Animism treats the grief and despair that come with waking up to what is happening to the living world as natural, to be faced and felt, not avoided or explained away, and then turned into empowerment and action. Activism is part of the path because shamanism is a path of service, and we cannot ask 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 for help in our journeys and then ignore their plight 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.
Is despair about the state of the world a problem? #
Not in itself. It comes with waking up. “Waking up to the true nature of the middle-world can be a harrowing experience”, and the more we regain our empathy and our sense of interconnectedness, the more we open ourselves to feeling the pain in the world. That is why true shamanism is not spiritual bypassing or emotional numbing: “It means seeing things as they are, and feeling things as they are.” The Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa described this as the path of the spiritual warrior, whose way is to be in the world, not to avoid it, and that means learning how to live with a broken heart.1
There is also a wider view. “Sometimes it is easy to look around at modern humans, and despair.” Yet given the society we live in, it is remarkable how much people still strive to look after each other and the world around them. Our true nature is to be cooperative and compassionate, and “Like a sickly plant given healthier conditions in which to grow, we will thrive if we change the society we live in.”2
Why not simply rise above it? #
Because rising above it means deciding that the living world does not matter. We are in the sixth mass extinction, the first that humans have caused. Some ‘spiritual’ people say that none of this matters because the world is just an illusion, or that it does not matter because life will always survive and evolve again. “Such views are the antithesis of shamanism”, symptoms of our wounded relationship with 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. The loss is personal as well as global: “My main 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 is Black Panther. It is entirely possible that within my lifetime there will be no panthers left in the wild.” Something similar is probably true of most of the Animal People anyone meets in their journeys. “This is just wrong.”3
How is despair turned into empowerment? #
By facing it, not by sinking into it. The idea of changing society can feel overwhelming or hopeless, but if we let that despair overwhelm us, then it really is hopeless, both for the world and for our own lives. As Joanna Macy shows, the way through begins with standing and facing things as they really are, and feeling our feelings about them. Then “we can transform the energy of despair into empowerment, and into an implacable motivation and determination to act.” On a shamanic path that means working on our inner world and on our relationship with the outer world, not by withdrawing from it, but “taking your place in it and actively being of service.”4
Gratitude practice helps with the pain of waking up, because despair has to be managed if the practice is to be any use to ourselves or to anyone else, and Macy’s Work That Reconnects offers many more ways of turning despair into empowerment.5 See Why is gratitude an animist practice? and What is the Work That Reconnects?
Why is activism part of the shamanic path? #
Because of reciprocity. “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.”6 Shamanism has never been a spiritual path that turns its back on the world. Part of the shaman’s role was “to be the champion and voice of the other Peoples, and to make sure that the humans lived in right relationship with them”, and so “activism, right living, and right action, are all at the very heart of Therapeutic Shamanism.”7 At the heart of the shaman’s role as a go-between was what would now be called activism: being active in the middle-world, advocating on behalf of the other Peoples. A shaman was never a hermit who had renounced humanity, or a monk on a mountain top; that kind of spirituality appears only as people fall away from animism. One of the practices in The Shamanic Journey is a simple act of giving back, supporting a charity that helps the animal your Power Animal is, with love and gratitude.
In short, shamanism is “a path of embodied spiritual activism.”8 See What is right relationship and reciprocity?
What kind of activism? #
Whatever fits the person. There are many ways of being an activist, “and not all of them are obviously spiritual”, from lifestyle choices to campaigning and volunteering, and “Whether obviously ‘spiritual’ or not, all these things matter.”9 The writer and activist Derrick Jensen, an extreme introvert who finds teaching a nightmare, does what he can do, and for him that is to write. Jensen says we need to find the things in the natural world that we love, and fight for them. How we do that depends on what kind of person we are, whether through teaching or writing, supporting charities, campaigning and lobbying, or what we eat and our impact on the environment, but “Doing that is at the very heart of what it is to practise shamanism.”10
That fighting is best done from an Adult place. The answer to the question of how to live is each person’s own, but one suggestion is to include this, whatever else it involves: “Find the true Stories of your Soul. Let your Human, Adult Soul shape your life. From that place, find ways to be of service in the world.”10 See Who is Derrick Jensen, and what is the myth of human supremacy?
What can shamanism bring to activism? #
It brings something unique, the knowledge of how to live in right relationship. If someone has a life-threatening infection, antibiotics may save their life, but if the infection is a symptom of something deeper, the antibiotics only stabilise them until a specialist can treat the cause. In the same way, campaigning, legislating, lifestyle changes and protecting habitats are “vital emergency measures”. For the underlying causes, as the writer Daniel Quinn points out, we need to learn from societies that were healthy, which means hunter-gatherer people, and above all from the shamans who kept them on the right path.11
So a shamanism made only of journeying and healing misses the point. Practised that way, “we are practising a stunted, diminished and domesticated version of it”, missing the very thing our society most needs.11 See Is spirituality separate from politics?
Why does inner work matter too? #
Because outer work alone will not be enough. A healthy society is made up of healthy individuals, so the outer work has to go hand in hand with inner work, each of us taking responsibility for healing our own inner world as well as for how we are in the outer one. The way we are destroying other species shows that our relationship with nature is profoundly wrong, and that something is deeply wrong in our relationship with our own 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 Soul too: “not only a sickness, but a spiritual sickness, a sickness of the soul.”12 Psychotherapy, meditation and many other approaches can help with that inner work; what shamanism offers almost uniquely is the way to the Lower-World and to our own Soul. See How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural Power-loss?
