What It Truly Means to Be a Shaman — a Humble Hollow Bone Through Which the Healing Flows.
A shaman is a healer who traditionally held a specific and revered place in their community. The shaman was not only a medicine person who helped heal others; the shaman also maintained collaborative relationships with helping spiritual forces, keeping the whole community in right balance with the Web of Life.
The shaman's task, in other words, is to hold balance on three levels at once: within themselves, within their community, and between that community and the living world. And the foundation of all of it — the very first thing to understand as you begin shamanic study — is ethics and right relationship.
Pursue Alignment, Not Power
Here is the heart of shamanic ethics: do not pursue power. Pursue right alignment, and allow power to arise naturally from being in right relationship with Creator and Mother Earth.
There are practitioners — indigenous and Western alike — who do the opposite. They work with parasitic forces, advertise spells, and chase power over alignment. Skill is not the same as integrity: just because someone is powerful does not mean they are ethical or benevolent. Look at how many people online offer love spells, money spells, vengeance spells. That is all bad medicine — very bad medicine. Anything that interferes with another person's free will or spiritual sovereignty is bad medicine, full stop. If you wish to call in abundance on a spiritual level, don't try to bend the world to your will; ask instead how you can offer something meaningful, and ask that your gift be seen by the people who will value it. Keep your focus on life-affirming purposes, on right relationship, and on giving agency to benevolent spiritual forces.
The Shaman's Role in the Clan
Traditionally, the shaman's job was to help the clan stay in right alignment with the forces of nature and spirit — and that skill was essential to the community's very survival. The shaman might be asked, "Where will we find a safe winter camp?" or "Where are the buffalo, so we can eat?" Many traditional cultures were migratory, living close to the earth and moving with the seasons and the herds, following the natural rhythms of the living world. In that life, the shaman's work was a matter of survival.
To answer such questions, the shaman had to attune to spiritual forces that could reveal what the logical mind and the physical senses could not. And it wasn't only the shaman: every hunter, every gatherer, every member of the clan understood that we have two ways of perceiving the world. Like having both AM and FM on a radio, we can tune to logical evaluation and to spiritual awareness, and let both inform us. The shaman was simply the specialist — often recognized early in life for a natural aptitude for attuning to the Spirit World — called upon when there was imbalance, or when the path ahead was unclear.
Becoming the Hollow Bone
Because of this, a shaman tends to live in a way that keeps the distractions of daily life to a minimum. The specifics vary by culture and, in modern life, by circumstance — there are far more distractions to account for now — but the purpose is unchanged: to keep the shaman's connection to the Spirit World clear and undistorted.
When beginning a ceremony or a healing, a shaman will often sing, dance, and drum to quiet the thinking mind. We call this stopping the internal dialogue. Once the inner noise falls silent, the shaman becomes the Hollow Bone — a bridge, an intermediary, a clear conduit between the worlds of flesh and spirit. We make our connection to the benevolent helping spirits, release the static of the thinking mind — its bias, its self-importance, its endless to-do list — and allow the healing to flow through. We give the benevolent forces a way to act in the physical world. They want to help; they are protectors of Mother Earth and the Web of Life, of which we humans are a part. But they need our collaboration to build the bridge.
The Humility of the Healer
A true shaman is humble. They would never say, "I am the healer, and I know what's right for you," or "I am closer to God than you, so you must come through me." Never. A true shaman is humble precisely because they know the real work is being done by the benevolent spirits. The shaman holds the doorway open — but does not heal with their own power.
Part of the shaman's role is to create a safe space and to hold it: to cultivate in the person the faith that they truly can heal. And then, when the healing itself begins, the shaman steps back and becomes the Hollow Bone — a facilitator of forces far greater than ourselves. It is a deeply humbling thing to hold the door open like that, and to witness the life force and the spirit flow through you to help the one who came seeking. That, in the end, is what it means to be a shaman.
If you'd like to understand more about what a shaman is — or to learn, step by step, how to quiet the mind and open that doorway yourself — that is exactly what we teach, beginning in Level 1.
— Scott Silverston