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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Rescuing the Heart at the End of the World - Part Two

With all of our Body, Mind, and Spirit practices we still rarely address the heart or our emotions. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or pathologize when intense. We are often taught to bypass our emotions rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be. With so few references for what a healthy adult relationship with emotions looks like, it can be hard to even imagine what a mature life affirming emotional response might feel like. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt to explore "emotional maturity" and expressing our emotions in service of life and the more just world we are striving to create. Join us as they explore how to discern between appropriate emotional intensity or indulgence, true peace or bypassing, and how to liberate and honor our authentic emotional response.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Rescuing the Heart at the End of the World

Today there are a plethora of movements, traditions, and modalities that promise to help us tend our Mind, Body, and Spirit. However, rarely is the heart or our emotions addressed. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or transcend. And any experience of emotional intensity is pathologized. Rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be, many modalities engage tools of the body, mind, and spirit to bypass our emotional experience and the way of true love. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt on the importance of reclaiming our authentic emotional response in times of transition. Join us as they explore this key component of accessing the sacred wisdom of our heart where our mind, body, and spirit can come into true harmony.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Esoterica

Will a Church Get Away With Making a Teen Listen to Recording of Her Rape?

The victim was 15 years old when she says church elders called her into a room with her mother and stepfather, sat her down, and made her listen to a recording of her own rape. A lifelong Jehovah’s Witness, the girl—who we’ll call Anna—says she was sexually assaulted by an older church member on multiple occasions. But when the church learned of it, they decided to investigate not her assailant, but her—for the crime of having sex outside of marriage. And now it’s down to the Utah Supreme Court to decide if they should get away with it.

The court cases rests on the question of eccleiastical abstention, or whether the court can intervene in matters of religion. The Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses of Roy, Utah, claims it was engaging in regular religious practice when it forced the teenager to relive to her own rape. And so far, the courts have agreed. But lawyers for the woman, now in her late 20s, argue that their conduct is so “utterly intolerable” that it transcends this rule.

. . .

In court filings, the church disputes Anna’s factual allegations and denies mistreating her “in any manner,” while at the same time describing her interrogation as a “common and accepted religious practice.” Anna, it claims, “voluntarily associated with the religious organization and chose to participate in the judicial tribunal with her parents”—something that, they argue, “would not ordinarily cause severe unmanageable mental distress.” At a hearing last week, a Supreme Court justice described the practice as akin to “emotional waterboarding.” A lawyer for the church said she would draw the line at anything physical.

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Creating Sacred Life: Shamanic Practice 6

The sacred is inherent in all things. Relationship with the sacred nourishes our deeper self, rekindles our passion for our soul's purpose, and opens the way for love to enter our lives. Yet we have largely lost the art of being in relationship with the sacred. In everyday life we starve our deeper self of the energies that nourish it, indulge our stories of isolation and separation and justify depression or aggression as appropriate responses to life and its teachings. The sacred, immune to our folly, is patient and present, waiting for us to remember how to tend our relationship with it. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares the basics of shamanic practice that retrain our intention, perception, and imagination to engage with the sacred as a natural course of our everyday lives.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, November 10, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Enliven Your Spirit: Shamanic Practice 5

Sacrifice enlivens our spirit. It opens the way for miracles or the impossible or that which we truly desire to come into our lives. To enliven the spirit in our shamanic practice we must learn to step out of our comfort zones where we feel the simple exhilaration of surfing the surface wave and step into the deep soul satisfying discomfort of becoming people who will make a significant spiritual contribution to life on earth. Author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman, joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to explore how we move our shamanic practices from serving our own visions to surrendering intimately to spirit and serving our part in the larger vision. Join us this week and discover who we need to become to engage in the transformations through love that are the needed medicines for our time.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, November 3, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Centering Love as a Place of Power

At the core of living well is the ability to center love as a place of power in any circumstance. This is equally, and in some circumstances differently, true individually and collectively. To center love empowers us to remember what we care about, what has value, and what is meaningful for us to commit time, energy, and resources toward. It reminds us why we should bother. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares practices and explores the dynamics involved stepping into love as an act of revolution, liberation, and creation of a new world. This week look at how the Cycle Teachings help us to meet the waves of stress that keep rolling in from climate change, pandemic demands on space and time, social strain of living with life narratives that refuse to ground in reality, and the heartbreak of not knowing how to show up as parents for all of the ways this is affecting our children.

Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

The Shaman's Mind: Shamanic Practice 4

We interpret the world and our experience through our mind. Ancient peoples understood this and were sophisticated enough to leave nothing to chance. The ancient mind was trained first by stories and then by ceremonial engagement with the invisible world and education in a cosmology that was as functional as it was accurate. The ancient mind was prepared to become the shaman mind and take on the challenge of interpreting altered states of consciousness. "The contemporary mind is weak and vulnerable to seductions," explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, "where the story telling is left to the media and ceremony runs from vapid and self centered to empty and self destructive, there is no coherent cosmology to illuminate the way. The mind is utterly unprepared to accurately interpret life itself much less enter altered states reliably. Join us this week as we explore the shaping of the shaman's mind.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Creating Shamanic Tools with Evelyn Rysdyk

There is nothing quite as powerful as making your own power objects and shamanic tools. Artist and shamanic teacher, Evelyn C. Rysdyk, joins us this week to share her new book, A Spirit Walker's Guide to Shamanic Tools. This is a beautifully illustrated guide to creating, decorating, consecrating, and using sacred tools in ritual and healing. Evelyn explores everything from how to use little known tools like shamanic mirror and wind staffs to responsible ways of obtaining your materials to the sacred process for creating your own drums, rattles, bundles and staffs. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she and her guest explore part three of the Shamanic Practice Series: creating shamanic tools.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Esoterica

There’s too much gold in the universe. No one knows where it came from.

Something is raining gold across the universe. But no one knows what it is.

Here's the problem: Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries. To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus. That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction. But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either. So where's the gold coming from? There are some other possibilities, including supernovas so intense they turn a star inside out. Unfortunately, even such strange phenomena can't explain how blinged out the local universe is, the new study finds.

Neutron star collisions build gold by briefly smashing protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei, then spewing those newly-bound heavy nuclei across space. Regular supernovas can't explain the universe's gold because stars massive enough to fuse gold before they die -- which are rare -- become black holes when they explode, said Chiaki Kobayashi, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and lead author of the new study. And, in a regular supernova, that gold gets sucked into the black hole.

So what about those odder, star-flipping supernovas? This type of star explosion, a so-called magneto-rotational supernova, is "a very rare supernova, spinning very fast," Kobayashi told Live Science.

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Igniting the Ecstatic Heart: Shamanic Practice 2

A spiritual life is nothing but dogma and deception without the heart's active presence. The heart's active presence will soon wander, bored to death with you, if you refuse to engage regularly and intimately with ecstasy. Ecstasy, the falling into the fire naked losing yourself to One surrender ecstasy that comes in union with your helping spirits is one of the great gifts of spiritual life in a shamanic practice. So then why are our shamanic practices so stodgy, precious, (frankly) boring, and ineffective in creating large-scale life change? Join us for part two of a series on creating an effective shamanic practice in your day-to-day life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the necessary terror in igniting the ecstatic heart and how to keep the fire of true love burning at the core of your shamanic practice while you passionately engage the world.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Around the Web, Around the World

"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Creating a Foundation for Wellness: Shamanic Practice 1

Knowing where you stand in life-and how to truly stand there-is essential if you want to live a spiritual or enlightened life. This is one of the many paradoxes of living life where the real energy that drives things exists under what is apparent. Those who cannot ground their visions will not live them. Those who invest too much in the physical world and cannot let their visions soar will never know why they are here. Join us for part one of a series on creating a shamanic practice in your day-to-day life. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores the cornerstones needed to create a foundation that will not crumble under the weight of the real life challenges life throws at you or collapse when you need it the most because your denial, like so many termites, has eaten through the beliefs you think support you.

**This show last aired February 2018.**

Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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