If You Have Ever Had a Dream, You Already Know the Doorway
Some years ago, when my daughter was in the fourth grade, her teacher invited me to come teach shamanic journeying to the class. The children were wonderfully open. One little girl struggled at first, then found her penguin power animal, and you could see how empowering it was for all of them to make contact with their own spirit minds. But when I sat down to prepare, I looked at my course notes, all written for adults, and thought, how am I going to teach this to ten-year-olds? The answer turned out to be the key to explaining this work to anyone. I needed a single experience that every human being shares. That experience is dreaming.
Dreaming as the Universal Reference Point
Everyone has had a dream. And like the shamanic journey, a dream is nearly impossible to explain to someone who has never had one. Imagine describing it cold: I was home in Hawaii, then eating pizza in New York, then soaking in a hot spring in Japan, then standing in the Amazon, and then I woke up in my bed, and all of it took ten minutes. To someone with no experience of dreaming, that is nonsense. You cannot do that. But of course, in a dream, you can. That is exactly what happens in a shamanic journey. We move our awareness through the spirit world, outside the physical body, outside ordinary space and time.
When the body sleeps and the mind travels the spirit world without the constraints of the body, we call it dreaming. When the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming, that is a lucid dream. And when a dreamer can direct their actions within the dream, choosing to look at their hands, to fly, to visit a friend, we call that commanding the dreaming attention. The shaman learns to do that same thing in a fully waking state. That skill is the shamanic journey. The word dreamtime, used by Aboriginal peoples of Australia, names this conscious travel in the spirit world, free of the body. The ability to enter it belongs to every human being, and like arithmetic, it grows stronger with practice, though it uses a different part of us.
Being Proactive With Spirit
There is a practical gift in this. When we regularly and intentionally enter the dreamtime to seek healing and growth, the spirit world's urge to reach us at random, breaking into our day or pressing into our dreams, tends to quiet down. We are already asking. What message does spirit have for me? What do I need to know today for my growth and healing? When we come proactively, the messages arrive in a form we have chosen, rather than intruding.
Everyone Journeys, Not Everyone Is a Medicine Person
Traditionally, in a spiritually mature society, every member could enter the dreamtime, but not every member was a medicine person. In a clan of forty or sixty or eighty people, you cannot have forty shamans. Someone has to hunt, mind the children, build shelter, gather food. So the one, two, or three who showed the most natural gift were trained as the medicine people, while everyone else, hunters, mothers, gatherers, builders, still knew how to journey. That is what we are working to restore in modern life: a whole community reconnected to this awareness, living in greater harmony with itself and with Mother Earth.
What a Shaman Actually Is
A shaman is someone who uses the dreamtime to journey to non-physical worlds in an altered state of consciousness, and then returns to normal waking consciousness at will. That return is everything. Being able to leave is not enough. If a person is lost in an altered state and cannot come back, that is not shamanism. It could be a psychological disorder, drug use, or something else entirely, but it is not this. Shamanism is the empowered ability to move deliberately between states of perception, back and forth, moment to moment, by consciously changing our brainwave state.
This is where meditation comes in, and where modern life has somewhat lost the thread. Nearly every culture and religion has some form of meditation, seated, walking, standing, lying down, all of it meant to quiet the mind and prepare it for spiritual perception. Somewhere along the way, we made meditation an end in itself. It is wonderful for relaxation and stress relief, but there is something beyond that. Quieting the internal dialogue is not the destination. It is the signal that we are beginning to downshift toward the theta state, the doorway that lets us enter the dreamtime and travel the spirit world.
Learning to enter the dreamtime at will, and to return just as easily, is the first and most fundamental skill we build together in Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism.