In everyday speech a calling is a vocation, the work or role a person feels they were made for. In Therapeutic Shamanism the deeper call comes from 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 Soul, the Human being each of us was meant to be, and it is a call to become that being and take our place in the web of life, not a job description waiting to be found. The work we do can be one way of expressing Soul, and what we have to give grows out of living from it.
What does “calling” usually mean, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it? #
In everyday use a calling is a vocation: a job, a craft or a role that feels like the thing a person was born to do. There is no agreed shamanic meaning of the word, and Paul Francis’s books do not use it as a term. What they offer instead is a way of looking underneath the career for the thing that does the calling, which is the Soul.
The two can be very different. Our culture tends to measure a grown-up life by things like “getting a job, ‘settling down’, having a mortgage, and so on”, and these may or may not be part of being a modern adult, but “they have nothing to do with what being an Adult is about, for our Adult Soul is of the Lower-World.”1 See What does it mean to become a True Adult?
Where does a calling come from? #
From the Soul, the part of us that is of the Lower-World. “This is our authentic Soul, our true, deep Soul. It is who we were meant to be.”2 Every being carries something like this: “All beings have a template, like a seed within them, a blueprint of what they could become, and all beings, deep down, have a drive to grow into this.” The founder of counselling, Carl Rogers, called that drive the actualising tendencyActualising tendency. Carl Rogers’s term for the drive in every living thing to grow into the best version of what it is meant to be. In animist terms, this is the drive of the Lower-World Soul. More about this.3
The other Peoples simply follow it. “Once they have learnt from their mother, bears just get on with being bears. Turtles hatch just knowing how to be turtles.” Humans are the exception: “We have a unique ability to not know who we are or how we are meant to be; a unique ability to become lost.”4 So for us the call has to be heard and answered, and it can go unheard for a whole life. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Is a calling the same as a job or a talent? #
Not quite. A talent is one of the ways Soul shows itself. Getting good at something usually takes hard work and practice, and what keeps us at it is that “doing something well that we have a talent for makes us feel good. It is our Soul finding a way to express itself in the world”.5 So painting, teaching, listening well or cooking can all be expressions of Soul, and a job can be one too. But the Soul itself is not the activity: “Your Lower-World Soul is You. The specific, individual healthy Human Being that you were, and are, meant to be.”6
The eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin makes a similar distinction from his own field. In his view “no one is born to have a particular job or role in a human community”; what we are born to is a particular place in the wider Earth community, and that place is what he means by soul.7 See Who is Bill Plotkin, and what is soul initiation?
What calls to the Soul? #
Whatever is close to it. Human-made things have no Lower-World Soul of their own, but they can be modelled on Soul, and “the closer something is to Soul, the more it calls to our Soul, too. This is why mobile phones do not move our Souls, but great art can.” The same goes for stories, poems, music, gardens, buildings and food: things close to 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’s Stories are “food for the Soul”.8
Our own lives work the same way. “Our middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is meant to be modelled on our true nature, on our Lower-World Soul.” The closer our everyday self is to Soul, “the better we feel. The further away our middle-world self is from our Soul, the worse we feel.”8 That ache, or that sense of rightness, is one of the plainest ways the call is felt.
Why does answering it matter beyond ourselves? #
Because each of us has a place in a larger whole, and the whole is weaker whilst that place is empty. Finding Soul “allows us to take our unique and sacred place in the web of life, allowing the earth to become whole by taking our rightful place in it.” In that sense, “Our Soul is both our gift to the world and our service to it.”9
Bill Plotkin puts it this way: “Your soul is both of you and of the world. The world cannot be full until you become fully yourself.”10 In Therapeutic Shamanism, finding your Soul is not just about you: it is about stepping into your place within the world and being of service to it, being “the organ you were meant to be in the larger body.”
How did hunter-gatherer cultures help people find their place? #
By building the whole culture around it. Living a fully authentic life means living “in a way that is shaped by, and an expression of, our Lower-World Soul”, and hunter-gatherer cultures, “through complex initiation rites and ceremonies, and by modelling what it is to be a fully authentic adult human being”, were designed to help children “grow and blossom into what they were meant to be.”11 The initiations around adolescence dismantled the identity a child had built and replaced it with “An identity rooted in their Soul and which grew from it”.12 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
The same road leads on to Eldership. “More than anyone else in the tribe, the EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this embodied Soul, and not just their personal Soul, but the larger Human 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, too.”13 A life lived from Soul can ripen, in time, into the wisdom a tribe relies on. See What is an Elder?
How do we recognise a calling? #
Less by fireworks than by a steady sense of being in the right place. Peak experiences can hold a message, and on this reading of the mythologist Joseph Campbell the message is that “if you are true to your Soul, to what you are meant to be, then something comes through you. You experience an inter-connectedness, a knowing you are part of something bigger than you.” Yet “The more you shape your life around your Soul (or allow your Soul to shape your life), the less important the peak experiences become.”14
So a calling is not found by thinking hard about the right career. The first step is often to loosen the culture’s hold: “If we are to find our true Soul, and who we are really meant to be, then we need to begin deprogrammingDeprogramming. The active work of shaking off Taker-culture conditioning; the companion of rewilding. More about this ourselves from the stories of the dominant culture that we live in.”15 Then comes meeting the Soul itself, in the Lower-World, through practices given in Finding Your Deep Soul and not repeated here. See What is deprogramming? and What does rewilding Soul mean and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
