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What is Appropriation in Shamanism with Mary Mueller Shutan

Appropriation is theft; it is to take something without the owner's permission. Cultural appropriation almost always involves members of the dominant culture taking from cultures of minority groups. This includes taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts and the unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, stories, cuisine, traditional medicine, rituals, and ceremonies. Spiritual appropriation involves assuming the right to work with helping sprits, deities, and religious symbols from another culture. This week host, Christina Pratt, and her guest, healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, explore appropriation in contemporary shamanism, why it is harmful, and unnecessary. Through education and awareness of history, respect, and the willingness to take to steps to create right relationship, contemporary practitioners can create depth and authenticity in their practices.

This week's guest:
Mary Mueller 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, November 24, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Releasing Fear, Letting Evil Go

Everyday fear-based thinking is fertile soil for the seeds of evil to germinate and take root. Chronic fear and anxiety nourish the roots of the current cultural collusion and disrupt our natural ability to heal, transform, and simply ask for help. Yet the constancy of the earth below and the radiant energies above never fails us. They are ever-present, supplying the Greater Source energy any human can use to release fear and purge the evil grows like weeks contaminating what should be the beautiful garden of imagination and vision of the mind. Earth rituals and blessings, from the every simple to the wonderfully complex draw Beauty into the foundation of any life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores shamanic ways to revision the concepts of good and evil and to move us body and soul into the next paradigm of the right use of power, creativity, and connection.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Fullmetal Plagiarist – UPDATED

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Comment Overflow: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8


Update: Spiritually Bypassing Citations (see below)
Update: How Many Cheneys on the Cooks Source Scale is This? (see below)
Update: Addicted to Plagiarism (see below)
Update: Plagiarizing Hay House (see below)
Update: Even Her Uterus is a Plagiarist (see below)


In this recent post on Teal Bosworth Scott Swan, I wrote about what I'm calling her "originality gap." I cited a number of examples of recycled material – numerous blog posts which rely on word for word lifts from her own previous articles. As stated, this is called self-plagiarism. I also touched on her propensity for relaying ideas, words, and images that strongly resemble work from other sources. I have noted a number of these parallels in the noncasts.

For instance, in the noncast entitled "The Bottomless Rabbit Hole," I referenced a rather striking similarity between her painting called Alchemy and art from the series Fullmetal Alchemist. Imagine my surprise at seeing that image, once again, heading her recent blog post.

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Shame and the Healing Heart

We feel natural shame when we fall short of our own inner standards, especially when others get hurt. It is a natural response of the heart to draw us inward to the source of that pain, to renew our own inner integrity, and to assess what we must do differently to rise to that inner integrity in the future. But when we have internalized standards from friends, family, culture, and religions that do not resonate with our heart's inner integrity and truth, we can feel a kind of toxic shame that debilitates or paralyzes us. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the "pool of true reflection" and other shamanic practices that assist us in discerning the difference between natural shame and toxic shame and how to use either to restore the inner integrity of your own heart.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Grief and the Healing Heart

Grief itself offers us great compassion. It comes and goes, tailoring itself to each heart that is experiencing loss and bereavement. It takes its time, never forcing us to do it all now, for if it did we would surely not survive. Grief has profound importance in the health of the heart. It shows us where we have made a heart connection, even when we didn't mean to. It shows us where we gave too much and where we regret not really showing up. To grieve fully is to grieve enough for the heart to cleanse, renew, and return to the serious business of intimacy with life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores grief as a part of the fall season, as a process that touches each of our lives, and as a ritual to cleanse and restore the greater capacity of the heart to love, connect, and make meaning in our lives.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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The "Mormon Satanist" Speaks – UPDATED

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

UPDATE: How did Doc not know?! See below for details.

For years we've been hearing about "Doc," the alleged, ritual abuser of Teal Bosworth Scott Swan. Her recollections of him infuse her work as a "spiritual catalyst" with no small element of horror. He has hovered over her public life like a specter, more myth than man. His deeds were monstrous, as recounted in numerous blog posts and interviews. In this post, she explains her violent history with her former mentor/captor – and that veterinarians have easy access to peyote, for some reason.

For the thirteen years that followed, I was systematically and progressively separated from my family, I was tortured physically and sexually in rituals, forced to participate in sacrifices, raped, forced to eat and drink out of dog bowls, forced to undergo 3 abortions (all fathered by my principal abuser himself who was in his sixties at the time).  He performed them himself with veterinary equipment, which is why I had such a hard time conceiving my son.  I was photographed for sadomasochistic pornography, sold for money to men for sex out of outdoor gas station bathrooms and motel rooms, kept in basements, kept in a plank covered hole in the ground in my abuser’s back yard, exposed to electro-shock programming, forced to undergo isolation torture, left overnight tied up in lava caves in southern Idaho.  I was forced to participate in bestiality and necrophilia, drugged by my abuser with Ketamine, Dormator, Xylazine, opiates, peyote and speed (all of which he had unlimited access to due to being a vet).  I was chased through the Idaho and Utah wilderness by my abuser who loved to “play” tracking games in which he would hunt me, and if I won, I got a reward, if I lost, I was either raped, or he would “count coup” by making cut marks on my rib cage.  I was used as a lure to other children that ended up being hurt or on occasion killed by the cult group.  And the list could go on.  But this experience is still something that seriously affects my life today. On one hand it is obvious that I would not be doing the job I am doing today around the world if it wasn’t for this experience.  On the other hand, a life that is spent in a constant state of recovery from the past is a difficult life.

He also killed her dog and threatened to kill her family members, as means of controlling her, and to keep her all to himself. He took some rather surprising risks, such as hogtying her with cables in a public parking lot, in full view of passers by. We're meant to believe that people didn't even notice an 11 year-old girl being bound and tied by a middle-aged man.

According to teal, Doc was both a "Blood Covenant" Mormon and a Satanist. He managed this paradoxical existence by having Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities). He was also, by her estimation, a "sadistic psychopath."  

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Abandonment, Presence, and the Spiral Path: Part Two

Abandonment by a caretaker breaks the heart of the child who is ignored, dismissed, or truly left behind. The desire to assuage this once-broken heart leads many adults into escapism, distraction, and unhealthy relationships. This desire can be refocused to lead us to the first step onto the spiral path. At its heart the spiral path brings us to understanding presence and our own inner embrace. This week, host and shaman, Christina Pratt, continues this exploration of how we can use shamanic skills to cultivate presence in body, mind, heart and soul. When we succeed in cultivating presence where there was only fear, we emerge from the spiral path able to intimately connect and joyfully engage with friends, family, lovers and our self.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Spiritual Catalyst or...

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

The magazine is out. What magazine, you ask? Why only the long-awaited publication from Ethics and the Modern Guru, about Teal Bosworth Scott Swan and containing an interview with her alleged Mormon Satanist abuser. It is available now in soft-cover on Amazon with a kindle edition to be released soon. It can also be purchased directly from CreateSpace here.

Addendum: The Kindle edition is now available. Details can be found here.

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Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Abandonment, Presence, and the Spiral Path

Fear of abandonment is often at the root of the poor quality decisions made by otherwise mentally healthy people. The cycle of abandonment, betrayal, and heartbreak is often learned in childhood and repeated in adulthood. For the adult with helping spirits and shamanic skills, abandonment is actually the first step on the spiral path that brings us to understanding presence in the way that only a heart, once-broken, can embrace. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to use shamanic skills to engage the spiral path, gain the allies that lie at wait in your discomfort, and discover the pleasure of pure presence at the heart of it all.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Why Shamanism Now? on Co-Creator Network
Questions? Comments? Call: 1-512-772-1938

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

Pottermore Has Fallen

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

For those who have not yet discovered the genius, creativity, and hours of fun to be had on the Pottermore site, you're too late. It's over. In place of a rich, atmospheric virtual adventure, is a slick but dull marketing vehicle, that has been compared by many to Buzzfeed. I would agree, except that I find Buzzfeed more entertaining.

Before this ghastly change, Pottermore was an experience to immerse yourself in. You got to be a student at Hogwarts, sorted into a house, given an account at Gringotts, and able to shop on Diagon Alley for school books and supplies. Users combed through "moments," multi-layered images with hidden potion ingredients, Bertie Botts beans, chocolate frog cards, and loose galleons to plump up their bank accounts. You had to work for things, including Rowling's new writings, access to which was hidden in the moments and sometimes required casting spells and working out puzzles to find. Like a student in a challenging school for wizards, you needed to use your wits and pool your talents. The new site is better suited to the dilettante who's never even read the books.

Pottermore did telegraph the coming changes, but not how drastic they would be. They did not make it clear that accounts would be flushed entirely with all the supplies collected, articles bookmarked, and potions made over years. They simply took everyone's hard work and devotion and threw it away. Their flippant answer to where it's all gone: "website heaven."

There were little indicators over time that the powers that be were losing interest in keeping up the site. The number of moments grew smaller as the books in question grew longer. They did away with comments. But, the first major sign of trouble came when they announced that the upcoming house cup would be the last and that Pottermore would be changing. I followed the unfolding discussion on their Facebook page.

When Bad People Teach Great Yoga

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

As discussed here, Bikram Choudhury has a long, documented history of being an awful person. He's sexist, lookist, bigoted, and almost unimaginably arrogant. He's also been accused of multiple sexual assaults and his accusers may finally get their day in court. Six women have come forward with claims of sexual assault, harassment, and rape.

Dana McClellan and Sarah Baughn have gone public with their experiences. Both were young and deeply enamored of Choudhury's yoga, swore by its effectiveness, and enrolled in teacher training. But, their fondness for their teacher evaporated when he started molesting them.

Baughn said she always discouraged Choudhury's advances, and reminded him that he had a wife and she had a boyfriend. But Baughn claims Choudhury would not stop his sexual pursuit, and would insist she brush his hair and massage him. “I was shocked, and I was sick,” she said of his unwanted advances. Baughn says Choudhury more than once touched her in a sexual way and even climbed on her, she said.

. . .

"You know, he told me that I was going to be like Mother Teresa, and I was going to influence the world if I only followed him,” McClellan said. But she claims the yoga guru raped her during a teacher training program in San Diego in 2010. McClellan claims Choudhury flattered and touched her and schemed to get her alone.

In her legal complaint, McClellan alleges Choudhury pulled down her pants and forced himself on top of her. She said she begged him to stop and tried to fight him off.

. . .

Baughn and McClelland said Choudhury ruined their lives, smothered their self-confidence and trust and left them with deep emotional scars.

. . .

And they said, poisoned their love and devotion to an ancient art of healing.