CONSISTENT ENGAGEMENT
What is authentic is rarely popular. Making something popular often means watering it down so more people will love it. I have watched powerful Qi Gong masters lose the depth and breadth of their teaching by trying to create a form so simple that everyone will be willing to do it. We see this effect everywhere in different practices.
If we are not clear in ourselves we end up urged into convulsions of deception and falseness by the need to trend, to get “likes and hits.”
Authenticity does not come from the exterior forms. It comes from a willingness to practice difficult things that are not popular. Shamanism has always been this way. Do not allow yourself to be driven by your fear, greed, or old, unattended need for specialness, into a relationship with self that marketers want you in, but is simply not true.
Living an authentic life with robust connection to your authentic self requires constant cultivation—through skills like shamanic journeying, clearing the emotional body, daily energy body hygiene, and truly living a shamanic life of integrity with the non-human world. This is a life of consistent engagement.
DEATH AND NEW BIRTH
Authenticity requires that we cultivate a right relationship with Death. We must transform the many forces within us that generate a false identity. Authenticity requires that we no longer grasp and hold on. We must learn to breathe into the truth of things and allow the old self to die, no matter how attractive or comfortable it seems. Authenticity is constant, deep, internal growth.
We could ask, “Who in me needs to die so that I can live into a deep and intimate relationship with my authentic self?”
The next thing that authenticity requires is that we give birth to two different kinds of things. The first are the aspects of self we are in denial of, things we truly don’t value, but live in us nonetheless.
These are things like our unconscious desire for power, rank, and privilege.
We need to give them birth to truly bring them out of hiding. In the light of that honesty, we can see how we became this way and how we must change to restore the alignment with the authentic self.
We also need to give birth to things we are afraid of that we want to express in the world, like our true, non-definable sexuality, our true passions that lie outside of the bounds of what is considered reasonable, or a love so fierce many don’t recognize it for what it is.
We could ask, “Who in me needs to be born so that I can live into a deep and intimate relationship with my authentic self?”
REAL TEACHERS AND REAL FAITH
You cannot do all of this by yourself. You will need to ask for help. We need teachers—human teachers, not just books or the internet—we need friends and community.
Teachers can present ideas and skills you’ve never thought of. Friends and community give us feedback – especially when we go off the rails. And here is the paradox: No one can do the work for you. You need to ask for help and you need to do your own work. These are both true, simultaneously.
To live authentically you need faith. Faith gives us the ability to be in that space between what was and what has not yet come to be. Faith allows the confidence that we can grow and change into something new, not just a new version of what we used to be, but something truly new. Faith is not something that is attached to religion.
It exists as an essence energy, in and of itself. The question we need to ask is not what do we have faith in, but do we even have the capacity for faith.
We could ask, “Is my capacity for faith great enough to come into right relationship with my authentic self and to do what I have come here to do?”
Faith, like all the other important sacred things, is something that is cultivated through attention to it. If we want to live authentically, we must have faith in something larger than ourselves. We need faith in our ability to care intensely about authenticity while not indulging an unhealthy ego. We need faith to stay out of the righteousness that blinds us to our rank, privilege, and power. And we need faith to not become righteous about our woundedness and victimization.
THE “AUTHENTIC SHAMANISM” ARGUMENT
There is an old argument about the authenticity of contemporary shamanism itself. On one side of the argument is the Foundation for Shamanic Studies which put forward journeying as a technique or a technology people can engage in without necessarily following any specific cultural tradition. On the other side of this argument are indigenous people and those who studied indigenous traditions who say that there is no shamanism without the culture it comes from.
There is merit to both sides of this argument. The problem is that the argument has stayed an argument. It never evolved into a new understanding.
It lacks the dimension a discussion of authenticity would bring to it.
Journeying works. It works with many different drivers, whether it is a plant hallucinogen or four days of dancing or 30 minutes of drumming. Humans are designed to enter altered states. We don’t have to be part of a specific culture for it to work. It works because it is an authentic human activity.
Journeying, by itself, outside a specific culture, is not appropriation because the act of journeying is so widely shared by cultures around the world that you can’t say any one culture owns it. It would be like saying that people with a tradition of working with the North Star can claim that the North Star belongs to them. The North Star belongs to all life on earth.
However, the specific way a culture journeys with the precise form they use is certainly owned by the culture. For someone to journey in that way and call it their own would be appropriation.
What the old argument boils down to is this: “Because you have no viable shamanic culture as Caucasian people, you are frauds. You are ‘plastic shamans.'”
Obviously that is hard for white-presenting people to stomach. People who feel distant from their own shamanic roots and have finally found a sense of self, a sense of relationship with spirit by learning to journey, are not frauds because of the color of their skin.
BUILDING A NEW AUTHENTIC SHAMANISM
Whether or not we are frauds depends on the authenticity of our relationship with spirit. Without a coherent shamanic culture, we are basically starting over again to learn how to connect with spirit and to ask all the questions and do all the work needed to create a new, authentic shamanic culture. And we can’t take a short cut by appropriating the ways of others. We have to do the work, make the mistakes, feel foolish and try again.
There is validity to the argument that shamanism is not a set of techniques, but it exists within the context of a culture. We can’t dumb the shamanism down so it is popular for everyone; it won’t be shamanism anymore. We can’t continue to do only the parts we can monetize because then we won’t build the culture. If we continue to practice without looking at the true authenticity of our own shamanic work, the doors to a new future will not open. And what our world, both human and non-human, needs right now is a new, authentic shamanic culture.
To build an authentic shamanic culture out of our current contemporary lives will seem insane every step of the way, except to your authentic self. The authenticity of your practice begins with the authenticity within yourself. First and foremost authenticity requires an active working relationship with spirit—living it every day. Authenticity is cultivated, through practice, pain, truth-telling, error, humility, revision, courage, new openness, and discipline. We cannot monetize any of this. There’s no return on this investment, except the authentic life you create.
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