How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss?

What is cultural Power-loss? #

Power-loss on the scale of a whole society. “From a shamanic point of view, we are suffering from severe and chronic power-loss, at a scale unprecedented in human history.” Our culture does not try to heal it: “unlike shamanic cultures that would wish to heal this, modern civilisation is actually based upon keeping us full of holes”, so that we can be sold things that promise to fill them.¹ Soul loss is endemic too: read its symptoms and “you could almost be reading a description of Western culture.” See What is Power-loss?

How are personal and collective wounds connected? #

Each creates the other. The wound to our relationship with the Mother “happens not just on an individual level, but on a collective level, because our personal wounds feed into and create the collective.” Distorted stories about Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this then shape how children are raised, and “In this way, the personal and the collective become reflections of each other”.² In some ways our entire modern culture, spanning the last 6,000 years of traumatic human history, is collectively experiencing post-traumatic stress.

Why does our built world add to the disconnection? #

Because human-made things are cut off from Mother Earth. People generally experience nature as alive, “(which, in turn, helps us to feel more alive), and human-made environments as being much less so.” Made things have stories but no Lower-World Soul: “They are not soul-less, but they are Soul-less. Natural things, however, the things created by Mother Earth, are full of Soul.”³

How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world? #

Through relationship with the other Peoples, above all through shamanic practice. Time in nature helps too, since we generally experience nature as alive. “Anything that helps us to reconnect helps in healing power-loss”, starting with finding a 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 and connecting with the real Lower-World.⁴ Being in the Lower-World heals the wound of separation itself: “The Lower-World heals this wound, by connecting us back to the web of life.”⁵ And because most of us live in towns and tamed countryside, Therapeutic Shamanism also looks for practices that help us “find the wild in the tamed.”⁶ See How is Power-loss healed and what is Power retrieval?

How does gratitude help? #

It overcomes the feeling of being cut off. It can be offered to anything at all. Expressing gratitude to people, animals, plants, the weather, anything at all, is “a powerful way of overcoming the sense of disconnection and isolation that characterises the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, and helps us to feel connected to the web of life and bounty around us.”⁷ Gratitude also helps with the despair that waking up to the state of the world can bring: “Gratitude practices are a remarkably quick and effective antidote to despair.”⁸

What do we owe the other Peoples in return? #

Real help in the everyday world. “We simply cannot ask an OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this like Panther or Wolf to teach us and heal us, and then ignore the plight of physical panthers and wolves in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer.” If we ask for help from the Animal, Plant and Stone People in the Lower-World, then in turn we need to help them in the middle-world too, and these days they need our help.⁹ See What is right relationship and reciprocity?

Is outer change, such as activism and law, enough? #

It is vital, but not enough on its own. “Outer work alone, such as political and social activism and making changes in our personal lifestyles, will not be enough”, because “you cannot have a healthy society if it is full of sick people. A healthy society is made up of healthy individuals. The outer work needs to go hand-in-hand with inner work.”¹⁰ “Empathy must come from within.”¹¹

What about the despair? #

Face it, feel it, and turn it into action. In the spirit of the eco-therapist Joanna Macy: “we first need to stand and face things as they really are, and feel our feelings about the situation we find ourselves in. We need to be the shamans, the people in the tribe who are prepared to see the things that most other people prefer to avoid.”¹² Withdrawing into private spirituality is not the answer: “Withdrawing from the world is simply not the way of the shaman.”¹³ See How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?

What kinds of wounds does shamanism address? #

Above all, soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer and Power-loss, and what gets in through the holes they leave. These include intrusions such as unhelpful thought-formsThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this, unhealthy entanglementsEntanglement. An unhealthy energetic tie hooking us into another person, a role, an object or a family story; released by disentanglement. More about this, and possession, including by large ideas: thought-forms that “possess whole communities or sections of society”, such as “religions, political ideologies, nationalism, conspiracy theories, and so on.”¹⁴ It also heals the deep loneliness of separation, and wounds from before we had words. It is not a cure for everything, and it works alongside psychotherapy and medicine. See What is shamanic healing?

Is shamanism mainly for personal healing? #

No. It is a path of service. “Shamanism is a path of spirituality through being of service in, and to, the world”, and “the role of the shaman is to be in the world and to hold the sacred balance between the beings that live within it; to actively be the intermediary and advocate.”¹⁵ Personal healing still matters, because it serves the whole: “the more people there are who heal their inner wounds, the more this heals the collective wound. Far from it being self-indulgent, we have a responsibility to the world around us to heal ourselves.”¹⁶ Finding your Soul “isn’t just about you; it’s about stepping into your place within the world and being of service to it”.