Shamanism offers ecotherapy and ecopsychology relationship as well as setting. It treats the natural world as a community of living persons who can be met and communicated with, and offers a practice, shamanic journeying, for doing so. It also offers an account of why we became so separate, rooted in 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 and 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 a way of keeping the connection alive in ordinary, everyday life, long after a session outdoors is over.
Is nature a setting, or a community of persons? #
For much of ecotherapy, nature is a medium, a setting, a “third space” between therapist and client, or even a co-therapist; it is valued for what it does for the human being.1 Much of the research on nature and wellbeing likewise treats nature as a resource that produces measurable effects in human bodies and minds.2
Shamanism starts from somewhere else. For people who live shamanically, the experience that everything is connected and part of 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 is their natural state. It is why indigenous people the world over describe everything as alive and as sacred. “Shamanic people experience being part of, not separate from, a world that is profoundly alive and vibrant, and which can be communicated with.”3 In this view the trees, rivers, animals and stones of an ecotherapy session are not scenery for human healing. They are the Animal, Plant and Stone People, with lives and purposes of their own, and the relationship with them carries obligations both ways. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
How can the other-than-human be met directly? #
Through shamanic journeying. 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 above all a place of connecting with the other Peoples. It is a place to receive healing from Bear, to experience flying like Eagle or swimming like Salmon, to learn focus and decisive action from Falcon or slowing down from Tortoise, to find a Plant or one of the Stone People to help heal a dis-ease, or to talk to Mountain or experience being Water.4 Just being in the Lower-World heals the deep loneliness, isolation and separation that modern humans carry, a wound most people feel without knowing what it is.5
The first and most important connection is with 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. Power-lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer happens when we separate ourselves from nature and the more-than-human world, and anything that helps us reconnect helps to heal it, first and foremost a Power Animal retrieval.6 This is a two-way relationship with a particular other-than-human being, not only the benefit of being in its presence. See What is a Power Animal?
Why did we become so separate? #
Ecopsychology names the separation; shamanism tells the long story of how it came about. The break from animism began with domestication and the coming of farming, and speeded up with the Fall, the rise of the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. See What is the Fall?
That story also explains why so much therapy stays indoors. Placing humans at the centre of the universe, and seeing everything else as merely a metaphor for human problems, is a symptom of the human narcissism characteristic of the Fall. Whilst psychotherapy works that way, it is a key part of our recovery from the Fall and yet cannot be fully part of the cure. Sigmund Freud said that psychoanalysis aimed to turn neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness; practised that way, therapy is a painkiller for the symptoms of domestication and the Fall, and not a cure for the cause of the pain.7
How can the connection last? #
By becoming a way of life. Powerful experiences in wild places, such as vision quests, can work dramatically in the short term, but people often find that a few weeks or months back in ordinary, domesticated life is all it takes for the effects to wear off.8 For our hunter-gatherer ancestors there was no conflict between what such practices opened up and how they already lived. For us, the question is how to integrate the experience into daily life. A modern shamanism therefore includes practices that help us keep the connection in largely urban, day-to-day lives, and find the wild in the tamed.9
Healing power-loss is essentially about how we live, about living in a more interconnected way, as an ongoing and lifelong process.10 It is a way of being, carried into every part of life, and not something kept for time spent outdoors. See How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural power-loss?
What about grief and despair for the Earth? #
Ecotherapists increasingly meet clients grieving for the state of the living world. Shamanism treats that grief as something to face and feel, not something to rise above. Sinking into despair makes things hopeless, but, as the ecotherapist and activist Joanna Macy shows, despair can be turned around: first by facing things as they really are and feeling our feelings about them, being the people in the tribe who are prepared to see what most others prefer to avoid.11 See How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path? and What is the Work That Reconnects?
