. They see this intentional relationship as a special duty for humans and they attend to this responsibility through the enactment of community rituals. When people and Nature are in harmony, then magic and beauty are everywhere.
We need to re-frame our worldview—our ideas, ideals, descriptions of reality and how to live our lives; our inherited, culturally transmitted story, perception, and how we interpret our experiences. We forget that our worldview is not the only truth nor the entire truth of reality. Shamans speak of this as learning to dream a new dream of the world and of ourselves in the world.
For thousands of years the shaman has deliberately set out to suspend at
will the confines of ordinary worldview through experiencing that
ecstatic state of oneness, unity, and state of harmony.
What we think of as "reality" can be altered. We can intentionally expand our "filters" to accommodate other possibilities. Our gates of perception open to the sacred. The shaman understands that nonordinary reality worlds can feed our world with vitality and beauty and so actively work to encourage just this to foster a greater experience of well-being for the inhabitants of Earth. The shaman journeys and chants, dances, sings, and meditates to open their perception to
become a "hollow bone," a vehicle for the transmission of healing, harmonious energies to help transform ordinary reality. We are all capable of this ecstatic state, to open and expand, to harmonize and align with states of harmony. As we do so, we allow beauty to permeate more of our world.
Nature is a portal to the grace of this world. It nourishes our beings, inspires us, and helps us restore lost balance and well-being for ourselves and others. The more present or at home we are in our bodies, the more we are able to receive and to
resonate with that beauty and reflect our own luminosity out into the world.
Form: Life Force and it's Transformations in the Middle World
Form is sacred and contains great power.
Form is a patterning, an ordering of energy, and it takes power to bond that energy into a particular order and shape. Form is not permanent or fixed. Forms are ephemeral.
We exist in physical form, yet we lack an acute awareness of our more subtle, energetic forms and sensory capacities.Somewhere in our prehistory, thousands of years before the widespread use of written language, it's possible that ancestral humans could hear and see things that we aren't aware of now. They could see and feel beings, spirits of Nature, that we now think of as mythological. Long ago, people, plants and animals could change their forms and all were equal in worth.
The perception today is a state of "none sense," our habitual nonsensory way of life and lack of holistic understanding of our reality. We are all endowed with a multitude of innate sensory capacities beyond the five senses. Yet our culture's worldview tends to support and validate only our material based senses while the others are generally ignored.
A life enhanced by focused intentionality is the deliberate act of absorbing the unlimited life force of the natural world.
Many struggle with the illusion of a sense of separation. It's an opportunity to remember ourselves in the greater, grander reality of true unity. But walk the edge: learn to merge well and frequently, yet remember your own essence, your own being and form.
There's an underlying energy, a substratum of life force with creative
movement through all things, be they rocks, weather, or our own
thoughts.
What is Weather? Emotion, Reciprocity, and Change
Origin stories recount the beginnings of all forms and created things as birthed from a great dark void, a primordial ocean.
Weather is the emanation of the conscious life force of the void. The void produces waves of energy that enter our world as an individual spirit of weather, shaping into form to guide the wave to materialization for this physical plane. The luminous field of pure being has a central pulse, like our bodies, that sends the waves. It's the theater of the Great Mystery for weather spirits to play, dance, and manifest their essence in form.
Weather, like the rest of us, is filled with individual expressions and manifestations of personality and mood. We often use language that speaks to our emotional kinship with weather: A "stormy relationship", "foggy thinking", "sunny disposition", "whirlwind tours", "thundering a reply", "got it in a flash", "runs like the wind", and so on.
Your thoughts are your weather system adjusting and moving and changing as energy moves through you. Stand back and watch your thoughts and feelings, as they are the clouds ever moving and reshaping, bringing precipitation and shade to you, your own weather system. You are a part of weather—it is a part of you as your thoughts. Thoughts are your weather.
Earth is a whole living organism and the abberant weather conditions represent stressors—changes, imbalances, obstructions, and energy surges in Earth's field, just like the etheric field of an individual.
Our relationship with the forces and spirits of the weather we experience every day provides a potent calling and opportunity to live gracefully and successfully with the challenges and gifts of change.
Weather spirits are spirits of change. Humans are not in control. Embrace change: align with the forces of change. Embrace weather. Open to the changes it brings. Open to the teachings of those changes. Open to your lack of control. Love the weather.
Chaos, Order, and Power at Work
Reciprocity is an active mirroring that teases apart the union, the oneness of all things.
Origin myths speak of an original primal state of chaos—a dark place
with no form or order, a place of pure potential. Out of this darkness
flares a point of light; from chaos emerges order; from formlessness,
form.
There's a Celtic tradition where the shaman voluntarily enters into the affairs of chaos and purposefully engages in battle with the dangerous and destructive forces of chaos that are afoot in the world. Those powers cause harm, destroy life, and disrupt the natural order of things. Yet this
destruction plays a necessary and important role in maintaining the balance between life and death that makes existence possible.
Apparent imbalances today, according to the Koyukon elders in Alaska are attributed to the loss of medicine people, those willing and able to work with the spirits of the animals and the elemental forces of Nature.
The Shaman's work is about restoring order when chaos moves in. It's important to do this work without blame. Wovoka's Ghost/Friendship Dance is a sacred community ceremony to align with the ancestors to restore lost beauty, lost harmony, and lost order to a ravaged world.
Today, all of us need to work to restore order from a place of compassion.
Many indigenous elders and shamanic practitioners see a growing state of imbalance and a distressing lack of order or harmony in our world's ecology. Nevertheless, there is room for optimism in our ability to participate in a rectification, a restoration of balance and vitality to the world.
Webster defines
power as possession of control and authority over others, which describes our culture's predominant understanding and relationship with power. For indigenous traditions, however, the concept of power embodies all the elements of the natural world.
A primal world force or energy exists everywhere and enlivens all things and beings of the universe. In the languages of these traditions the essence of power carries a quality of
sacredness.
- Orenda - Iroquois
- Wakan - Lakota
- Shakti - Hindu
- Mana - Hawaiian
- Chi - Chinese
- Djang - Aboriginal (Australian)
This power is accessible to those who know how to use it for a variety of needs, including the need for rain or sunshine. Power is what makes things happen. Power is conscious. It is the role of human beings to
learn how to appropriately interact with power so that the cosmic order and harmony of the universe may be served. True power is the sacred life force of the universe that exists in all things. . . . One important aspect of relating to power is clarity of purpose.
The Faces of Weather
Every weather event, each storm, breeze, or drop of rain, is a manifestation in this world of the power of the weather spirits. The creative force behind all acts and manifestations of weather's power does not, itself, have a specific form. What is has is potential, the potential of unformed energy. This energy of potential has spirit and gives birth to spirited forms or elements of weather.
We can perceive a particular form when this energy is ordered into a state of coherency, when energetic particles or waves are in alignment.
Weather is a master teacher of form and of form changing. By exploring form, you will find teachings of metamorphosis. Your form, your body, is sacred. Being of form, you are far more able to relate to form than you are to concepts and words alone. Through the vehicle of a form, you are better able to identify and receive, to bring a concept home to yourself. This is why symbols are so useful to you.
Form is your portal to understanding the weather's world, and why you were given "only" experiences of weather's changing forms.
To learn about weather from its various personas,
we need to cultivate and access a certain level of awareness. We need to know about boundaries—especially our own. We need to know that deception or illusion is all too possible as we look at the world. Too often we gaze at clouds and just see "clouds"; if we studied them in school, we may identify them as cumulus, stratus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, and so on, and stop there. None of this is wrong, yet it is limited in scope and perception. Shamans can recognize and relate to the clouds as sentient beings, as spirits manifest, and able to divine accurate information from them regarding matters in one's life as well as for healing others.
I was floating in clouds, fluffy and light; I became fluffy light clouds. It was intoxicating. Then I became gray, heavy clouds with lots of water and pressure; then I was on a lightning arc and I became the lightning arc. . . I was hot and crackly. I was hot wind, blowing the fire around . . then I felt wet and was a pounding rain. I heard, "These are the faces of weather, they are to be studied, to be enjoyed, to be feared, and to be loved. But most of all, these faces are your faces, these conditions are your conditions. You make the weather as surely as you walk each day."
The Sacred Nature of Storm
Once in a while a helping spirit journeys with me into a storm and I am able to briefly merge with its power, as one of its elements of cloud, wind, rain, or lightening. I began collecting storm waters from each that passed over for the use in ceremony, for offering healing to the sky. This is one way we can work spiritually to help balance the toxins that are routinely pumped into the very air and atmosphere we depend upon for life.
Storms serve essential roles in the continuance of life and fertility in our world.
Most journeys for learning about weather working provide teachings on topics of cleansing, with storm as the restoration and maintenance of balance, a wake-up call, and a fresh start. The role of storms is not to bring destruction, but to bring rebirth.
Toxins and pollutants weigh down the air and wind and rain and cause interference and chaos. The storm gods tell the shamans to help, to "
heal the heart." in order to
see the weather and its role, and honor the weather. . . . The weather gods tell shamans, "You humans work well together in crisis, well in chaos, so go and work well together—here is your crisis.
Enlivened Relationship With Nature: The Way InHow do we know if we are in a trance? It usually involves a feeling of expansiveness of the self, as if
your boundaries suddenly become permeable or are suspended. It's an enhanced awareness and you know unequivocally that you are one with the universe or Nature, and that all is well after all. Such experiences can inspire a lasting and welcome opening of the heart along with an abiding sense of trust in life.
When storms threatened, despite their potential for destruction, bless them with hope that proper recognition and honoring will ensure at least some measure of protection.
People of power, those consciously in touch with this truth of unity within diversity, have been known to change their forms at will and thus are able to influence the behavior of other forms or beings. These shamans know the common language of Nature.
It can be a lot of work, and it takes sustained effort to free ourselves and enter, at will, into heightened states of conscious awareness - yet the results are worth it.
The Dance of Power: First StepsSo firm was the belief of the Maori in mana that those who were held to possess it in high degree were credited with amazing powers, such as control over, or power to influence, natural phenomena. Such highly endowed people could cause the sun to shine, mist to disappear, and many other things equally marvelous -
Maori Religion and Mythology by Best.
This is the time of water and water's power on Earth to create change and to cleanse. The tragic tsunamis and floodings and mudslides and big storms unleash the waters, and we are in that process now. Know storms as creative beings and don't be obsessed with their destructive side only. Honor and communicate with the storms.
To consciously relate to weather is to dance with weather.
It is an act of focused intention, with clarity of purpose and presence in the moment. When inspired and energized by love it can become an ecstatic act of power. Spirit teachers repeatedly speak about the power of strength that is enlivened and intensified by compassion. Align with the power of compassion when you spend energy and time on behalf of another. Shamans know that to successfully call upon the assistance of their helping spirits is to work with a power that is infused with unlimited compassion.
The Navajo people see no choice but to perform:
"humans are the earth and sky aware of themselves." We find the creative principles of unity (we are all part of the world and each other) and reciprocity (we and the world affect and mirror one another.)
In developing a relationship of this kind with power, we have to understand more about the nature of power and where we stand with power. We need to gain clarity about the hidden nature of our personal need for power before we can reliably relate with the weather in a clean, effective, and safe way; otherwise we are only courting trouble. This kind of knowledge doesn't come easily, and the learning of it is an ongoing task. Depending upon our individual perspectives and intentions, our understanding of power varies widely and wildly. We are all capable of wielding the power to destroy and, in turn, of suffering the destructive effects of powerful acts motivated by fear. Likely we have always lived with the power of fear, which when in balance motivates us to exercise caution in the risks we take, yet when out of balance profoundly inhibits our ability to live life fully.
…I have to convince the tornado to withdraw or rein in its fearsome and wondrous power - to express its beauty in a place where none will be harmed.
It may be that our spiritual muscles are weakened due to our reliance upon modern technology, but they aren't gone, and they will respond to the proper types and amounts of exercise.
For the Lakota people, "crying for a vision" is a sacred rite that involves a period of fasting from food, water, and human contact in a place of power such as a mountain or hilltop. Other peoples in North America seek their visions within the utter darkness of caves. Such a quest is a practice found worldwide in one variation or another, with the common ground of being a solitary experience in Nature, with some amount of suffering.
Weather calls us to align ourselves with the direction and expression of natural power, and to do so possessing a clarity of purpose to restore and foster harmony and balance in our lives and world.
Any attempt to wield "power-over" with weather in our efforts to influence weather yields unpredictable, possibly undesirable, or even regrettable results… Relationship is the key. Relationships promotes harmony for your life and your world. This is what really matters.
To Honor Hurricane: A Divine TempestEven though threatened with the real possibility of injury or property damage, those who could work with the challenges from a shamanic worldview found opportunities for valuable lessons and personal growth. They were the ones who could step beyond their fears and find a place of acceptance and grace. They did not forget that we have the option of relating to that which could otherwise victimize us, and so they were able to claim their own stance of strength and endurance.
Honor the weather. This is the kind of honoring that combines respect with love for the storm, or any other element of weather, as another living being, and that recognizes that, no matter how we may feel about its effects, it is a being with a purpose - a divine purpose, if you will. Honoring allows for the role that we each must play and creates a space for true collaboration.
Weather Working: A Closer LookThere's a bewildering variety of attitudes and styles of weather working in the world. A basic model that embodies three discrete levels or categories, nested together in a series of concentric circles. Don't grasp the model too tightly: everything is connected behind many facades and so the multilevel theory is useful only if we understand that the distinctions can overlap and meld into one another.
In the model of the concentric circles, the innermost circle is the heart, the central core to all the outer circles. This is the place of weather dancing, the harmony in relationship that permeates and enlivens all the other circles. At the outermost circle, the farthest removed from the heart place, is weather modification, more about power-over than relatedness. In between the innermost and outermost circles we have the place of weather working, consisting of practices that may lean either way.
In its highest sense, weather working is performed on behalf of something - a place, a community, a situation - for which real healing is needed, and not based on what we may personally desire.
Weather dancing is about harmony, respect, and love in relationship with the spirits and forces of weather. From this place we find the dance that engenders a spiritual alignment of allowing and honoring the uniqueness and sacredness of the other, of even occasionally becoming the other. The essence of weather dancing is capable of radiating outward and through the other lays, infusing them with its harmony - just like our great and brilliant sun radiates its shine throughout our solar system.
The spirits are here - all we have to do is acknowledge them. Relatedness, compassion, empty, receptivity, desire - perhaps this is all it task to work with the weather in a healing way.
Our presence, focus, and genuine appreciation - along with appropriate timing - can sometimes tip the scales.
THE PRACTICE OF WEATHER DANCING
Weather Dancing: Metaphor for a Spiritual PracticeWeather dancing occupies the innermost circle as the heart, the core of it all. Weather dancing is no less than a guiding metaphor for the power and beauty of being openhearted - a transformative spiritual practice.
The power is the dance of relationship, and the ecstatic moments are there in the dance, in the alignment of our beings with the beings and energies of the weather.
The practice of weather dancing also insists that we cultivate a genuine attitude of humility, or we could find the forces of weather ignoring or humiliating us - or worse - for excessive self-aggrandizement. At the same time
it requires a healthy ego. We need an ego that is sufficiently strong so that we have the necessary self-confidence to willingly risk, and especially the risk our familiar sense of the rational. Our comfort levels - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual - can and will be challenged. When we open ourselves to new opportunities for learning and personal growth, our egos will want to rebel from the possibility of failure as we encounter challenges and face the need to risk, again and again. The "demons" of self-doubt and lack of trust in the universe, in the compassionate spirits and sacred relatedness of all that is, lie in ambush at every twist and turn of our dance with weather.
As when we ask a big favor of a friend, it is a genuine relief to feel noticed and worthy of an agreeable response, a sure indication that the relationship is in alignment with a mutual purpose. Practice with a strong sense of clarity coupled with a balanced ego, with an intent to bring healing - or else it can weaken us or harm others.
What particular story is life and the world showing us? it takes intention, focus, and practice - lots of practice - to broaden our abilities to "see" and understand. Explore how you can broaden your radar and magnify your abilities to tune in to the greater, overall reality. The sea, for example, can present a different face of colors, shapes of waves, aromas, and sounds. Likewise, the "ocean" of our atmosphere has an unending variety of expressions of weather.
Ceremony: Dance of AlignmentThe use of ritual and the tools of ritual, such as dancing, singing, praying - engaging in that which aligns heart, body, mind, and spirit with your intention - creates a magnetic attraction for the weather spirits.
The wind and the rain are all within the shaman. The shaman's consciousness extends to include them within their very being. This is what is behind those breakthrough, peak experiences of ecstasy: our sense of expanded being-ness in the world. When it happens for us it is a rare and genuine state of grace and it inspires a feeling of true belonging in Nature, with a consciousness of no separation - of unity. It is the essence of alignment.
There has to be an exchange of effort - an offering of your effort first - in the working, in the asking. Weather expends energy, and to ask a cloud or a storm to bring rain requires a reciprocal act in which you expend some of your energy.
Ritual is a way for us to retrieve and raise your own power as you direct intention to align with the power of weather. Weather the offering is praying, singing, dancing, honoring, or some other form, it requires an expenditure of energy on our part as we seek to align with the weather spirits. It is through ceremony and its elements that we can contributor our exchange of effort.
I call to the power of the Thunder Beings,
I call to the power of the Earth,
I call to the power of the East and West,
I call to the power of the North and South.
Behold, the time has come,
The time has come to unite as one,
Behold, the time has come,
To encircle the Earth with our love.
- The Thunder-Being Song, Sandra Ingerman, sung loudly and for as long as one dares.
The ancestral understanding is that ritual and ceremony are primary ways in which humans can do their part to hold the world together - to maintain the cosmic order that engenders the balance and vitality all beings depend upon for life. The recognition of humans as vital to the well-being of the world is cross-cultural in its scope. Taken seriously, it is an invitation to shoulder a great responsibility, for the harmony of both our world and the spirit world, for behind it all we are all connected. We were created, the Navajo people say, to restore the beautiful, with sustaining songs and stories; to keep the world in motion in dance, in ceremony and ritual.
The Hopi Indians say that they don't make it rain with their ceremonies. Rather, the ceremonies drive away the disharmony that prevents the rain from falling. The Hopis call the disharmony exorcised by their ceremonies "akina."
Many places suffer from drought, too much rain, shortages, many problems. There is a reason for this misfortune, for you have not been doing ceremonies, gathering together, thanking the Earth, the gods, the Sun, the sea for your lives. This is missing. Without celebration, the gods are unhappy and bring misery to us. The ceremonies, gathering together, celebrating together - this is the love or energy that the gods live on.
All ceremonies are composed of various elements that are utilized worldwide. The use of prayer, meditation, symbols, offering, chanting, singing, and dancing all provide ways to stimulate us, to help us concentrate, to focus our intention, and to show up in our power as we engage and align with the spirits in ceremony. Each ceremony has its own intention and combination of elements, with an invitation to the helping spirits, and through these we are able to concrete, to conjure, to manifest in this world. Give the spirits an opportunity to be heard. Shamans recognize the sacred responsibility of humans to dream the world anew, and it is through ceremony that the dreams are empowered.
Ethics of Weather WorkingAs we grew into our relationships with the forces and spirits of weather, we were surprised to experience a diminishing desire to try to change anything. This is a good sign that our aim is true, although it is always a thrill when the weather spirits do agree to a request, which reassures us that we are aligned, if only for one instance.
Some droughts are necessary to heal the land in ways we do not understand. It is needed to heal the ignorance of people. Through this ignorance, people live in disrespect for the natural world. Becomes of their lack of respect too many people abuse the waters that give them life. People have forgotten the sacredness of water and how to live with water. Therefore, the rains are withheld for a time - long enough to attract the attention needed for more people to yearn for harmonious relationships with water, with weather, and with Nature. The drought can be healing.
There are times when it is crucial to attempt to intervene in a particular weather's course - when the time and place are right.
Thich Nhat Hanh called for the aware human to work for the maintenance of balance and overall harmony in the world - as the old-time shamans did for their communities: "The individual and all of humanity are both a part of Nature and should be able to live in harmony with Nature. Nature can be cruel and disruptive and therefore, at times, needs to be controlled. To control is not to dominate or oppress but to harmonize and equilibrate. We must be deep friends with nature in order to control certain aspects of it. We should be able to prevent to a large degree the destruction that natural disasters cause, but we must do it in a way that preserves life and encourages harmony."
Whenever we weather-work there are choices to be made. We have to straightforwardly ask ourselves, why do we want to do this? Will it promote harmony and restore balance? Are we working to heal or are we working on behalf of our own personal desires, to serve our egos for any reason? You must come from the heart. Both the desire and the need must come from the wisdom of the heart. There may be a desire to work for rain, but no need for it. Any working like this will serve only ego. This can create trouble. To have desire without the need is empty of heart.
It is the shaman's responsibility to consult with the spirits not only to master specific techniques but also to learn how to work with the forces of Nature to bring about what is best for the most people, animals, plants, land, and ideally, the entire world. Weather spirits are not obliged to work for compassionate ends. Shamans think of power in the world as an amoral, neutral force, neither good nor bad. The power derives from how the power is directed and what is objectives are. The calling, for those practicing weather dancing, is to
align with these forces and spirits from their own place of heart and wisdom, in collaboration with the reliably compassionate helping spirits of the upper and lower worlds. This partnering can include trustworthy and compassionate spirit allies in the middle world as well. In this way, no harm comes from weather working.
Weather workers who are not aligned with harmonious forces can create substantial harm. Even though these people intend no harm, when they work from a place of carelessness or hubris - basically ignorance - their workings can go awry, causing great difficulty for others and lifelong regret. Then there are those who intentionally work to cause suffering for revenge, to satisfy a grudge, or to cause a loss of power or prestige to a competitor or enemy.
Warao rain shamans solicited and expected to receive foods, items, and favors as needed. This illustrates an ethically gray area in which the shaman is willing to invoke trouble and hardship in the interests of ensuring proper behavior among the villagers. The Warao shamans conjures up the frightful images of hunger and starvation to enforce selfless normative behavior.
Ted Owens could influence the weather, with numerous documented and notarized testimonials about Owens's ability. (See
The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, Mishlove, 1987). But he seemed to act with reckless disregard for the suffering produced in the wake of his demonstrations. It's possible that Owens' enfant terrible behavior (
unconventional or controversial behavior or ideas that shock, embarrass, or annoy others) represents the puerile (childish, trivial) manifestation of an
emerging evolutionary talent latent in all humanity. Sandra Ingerman, in Medicine for the Earth, writes about the ethical safeguard: There is no issue of personal gain in attempting to influence the weather.
The guiding principle is to ask for the highest good for all life. Keep a close watch for any ego inflation and choose ceremonial times at which it is difficult to determine the amount of influence your efforts exert upon the weather. it's important not to take credit if you are successful in working with weather. When we move into a place of self-importance, saying, "Look at what I did," we forget that we are just one small piece of the puzzle.
Healing with WeatherThe ancient Greek god of the medical arts, Aesculapius, who still serves today as spiritual muse to physicians and other health practitioners, was the son of the sun god Apollo. Aesculapius is associated with a healing atmosphere. The classical Greek work asklepios denoted a gentle radiance of the sky such as we experience in the air after a storm.
Life lived in harmony with the cycles of Nature is essential for good health and longevity, according to thousands of years of traditional Chinese medicine.
It's about balance and harmony, and it's weather's job to cleanse out the negativity and balance it with positive energy. When we hate the weather we are refusing the healing it brings and blocking the cleansing for ourselves as well as that part of the planet. We must accept the weather, welcome it, and know it is part of the bigger picture.
We get in the way of the healing that weather brings when we hate it, rather than reaching beyond our personal likes and dislikes to a place of respectful acceptance.
Carrying On
Throughout their lives our ancestors were deeply conscious of the life-sustaining workings of weather. The old ones knew their lives depended upon their ability to live with and relate to these powerful forces.
Remain wary of our culture's predilection for dilettantism regarding spiritual ways. It is all too easy to play at things and risk deluding ourselves into thinking we are living our practice. Furthermore, we have to show that we are truly willing to show up for the teachings and are worthy - strong enough to receive and carry the work, the medicine, the power. Ancestral teachings and traditional peoples today say that this requires suffering. But suffering is not a negative thing; it refers to forces that are pressing or pushing on us that we can feel very strongly. Suffering helps us become strong so we can withstand the winds and storms of life.
As weather dancers, the truly important calling is to love the weather and to relate to weather from a place of personal authenticity. No one else can prescribe exactly how to do this for any one of us. Essentially we're on our own, unless we come from and live within an indigenous, ancestral tradition of established ways of relating. We can, however, look to the core of shamanism about the underlying common ground shared by a variety of similar and dissimilar traditions that shows up over and over. The connection to Spirit and the Other World is a dialogue that goes two ways. We call on the spirits because we need their help, but they need something from us as well. They look at us as an extension of themselves. Shamanic practitioners understand that the need and desire for harmony between the worlds is mutual - yet it's not all up to the spirits. We have an important role to play in our willingness to work with the helping spirits. Intentional collaboration between humans the the spirit world is a necessity.
One has to reach beyond cultural prescriptions or bonds to bring in something new. To go against established tradition can be a formidable task, and even dangerous, a challenge the old shamans may have had to face from time to time. We are all supported and tempered by our circumstances. What counts most in shamanism, other than ethics, is the willingness to bring forth what is needed in the world now. And that may be something that is entirely new or something ancient that is renewed for today.
Those of us practicing shamanism within our culture have a doorway through which we can intentionally create favorable change for our world. Through appropriate acts of spontaneity, we can continue to follow the lead of the helping spirits so that the work and knowledge can evolve and stay fresh. Throughout, the presence and power of love makes it all worthwhile - and possible - as it weaves everything together.
