ACPEM 2009 SPRING CONFERENCE REVIEW
By LINDA RODGERS
I attended the conference for the first time, and just for the day, on Saturday. The first thing that struck me was the appropriateness of the venue a lovely setting, and with all the right vibes, values and feeling. The hall we met in was both beautiful and green, demonstrating holistic principles in the choice of sustainable building materials, heart-felt design and ecologically sound heating and insulation. Not to mention the wholesome and delicious lunch. It all sat very nicely with both Holistic Physio and the subtle sensing of Energy Medicine.
The next thing to warm my heart was the unequivocally friendly reception everyone was kind, welcoming and open hearted. I felt immediately drawn in and accepted.
Our mentor for the day
was wonderfully, simply, down to earth and present.
It was immediately clear how Shamanic work fits so well with the work that
we all do. The lovely sculpted metal dragonfly in the hall symbolized for us
the Shamanic work of opening to Spiritual perspectives. We learned that
Shamanism is about Soul Retrieval, is based in nature, is about connection
and about the way that we live, noticing messages, noticing signals, being a
part of all that is. Shamanism teaches that everything is alive, everything
is made of energy, all energy is conscious even light is conscious, has
awareness and there are different kinds of consciousness. We learned that
we can drop out of our everyday consciousness, and enter the consciousness
of different kinds of beings, we can communicate with different
consciousnesses and enter the deeper reality behind the reality of our
everyday lives. In Shamanic terms, we distinguish between the Tonal
the physical, normal, Newtonian world, where everything is explicit
and separate, and the Nagual the energetic, quantum world, the
implicate order, where everything is connected to everything. In the
Nagual there is no separation. It is the implicate reality behind and beyond
space, time separation and limitation so Shamanic practice takes us into
connection with everything and we learn to walk with one foot in each
between the worlds.
Shamanic practice is world-wide, and world-wide, all use drums and/or rattles at 4 beats per second. Ten minutes of Shamanic drumming creates the same theta waves as 2 hours of Transcendental meditation! Shamanic practice has no creeds but consistency in experience throughout the world. It is all about direct personal experience, and our reconnection to the whole.
The Nagual has three realms:
The Upper World which is nebulous, floaty, tinkly and light. Here we find Spirituality, and we make our own metaphors for what we meet God, Buddha, Ascended Beings, Shamans. We look here for Purpose, Spiritual Practice and Love. It is benign, safe.
The Middle World where we see the energy behind and between everything we see as separate in this world. It is where we can clearly perceive emotion the benign and the not-so benign. Here also are elves, fairies, devas.
The Lower World the realm of nature, our visceral connection. Here we make connection with animals, plants, rocks.
Why did we lose the connection?
Archaeological research shows that before around 4000 BC there is no evidence of either hierarchy or warfare. According to Steve Taylor, in his book The Fall there was a massive climate change around that time and the population was already too large to return to our old hunter-gatherer ways. We began to fight over our dwindling resources. this gave rise to a major shift in our psyche and compassion in short, we needed to sever our connection in order to allow the slaughter of others. This shift cut us off from the rest of the material world, and from the matrix of life. The legacy has been seen throughout history as the modulation of spiritual experience through a priest and the persecution of people seeking direct experience. We might think of it as the fall.
We are at the beginning of post fall times where we begin to see the shoots of recovery from our disconnection, which has been passed on through the generations for about 6000 years. Our work, then, is to assist in the reconnection before we destroy the planet.
Shamanism sees illness as a loss of power a loss of part of the Soul, as we become more and more unplugged from the matrix of consciousness. We lose parts of the Soul through trauma, through giving parts of ourselves to others, through shutting ourselves up and suppressing parts of ourselves in order to fit in.
Health, on the other hand, is being connected to the grid, to nature and to each other. Shamanic practice plugs us back in, reconnects us and recollects our Soul fragments.
We spent wonderful time journeying to the Lower World, to meet our Power Animals, and later to journey both for ourselves, and for each other. Many of us experienced a reconnection. We significant, meaningful experiences which left many of us feeling as though wed come into a way of being that feels right to us.
