Finding One’s Medicine
by Zayin Neumann, The Integral Gardener
ATH Editor of Shamanism
Shamanic practitioners tend to specialize, just like MD's and other health professionals. Similar to a doctor, they go through intensive trainings that often leave them teetering on the edge of life and death. Then they do rotations. Unlike MD’s, who choose their specialty and then go through the steps necessary to learn their chosen specialization, a shamanic practitioner’s medicine finds him.
An interesting difference between Western doctors and shamanic practitioners is that the shaman is a medium or vessel for trans-physical helpers; guides and spirits beyond the physical plane. Doctors are primarily focused on the physical aspects of the healing process ... (although a good number of doctors I have met work with a lot more than physical symptoms). They will typically administer medicine that they’ve been trained to prescribe. A shaman operates a bit differently. They are inspired, even led, by their helpers. As a way of putting this into perspective, imagine that each type of medicine a Shaman engages has a life and personality all its own. Now imagine that each form of medicine that is most likely to be effective, seeks out the shaman.
Each helping spirit that comes to work with a shaman often has a specialty or type of medicine. One might be adept at curing sleep apnea while another might specialize in dis-eases of the lungs. These helping spirits seek out practitioners whose clients are in need of their specialty; or practitioners that they know to be especially capable of dispensing their particular form of "medicine." Specializing then, as a shamanic practitioner, is a matter of context, much like shamanic work in general. It doesn't happen without the help of the community, inclusive of the human and more-than-human worlds.
Over the course of the last year I have been watching to see what my own "medicine" might be. Who has come to help me, and who is coming to be healed? I’ve noticed that various helping spirits have shown up to work with me and teach me about the elements. A good “gardener” must understand the elements. I’ve also noticed that my work often tends toward integrating the subtler trans-physical realities through working with the physical body. Somewhere within these budding specialties lies the cycle of birth and death.
I find myself drawn to these cycles of sprouting from and returning to the soil from which we came. In birth there is a dying, a leaving behind the trans-physical in some real way. In death, the opposite becomes true; we find ourselves born once again into the trans-physical. We must leave or die from this body and the physical plane that we called home. This cycle is our constant state of being and it is this basic cycle that I find myself drawn to.
The idea of helping people pass-over might seem a little morbid to many in our culture, since we so often cut ourselves off from the basic facts of the cycle of life. To most shamanic practitioners, however, practicing as a psycho-pomp (a helpful guide to the dying from this world to the next), soul retrieval, and communion with the deceased are all just part of a regular day at the office. In most indigenous cultures, death is a very real and regular teacher within the community; but so is birth...and it is the expecting parents who have come into my office that led me to look through Barbara Tedlock's book, Shaman in a Woman's Body, and find the quote below:
"I have found that women shamans are nearly always midwives. The act of helping souls to transform themselves in order to cross from the other world into this world turns out to be at the heart of feminine shamanic traditions worldwide. While the masculine traditions focus on a shaman's symbolically dying into shamanhood, the feminine traditions focus on the shaman's body being born into it."
My own initiation and training has tended towards what is referred to as the masculine in the quote above. Death came knocking on my door, and once I gained the courage to answer it, Death became one of my most important guides and teachers. Death has served as the initiatory medicine of many shamans worldwide. Yet, as I work with the expecting parents who have found me, I see another side — Birth as initiation. Without Birth, without Life, there could be no Death. Our lives stand as the balance between the two.
Not coincidently, my name, Zayin, points to a balancing of masculine and feminine tendencies in the world. I have known for most of my adult life that this work of balancing would play out strongly in my life, and it has. I can trace most everything I have done up until now back to this tightrope walk towards building a bridge in this sorely needed area of balancing Life with Death and masculine with feminine.
It has been no real surprise to me that I find myself drawn to working with parents as they create the sacred space to bring their new born child into the world. But it is in the quote above that I start to see myself settling into part of my medicine. I can see myself helping to initiate others into the secrets of birth as well as life beyond death. And for most of this I thank those teachers and guides who have come to work with me, creating the needed rituals and ceremony to help reveal and heal these most basic aspects of our contemporary culture.
Blessed Let It Be...
About the Author
Zayin Neumann, The Integral Gardener, and our ATH Editor of Shamanism, has worked in intensive settings with several highly respected shamanic teachers, chief among them, Michael Harner and his Advanced Training in Core Shamanism. He is currently working towards his Ph.D. in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he is working to bring shamanism into the contemporary conversations around Integral Cosmology and Comparative Religion. He has a private practice in San Francisco, and facilitates workshops in and around the Bay Area. To learn more about Zayin’s work and practice visit IntegralGardener.com.