Renewing Your Dream

12/31/13 • 60 min

Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Short days and long, dark nights lend themselves to unpacking squashed impulses of authenticity, assumptions that diminish passion, and denied feelings. Winter is the time to entertain your deepest truths for the purpose of renewing your dream. Without taking some time each year for gestation to tend the self who is tired, feeling inadequate, too small, too weak, and without power the expressive self is not rejuvenated and realigned to live your dream in life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how we attend to “adrenal fatigue” and “yin depletion’ by working honestly with our emotional life without indulgence or mental distance. With a renewed flow of our emotions we can replenish our stores of lifeforce energy and realign with our dream with the call for your unique genius that resonates in the Dreamtime.

Previous Episode

A Messianic Complex and Shamanism

Shamanic initiatory experiences often involve a break with reality and a time of madness, which is perceived of as a kind of test or challenge initiated by a helping spirit. The novice that allows a death of his/her sense of self moves through their own madness to the other side of that challenge transformed. The novice returns to a more ordinary state of consciousness and is acknowledged as a shaman. In contrast, in America similar breaks with reality lead into a dead end commonly referred to as a “messianic complex” in which the person perceives of them selves as a Savior or The One. This interpretation becomes a mental cul-de-sac for the individual with martyrdom the only way out. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the fact that how we interpret our own “madness” is culturally determined, thus those challenged by a diagnosis of mental illness may help themselves by ditching contemporary culture and interpreting their own experience through a shamanic cosmology in which no one needs to be saved.

Next Episode

What are your Gifts?

Every individual has gifts to bring to the world, though many will live their lives precisely running away from those gifts. Every individual has gifts to gain in this life, though we need to give ourselves to life to get them. Shamanism offers us both an attitude from which to view life and the skills to engage in it in a way that our gifts can be given to a world in need. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores our gifts and the shamanic path we can walk to cultivate them. First, there are the gifts we bring in to this life and how they can align us with our calling. Then there are the gifts that are here for us to gain if we engage with spirit to use what we came into this life with to become who we could be. We must each take responsibility for the powers we brought into this lifetime and cultivate our unique gifts for our well-being and the nourishment of all life on earth.