Shamanic work suits many dyslexic and dyspraxic people well, because very little of it depends on reading, writing or physical coordination. Journeys are largely beyond words, they come through any of the senses, and they are done sitting or lying still, usually to a recorded drum. Therapeutic Shamanism has no separate teaching on dyslexia or dyspraxia, but its view of the Wild Mind questions whether difference should be seen as disorder at all.
What are dyslexia and dyspraxia? #
Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that mainly affects reading, writing and working with numbers; the NHS describes it as a condition in which the brain “works differently to most people”. Dyspraxia, also called developmental co-ordination disorder or DCD, is a condition affecting physical co-ordination, which can make things like handwriting, sport and some everyday tasks harder. Neither affects how intelligent a person is.1
Both are experienced very differently by different people, and the person themselves knows their own experience best. So this answer describes what shamanic work asks of people and what it offers, not what being dyslexic or dyspraxic will mean for anyone in particular. See What is neurodiversity, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it?
Does shamanic work depend on reading and writing? #
Very little. Journeys themselves are about right-brain, largely non-verbal knowledge. Human language is largely a 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 thing, so a journey deep in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is mostly beyond words, and the 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 communicate by showing, through imagery, metaphor and sensation, not by talking.2 Long, wordy messages in a journey are a sign that the middle-world has crept in. The skill being learnt is paying attention to what the Guides do, and that has nothing to do with spelling.
There is a place for words afterwards, when a journey is written down and things that appeared in it are looked up. But the books themselves already use the spoken word. An exercise can be read aloud, recorded on a phone and played back with eyes closed, and in a journey done for someone else, the journey can be told aloud straight afterwards whilst the other person writes it down.3 All three books are also available as audiobooks, and the courses are taught through recordings, with captions and transcripts, at each person’s own pace. See Are the books available as e-books and audiobooks? and Will the courses suit me if I am neurodivergent?
Does journeying need physical coordination? #
No. A journey is usually done sitting or lying down, with the eyes covered, to a recording of a drum played through speakers or headphones.4 Nothing has to be danced, drummed or drawn well, and the drum is only one way into the shamanic state of consciousness, a means to an end.5 Being “artistic” is not needed either. Artistic people sometimes take to journeying more quickly, but anyone can imagine, and so anyone can journey. The aim is simply to return the two ways of attending to the world to their natural balance.6 See What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying?
Do journeys have to be seen? #
No. Many people who struggle at first are expecting journeys to be visual, and are in fact journeying without realising it, because they are dismissing what comes through the other senses. A journey can come as sound, smell, taste, touch, feeling or a simple sense of knowing what is there. Sight is the sense that most keeps us rooted in ordinary reality, which is why journeying has traditionally been done in the dark, and in some cultures blind people were thought to be better at it.7 Whatever a person’s way of taking in the world, there is a way into a journey through it. See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
Is dyslexia a disorder, or a difference? #
That depends partly on the culture doing the judging. Writing, as the researchers Helen Taylor and Martin Vestergaard point out, is “a very recent invention”, around 5,350 years old.8 It appeared in the first city-states, within the period Therapeutic Shamanism calls 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. For nearly all of human history, people lived as hunter-gatherers without reading or writing at all, and a difficulty with print could not have shown up as a difficulty. Modern childhood, by contrast, means a dozen years or more in school being told to sit down and shut up.9
Taylor and Vestergaard go further. They report evidence that people with dyslexia lean towards exploring the unknown, and propose that this may be a specialisation, part of a system in which people with different but complementary strengths search for knowledge together, which they say “challenges the view that individuals with DD have a disorder” (DD meaning developmental dyslexia).10 Others are more cautious about claims of hidden strengths. A meta-analysis by Florina Erbeli and colleagues found that people with dyslexia, as a group, are no more creative than people without it.11
Therapeutic Shamanism’s view of the Wild Mind asks a similar question from its own direction. Perhaps the word ‘neurodiverse’ still treats difference as illness, and still takes the neurotypical as normal, when what passes for normal may itself be a product of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, or neurodomesticated. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind? and Is neurotypical the same as the Domesticated Mind?
Is shamanic work a treatment for dyslexia or dyspraxia? #
No. Shamanic work does not offer to change anyone’s neurology, and it is not a treatment for either. What it offers is a practice that does not depend on the skills these differences make harder, a long view of human history in which those skills are newcomers, and relationship with the Animal, Plant and Stone People, none of whom read. It can sit alongside whatever other help and support a person finds useful. See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?
