Shamanic Path Of Presence
by Lomakayu
The shamanic path of presence is a spiritual practice that comes from the heart and goes to the living heart of every religion and tradition. whether its Buddhism or Native American spirituality, Sufism or an Aboriginal Walk About, orthodox mystic Christianity or Celtic Paganism. There can only be one presence with many names: God, Great Mystery, Yaweh, the absolute, “I am that I am”.
Korean Shaman
Most of us spend a great deal of our lives driven by unfulfilled needs that we have lost touch with. Some of them go back so far they are primordial, even if it is reflected in a past life or childhood. The point is, it’s still going on, right now. They are hungry ghosts within us. They pull us away from being present into mind realms of past and future. they separate us from the presence that it is right now.
So what is presence? And how does it differ from plain awareness? I’m just going to give you two types of awareness. This is not meant to be all-encompassing. You can have an awareness of the consequences of your actions. Or you can have an awareness of the inner and outer, ordinary and non-ordinary, psychic, emotional, physical, or what-have-you world. In this case, you might be aware of the wind blowing, your breathing, a bird flying above your head, your stomach gurgling, a tightness in your chest because you just lost money in the stock market, or you might be getting this hit about corn commodities, or that person standing in front of you is in pain and doesn’t even know it. Or upon entering a certain landscape that something textually has changed on a feeling tone level. So awareness is a particular way of using our mind to open us up to experience and is a necessary step toward presence. It gives us a small measure of presence.
Now the essence of presence is becoming. From awareness, we take a further step into becoming. Awareness is a choice and becoming is a stronger choice to let the world in, to invite it in. This is both the inner and outer world. If you have lost someone dear to you, you allow yourself to feel that loss. Notice the energy around it: it might be a complex of fear, anger, and sadness. The mind has a memory, you notice the feeling in your body and you become it. This means you lean into it and you breathe into it. You let it into your core like a shimmering breeze. You relax and you let yourself tremble, cry, or ache. It’s only energy. You become the great circle of being thorough in which this energy is moving at that moment.
This becoming is practiced with all things that enter our awareness and as we expand our field of awareness, we expand the depth of our becoming, the circle of our being. We become the world. And since we already are the world, we only reclaim what we already are anyway. We reinspire it into ourselves. We give it permission to live within us. We become a shimmering leaf, the flight of an eagle, a raging river, our hurt and anger, the trembling in our heart, the ant that we crush, people we dislike, noises that bother us. In the act of becoming, we are led into the pulsing heart of all things. We are led into a dynamic state of presence. So presence is a rootedness into the depths of your soul that roots you into the depths and the heights and the center of all things.
This is some of the teachings and foundation that help support the Soul Journey shamanic session. This is what I am doing when I am journeying for somebody. I am entering the person’s mythic landscape and becoming every detail of it right down to the feel of wet grass under my/their feet or a sky full of clouds. While at the same time becoming the dynamic gestalt of feeling images that are like pieces of the soul calling out for recognition. I recognize them and revivify them. I breathe them in and become them and let them speak through my body and voice. This not only sets them in motion regardless of what the person I am working on is doing but it also allows them to become their own lost world of soulfulness.
Awareness, becoming and presence permeate every aspect of the Work. It is the main component of what I am doing and what I am inviting people to do. All of these levels of becoming carries us into presence, the presence which equals soul-full-ness, which is spirit living fully through the body.
