Mostly not through words. The Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer communicate through doing, showing, feeling, imagery and the felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer of becoming them, and the relationship is built through journeying with the Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer and grokkingGrokking. Understanding a being from the inside out (the word is Robert Heinlein’s): deep, embodied, experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Its two shamanic routes are shapeshifting and dieting. Read the full answer, research, time spent with them, and giving back. Humans have to relearn this because we have cut ourselves off from the living world.
Why do humans need to relearn how to communicate with the other Peoples? #
Because we cut ourselves off. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in constant relationship with the other Peoples and the land, and that relationship “was not an idea or a thought. Nor was it a belief, nor a concept”. It was felt, and “Shamanism gives us the ability to talk with animals and plants, and with the land itself.”1 Modern people have lost this: “We have cut ourselves off from all the love, healing and other help that is literally just there for the asking.”2
Relearning begins with humility. Humans are the youngest of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer: “This is not about hierarchy, but about family. It means that we are the children. We are the youngest and least wise of the Peoples, and like children, we need regular guidance and have a lot to learn.”3 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Do the Animal, Plant and Stone People speak in human words? #
Rarely, if at all. “Words are middle-world things. They have little place or use in the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and Lower-World (particularly not in the Lower-World).”4 When GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this do speak, it is briefly: “My Lower-World Guides rarely speak to me in journeys, and if they do, it is usually only single words or simple sentences. They may say things like ‘Pay close attention’, ‘Do this’, ‘Be this’, and so on.”5
Instead they teach by doing. Paul Francis’s own Power Animal, Panther, rarely teaches him by using spoken words. Words are limited, mostly left-brain and middle-world things. Rather, Panther teaches him by doing and by demonstrating.6 Because we are so used to words, it is easy to miss everything else. Journeying deeply in the Lower-World takes us mostly beyond words, because human language is largely a middle-world thing.
How do they communicate, then? #
Through sensation, imagery, metaphor and feeling. “Remember, in shamanic journeying we are trying to go beyond language, into a deeper reality that can only be experienced through sensations, imagery and metaphor.”7 The side of us that journeys works symbolically, through feeling, resonance and intuition. So the work is to pay attention to what the Guides do in a journey, and to understand its significance and its deeper layers of meaning afterwards.
This is also why shamanic work is not about getting messages. Shamanic healing “is categorically not about getting messages, advice or guidance, or predictions about the future. It is simply about doing the healing.”8 The learning comes from what the Peoples do and show, not from instructions.
What are grokking and shapeshifting, and why do they matter? #
They are the deepest ways of relating. “Grok” is a word from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and it has several senses: “to understand profoundly, with intuition and empathy”, “to communicate empathically with something”, to understand something “so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you”.9 It happens between people who know each other well, and “not just with other humans, either. It can happen between you and your cat, dog, horse and so on.”
One way of grokking is to become the being in a journey by shapeshifting. New students usually stay human, experiencing what it is like to be Tree, but “even better is to experience not what it is like to be Tree, but to be Tree.” The result “is not an intellectual understanding, but a deep felt-sense, a knowing from the inside out. Doing that brings with it a sense of connection and bonding with the thing that we have shapeshifted into.”10 See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
What role does the Power Animal play? #
It is the first and most important link. “Your Power Animal should be with you all of the time. There are no exceptions to this.” It is “your primary and most important link to the more-than-human world.”11 Relationships with other Animals, Plants and Stones are built from that foundation, with the Power Animal leading the journeys. The bond itself deepens in the same way as any other: by journeying regularly, asking for healing, and paying attention to what it does, as its apprentice (see What is a Power Animal?).
Is it different with Plant and Stone? #
Yes, because they are very different from us. Plants operate at a much slower pace than animals: “This is essential to grasp in trying to grok Plant.” We are like the aliens in a Star Trek episode who move too fast to be seen, “moving too fast most of the time to realise the sentience of plants.”12 To meet Plant, we need to slow right down.
The Stone People are more different still, conscious and alive “in a way that is very, very different to us. Way more different to us than Plant is. Off the scale different.”13
What gets in the way? #
Two things in particular. The first is projection, especially projecting Animal or human qualities onto beings that do not have them. Plants have no agendas and play no politics, and “It is crucial to understand this if you are to really grok Plants, and not project Animal qualities onto them.” The second is mistaking who we are talking to: many people “talk to elemental beings that live in and around plants in the middle-world, thinking that they are talking to the plant itself.”14
The second is middle-world bleed-through, everyday thoughts, images and human concerns leaking into a journey. Part of hollowing-out is “simply to watch for any middle-world imagery or things bleeding into your journeys, and be aware when it is happening.”15 Language matters too: describing a journey as “Next, Bear appeared”, rather than “a bear”, keeps the work with the Oversoul, because “Using ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘my’ reduces Animal to animal”.16 The opposite error is to treat what is met as only symbols. In the words of The Shamanic Worlds, “The beings we encounter in shamanic reality are not just symbols. They are real. Sentient. Independent.”
How does research help the relationship? #
It helps us understand what the Peoples are showing us. When a Plant, Animal or Stone appears in a journey, researching it afterwards is part of the process, because often it has appeared for a reason: “your guides are trying to teach you something new as part of your shamanic development (remember, you are an apprentice to them).”17 Knowledge also deepens grokking, since the more we know about someone or something, the more easily we can understand them from the inside. See What is the medicine bundle?
Does time in nature matter? #
Yes. Journeys begin from a real place in nature. The relationships formed in journeys are then lived out in the middle-world, with the physical animals, plants and land around us. “Generally, we find being in nature to be good for the Soul”, and most people find it easier to experience aliveness in mountains, boulders, waterfalls and the wind than in chairs and cookers.18 The published exercise ‘Everything Is Conscious and Sacred’ in Finding Your Deep Soul is a simple practice for gradually overcoming our separation from the living world, by allowing the possibility that what is around us is alive and noticing how easy or hard that is to accept.
Does the relationship ask anything of us? #
Yes. Like any real relationship, it goes both ways. “It is a nonsense to ask for help from animals and plants in journeys, and then ignore their plight in this physical world and do nothing to help.”19 Giving back, through gratitude and through practical help in the middle-world, is part of how the relationship is built (see What is right relationship and reciprocity?).
