The Hollow Bone
A Shaman’s Role in Society
by Scott Silverston
A Shaman is a healer who traditionally held a specific and revered role in their community. Not only did the Shaman act as a Medicine Person, helping to heal others, the Shaman was responsible for maintaining collaborative relationships with helping spiritual forces to keep their community in right balance with the Web of Life.
A Shaman is tasked with maintaining balance within themselves, within their community and between their community and the Web of Life. One of the most important things to understand as you pursue shamanic studies is ethics and right relationship. Do not pursue power, pursue right alignment and allow the power to arise naturally from being in right alignment with Creator and Mother Earth.
There are many practitioners out there, both indigenous and western, who work with parasitic forces, they advertise spells and pursue power over alignment. Just because someone is skilled does not mean that they are ethical or benevolent. Look online or on social media at the huge number of people offering spells of all sorts: love spells, money spells, vengeance spells, etc. All that type of stuff is bad medicine, very bad medicine. Anything that interferes with another person’s free will or spiritual sovereignty is bad medicine. If you want to call in wealth on a spiritual level, ask how you can contribute by offering something meaningful to the world and ask that it be seen by the right people who will value and pay for your product or service.
It is vitally important that we keep our focus on life affirming purposes, working in right relationship and bringing agency to benevolent spiritual forces. Shamans form collaborative relationships with benevolent spirits to help maintain health and balance within themselves, their community, and the web of life.
The traditional job of a Shaman is to help their clan stay in right alignment with the forces of nature and spirit. The skill and efficacy of the Shaman was an essential ingredient to the well-being and survival of their clan. Sometimes the Shaman was asked to determine things like “What's going to be a safe winter camp for my people?” or “Where can we find the buffalo herd so we can find food?” Many primitive cultures were migratory; they lived close to the earth and moved with the flow of the seasons and the flow of the resources they needed to survive. They were following the herds, following the natural flow and rhythm of nature. The Shaman's job was very important.
The Shaman had to be in tune with the spiritual forces that would inform the clan of things that they needed for their survival, things which could not be fully perceived by the logical mind or physical observation. They opened their perception to spiritual awareness that allowed them to receive the additional information they needed. It was not just the Shaman who did this, it was also every hunter, every gatherer, and every member of the clan group who understood that humans have two ways of perceiving the world around us. Like having access to both AM and FM radio, we can attune our awareness to both logical evaluation and spiritual awareness and use the information gathered from both sources to inform us. But the Shaman was a specialist, often chosen early in life because they demonstrated an aptitude for attuning to the Spirit World. The Shaman is called on by other members of the community to assist on issues of imbalance or where the path forward is not clear to use their unique gifts and bring forth their medcine for the benefit of the clan.
Shaman live a special lifestyle because they need to keep the distractions of day-to-day life to a minimum. In traditional cultures, the specifics of that lifestyle would vary by culture. In modern times we have to account for more external distractions and there is more variability, but the objective remains the same; to ensure that the Shaman’s connection to the Spirit World remains clear and undistorted and is supoprted by their lifestyle choices.
When starting a ceremony or healing session, a Shaman will often sing, dance and drum to help silence the thinking mind. Shaman need to maintain a level of inner silence so the messages from Spirit can come through clearly. We call this “Stopping the Internal Dialogue”. Once the Internal Dialogue is stopped, the Shaman becomes the Hollow Bone. The Hollow Bone means that the Shaman acts as a bridge, an intermediary, between the worlds of flesh and spirit. The Hollow Bone is a conduit to the Spirit World.
As Shaman we make the connection to benevolent helping spirits, release the noise of our thinking minds such as bias, self-importance, our “to do list”, and allow the communication and healing to flow. We give agency for benevolent and healing spiritual forces to act in the physical world. These spiritual forces 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 make the bridge and give physical agency to their intentions.
A true Shaman is humble. They would never say something like “I am the healer and I know what’s right for you” or “I am closer to God than you and therefore you must use me as your intermediary to God”. No, not at all! A true Shaman is humble because they recognize that the real work is being done by the Benevolent Spirits. The Shaman holds the doorway open, but they don’t use their own energy to do the healing. The Shaman holds the doorway open for the benevolent spiritual forces to act.
Another important role of the Shaman is to create a safe environment, to hold space for their clients to heal. To cultivate faith within the client that they have the ability to heal, that they can and will heal. But when the actual healing happens, the Shaman steps back and becomes the Hollow Bone, the facilitator of forces greater than ourselves. It is a humbling experience to hold the door open in that way, to witness the life force energy and the spiritual energy flow through you and help the person who is seeking your help.
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