Shamanic Initiation

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The embrace of the swans in Hilma Af Klimt's painting powerfully embodies the marriage of light and darkness that permeates life. We often think of light as a positive force to seek out and darkness as a negative one to avoid, but, in truth, we need to value each equally. The pulsing of light into darkness and darkness into light is the basis of creation. As I relax more and more into this basic truth, I strengthen my ability to accept and integrate whatever comes down the pike. And as I breathe into my experiences, whether dark or light, with a curious, open heart, my fear dissolves into love.

Just as night is always followed by dawn, the darkest times of life offer great opportunities for spiritual breakthrough. But before we can become spiritually enlightened, we must learn to value and pay homage to the darkness. I have cancer. I am profoundly wounded. I literally carry death over my heart. I am in awe of this destructive force that has amplified my awareness and transformed my mundane existence into the stuff of myth. My cancer is the teacher that is transporting me to powerful realms of transformation. In Joan Halifax's book, Shaman, The Wounded Healer, she speaks of the shaman's call to power, an ordeal that takes us down into the realm of chaos, where energy is wild, disorderly and untransformed. This ordeal challenges the initiate to "tap into the net of power" and gain the mastery that allows for "the reversal of death, the transformation of form, and the transcendence of time and space." Everyone has the potential to gain this level of mastery. To attain it, we must surrender to the wound that has rent us open, willingly submit to our journey through the Underworld, and open our heart to what our soul wants us to learn. Here is how a Native American elder from the San Juan Pueblo eloquently explains the process:

What I am trying to say is hard to tell and hard to understand unless you have been yourself at the edge of the Deep Canyon and have come back unharmed. Maybe it all depends on something within yourself - whether you are trying to see the Watersnake or the sacred Cornflower, whether you go out to meet death or to Seek Life. It is like this: as long as you stay within the realm of the great Cloudbeings, you may indeed walk at the very edge of the Deep Canyon and not be harmed. You will be protected by the rainbow and the Great Ones. You will have no reason to worry and no reason to be sad. You may fight the witches, and if you meet them with a heart that does not tremble, the fight will make you stronger. It will help you to attain your goal in life; it will give you strength to help others, to be loved and liked, and to seek Life.

Shamanic cultures often depict spirit animals as messengers from the Underworld or as abductors that kidnap human souls into the Underworld. This is an Inunnit Eskimo stonecut of a predatory bird that's carrying off an unsuspecting soul into the chaotic depths for his initiation.

I find great comfort in the wisdom of the ancient shamanic cultures. Their teachings offer profound depths of meaning to abductees like myself as well as a spiritual pathway through the fires of our ordeals. In homage to the shamanistic traditions, I have written this poem describing my abduction into the nether realms:

Ashen Moment

Last night, Mother Spider
nested in my breast.
Kissing my eyes,
crooning soft, dark lullabies,
she embraced my heart
within her lacy, lethal web.
Dreaming my death dance,
Mother Crow visits
to pluck my hair,
stealing ease
and vanity
for herself.
Plummeting through
black hole after black hole,
unwinding lifetime
after lifetime,
Mother Snake uncoils,
red as blood.

In this dusk,
this ashen moment,
bouquets of hope
lie strewn along
the ground
and I am lost,
unbound,
loosed in time,
helpless as a
wounded dove.

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