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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Shamanism and the Mess of Love

Humans are messy. And love is one of the messiest bits of human life. So what do we really mean when we strive to rise to shamanic principles for living, like loving all life or mediating our power through the heart? What does love mean from the fundamental perspective of Oneness, not separation? How do we need to understand love to become truly new people crafting a new world story? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the ways shamanic practice can change our understanding of love from one of pop song, emotional drama or the intellectual labeling of distinct kinds into the current of life itself. True shamanic practice requires a level of intimacy in action that contemporary people find offensive to their sense of individuality and ego. Yet climbing over that offense and stepping into the fear it is hiding is necessary if we are ever to allow our soul to truly love.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

How to Manifest Your Calling: Myth Busting

Rebuilding a new life from the rubble of your old one is at once an exciting and a scary prospect. Whether you tore your life apart on purpose or your life self-destructed for you, you are still faced with the same challenge: How to create a new life of greater alignment, abundance, physical health, and soul-nourishing meaning? Nothing will send you down the rabbit hole of popular culture's myths about living the life you want than googling "how do I live my soul's purpose?" Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she looks at the most common myths about what it takes to create a life that is aligned with your soul's calling and shares the wisdom gained in two and a half decades assisting people in using their shamanic skills to be clever and courageous in creating a life of meaning a purpose that is better then they imagined.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Witchcraft" Blamed for Grisly Murder

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

This is how it starts, people. A grisly crime in some sleepy, provincial community, a proximal association with an astronomical event, police officers with notions, credulous reporting by so-called journalists, and it all adds up somehow to an occult ritual.

Numerous news outlets are breathlessly reporting a "Wiccan Ritual Killing" in Pensacola, FL. That Wiccans don't ritually sacrifice people and that nothing about this crime appears in any way ritualistic, notwithstanding.

This NBC article was floating down my Facebook timeline this morning.

A triple homicide in Florida is suspected to be a "Wiccan ritual killing" related to the "blue" moon, police said Tuesday.

The three victims, all from the same family, were found after a welfare check on Friday, July 31, said Escambia County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Andrew Hobbes.

"It appears that this might be connected to some type of Wiccan ritual killing and possibly tied to the blue moon," Hobbes told NBC News.

. . .

When asked how the evidence suggests these are ritualistic or Wiccan killings Sgt. Hobbes said, "The injuries to the victims, the positions of the bodies and also the person of interest right now is also a practitioner." 

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

The Spiritual Awakening Guide with Mary Shutan

There are many different types of spiritual awakenings, from kundalini rising to shamanic initiations and everything in between. This often misunderstood range of human experience is explored beautifully and thoroughly by spiritual healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, in her new book The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and The Conditioned Layers of Reality from Findhorn Press. This guide is unique in helping the reader to understand what experience they are in the middle of and how to shape the experience into a meaningful transformation. Drawing from her extensive training in multiple healing forms, Mary joins host, Christina Pratt, to share the different layers of going to sleep, the many ways we wake up, and how to free your awakening process to become the direct revelatory path it is meant to be.

This week's guest:
Mary Shutan

Mary Mueller Shutan is a Spiritual Healer who focuses on helping others work with their spiritual awakenings, spiritual callings, and psychic abilities. She is a painter and the author of The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and The Conditioned Layers of Reality from Findhorn Press. Her focus in all of her work is on the understanding that the spiritual is part of our daily lives, that we are meant to have emotions as well as physical bodies, and that we can have deep compassion and love for even the darkest aspects of ourselves.

Since she was a child Mary has been highly sensitive and creative, with the ability to see, sense, and interact with the spiritual realms. Over a ten year period she focused a tremendous amount energy into finding out how to work with her sensitivities and abilities. This led her through four years of Chinese Medicine school and certifications in Upledger-style and Biodynamic CranioSacral therapy, Asian Body Therapy, Massage Therapy, Zero Balancing, Reiki and Energy Work, Rootwork, and Meditation. Mary also has intensive education in different forms of bodywork, energy work, folk magic, occult practices, and shamanic/spiritual healing.

Mary is particularly known for her distance healing work. Her focus is on Dark or Middle World work- trauma and emotional release, spiritual clearing and protection, spirit release, past life and ancestral healing. She also teaches individuals who are called to this type of work to become safe, effective, and powerful practitioners.

Mary runs a personal blog (www.maryshutan.com/blog) that covers a variety of thought-provoking spiritual subjects and offers email based programs and individual consultations worldwide to people experiencing Kundalini, Spiritual Awakenings, Psychic Abilities, Shamanic callings, and other spiritual experiences to learn how to understand and navigate their experiences and abilities.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Rising Up When Life Falls Apart

How do you rise up when you have lost more than you thought you had to lose? How do you avoid the contemporary pitfalls of falling into a deeper pit of depression, grasping for anything to make it look better than it is, or recreating a shiny new version of the same life you had before? We have to find an ignored inner self who stands between the Lost One who doesn't know how to go forward and the Blissed One who just wants to stay in the flow. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to go forward and cultivate a truly new life from the rubble of our old one. By co-creating with spirit through our shamanic skills we can use the dynamics of physical life to ground our visions in reality and the patterns of our emotional life to expose false beliefs. Then the mind can balance the discipline and imagination necessary to rise up anew.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Contemporary Gender Issues and Shamanism

Gender is a charged issue in the contemporary world and will continue to be as long as we think we understand gender when we don't and believe that others "should" be like us when they are in reality unique. For many bringing shamanic skills to bear on the issue only confuses things. It is important to remember that from an understanding of reality based on Oneness like the understanding shamanism offers, gender is a non-issue. Gender variance is expected and accepted in ancient shamanic cultures without pause. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we can use shamanic skills to work with the four wisdoms to understand and align our own gender expression with our deepest truth and find the deep damage that is always at the root of our intolerance.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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The LHC and Another Mystery Particle

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Here's where I pretend to understand quantum physics well enough to relate some very important news. The Large Hadron Collider, which enabled the detection of the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle," has also revealed the pentaquark. It is effectively a new state of matter.

In 1964, two physicists - Murray Gell Mann and George Zweig - independently proposed the existence of the subatomic particles known as quarks.

They theorised that key properties of the particles known as baryons and mesons were best explained if they were in turn made up of other constituent particles. Zweig coined the term "aces" for the three new hypothesised building blocks, but it was Gell-Mann's name "quark" that stuck.

This model also allowed for other quark states, such as the pentaquark. This purely theoretical particle was composed of four quarks and an antiquark (the anti-matter equivalent of an ordinary quark).

I was just the other evening listening to an older interview with William Henry, in which he touched once again on the LHC. Henry has noted the similarity between the LHC and the 8 spoked wheel of Mayan prophesy.

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Change and Transformation — Using Shamanic Skills

Shamanic teacher and author, Christina is a skilled shamanic healer who weaves her authentic shamanic experience, extensive training, and experience with shamans from Ecuador, Nepal, Tibet, and Africa into her contemporary practice. She has been in practice for 20 years, specializing in soul retrieval healings, soul part integration, and ancestral healing. She is the director of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing in Portland, Oregon.

Monday, July 13th, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Cameron Clark On Not Being a Victim

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

This is a really great, in depth interview with Cameron Clark. Her months long experiment in living and working in Teal Bosworth Scott Swan's "intentional community" has been previously discussed in a lengthy interview posted here and in the Cameline video posted here. This discussion brings much needed clarification of some of the finer points of her experience and perspective.

Cameron endured a great deal in a relatively short period of time, including not so subtle pressure to kill herself. Despite all this, she says that she has never considered herself to be a victim. She feels she made choices and learned valuable lessons. So, I thought it was awfully funny that the Ask Teal episode posted the following weekend dealt directly with victimhood. That whole idea of not seeing yourself as a victim? She's against it.

For a true believer in the "law of attraction" to stand against the idea of personal responsibility requires some rather profound convolutions of thought.

The unhealthy Ego is concerned with power. Not the good kind of power (like empowerment), the kind of power that needs something to be less powerful in order to feel powerful by comparison. And the ego can gain this power by being the good guy. People who are trapped in victimhood mentality are after the kind of power that belongs to someone being righteous or good. But the ego that is concerned with being righteous or good needs someone to be the bad guy to exist. Similarly, an ego can gain power by being the victor. People who are trapped in victor mentality are after the kind of power that belongs to someone superior and strong. This kind of person cannot ever admit to vulnerability. This kind of ego may be unwilling to admit to any negative emotions at all. Or it may not have a real problem with expressing anger or negative emotional states that it perceives as strong, while refusing to admit to negative emotional states that it perceives as weak. This ego crumbles at the thoughts of admitting to fear and especially hurt. Admitting that their feelings got hurt is like a death sentence. This ego thinks that by denying vulnerability, especially any notion of victimhood, it is a victor. It was won.

See? Feeling like a victim is bad, except when it's good.

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Psychopomp-to Conduct the Souls of the Dead with David Kowalewski

Not all who die leave the realm of the living easily and these souls need help. From the beginning of people the shaman has served this role, the "psychopomp," and transported the souls of the dead home, assuring their safe and complete journey through the death process. Each traditional culture defines the psychopomp's work in its own way, influenced by that culture's beliefs about the soul, death, and the process of dying. However shamanic people hold the universal belief that the souls of the dead need to move on to the Land of the Dead or they become a source of stress, physical illness, and mental distress for the living. As our world continues to amplify the conditions that cause a soul to need help crossing-violent death, unlived lives, despair, addiction, and spiritual ignorance-those who are able to escort the soul are needed even more. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and her guest, David Kowalewski, Ph.D., psychopomp, university professor, shamanic healer, speaker and author.

This week's guest:
David Kowalewski

Dr. David Kowalewski is a Professor Emeritus, teacher, author and shamanic healer. He has been trained by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and indigenous shamans from many traditions, including Native-American, Celtic, Tibetan, West African, Huichol, Incan, and Mayan.

He has written articles and books on his shamanic work. His work has been featured in Journal of Contemporary Shamanism, Journal of Shamanic Practice, Sacred Hoop, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Review of Religious Research, Journal for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, Journal of Church and State, and elsewhere

He also speaks publicly on shamanic healing, Deep Ecology, Plant-Spirit Medicine, Developing Your Paranormal, Mystical Wildlife Tracking, and Discovering Your Destiny, based on his university courses, conference papers, and publications in ecology, religion, psychology, and education.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Sea Change

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

When I was a kid, I got into an argument with some of the grown-ups at my church. (Yes, I have always been as I am today.) I had been at a youth service where we had sung fun, kid-friendly songs instead of hymns. One of the songs was "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love." These are the lyrics.

We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit
We are one in the Lord

And we pray that all unity may one day be restored
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love

We will work with each other
We will work side by side
We will work with each other
We will work side by side

And we'll guard each man's dignity and save each man's pride
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yeah, they'll know we are Christians by our love, our love
By our love, our love, by our love, our love, by our love, our love
By our love, by our love, by our love, our love
by our love