Awaken the Inner Shaman: A Guide to the Power Path of the Heart

PREFACE

This book has not fallen into your hands or appeared on your screen at this particular time accidentally. Nothing is truly accidental. And yet, this book may not be for everyone. It is for those of you who place the greatest value on personal freedom, who have limitless curiosity for learning about the universe, who yearn to explore the great mystery of life. It is for those of you who are interested in deconstructing your habitual sense of reality to become free from the retaining walls of the mind. If you are content with the status quo of your life, if you don’t want to question what you have been taught, if you don’t want to rock the boat and want to remain simply comfortable in your life, then please ignore this book. This book is about transformation. It is about changing your life, breaking out of simple comforts and into something far greater. Reading it will upset your apple cart.

But, if you are interested in the greatest journey ever taken, then by all means read this book, rock your boat, deconstruct your reality, allow yourself to be presented with information that can drive you to tremendous expansion, unlimited freedom, infinite power, and joyful awareness.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about awakening the most powerful, creative source within you, a core self that has been with you, inside you, since your ageless beginning. This creative, energized core self has always been operating within you, but acts subtly in the background, like an engine idling. It has been waiting for your acknowledgment so that it has permission to engage and release its immense power and influence in your life.

This creative source within you is what I call the Inner Shaman. The deep self has been referred to by many names over the ages. You may know it as Essence, Spirit, Soul, Source, Core Self, I Am, the Way, the Tao, the Christ force, or, perhaps more accurately, by no name at all. I prefer to call it the Inner Shaman because shamanism is the world’s most ancient understanding of the power within. This power within is that which is most true about you—and yet it draws no attention to itself, which is impressive. You are unaware of it. Think of yourself as sitting on a nuclear reactor and not knowing it is there. It is that powerful; it holds that much potential for radical change. This is a testament to its willingness to grant you absolute freedom to acknowledge it or not, to choose it or not, to harness its awesome power or not. The Inner Shaman never coerces, demands, or fights you. It offers no resistance to your thoughts or feelings; rather, it accepts them fully as you wend your way through life.

That said, not all of your thoughts and feelings are in harmony with it, resonate with it, or support its authenticity. The Inner Shaman tolerates these distractions because it is not threatened by them and is in no way harmed by them. In fact, your Inner Shaman ignores most of your experience, just as you might ignore the distant drone of a small plane that has nothing to do with your current focus. By ignoring your experience, it does not intend to be cruel or abandon you; in fact, you benefit from it ignoring your worries, conflicts, judgments, fears, disappointments, and angers. The Inner Shaman simply waits for your sanity, that glimmer of light or recognition on your part. In short, it is waiting for your readiness to be aware of it. Until that moment of your maturity, when the seed within germinates and casts off its outer husk, the Inner Shaman abides. In the meantime, it does not interfere, nor does it encourage anything that lacks power, heart, and true meaning.

Because your Inner Shaman is connected with the truth, it is not fearful; therefore, it is that part of you that is courageous, that part of you that cannot be discouraged, does not become anxious, does not become depressed. In short, your Inner Shaman is that aspect of you that is completely healthy. It is filled with an infinite supply of vitality, creativity, curiosity, inspiration, and deep inner knowing about the appropriate course of action for your life. The Inner Shaman helps you to let go of your need to control yourself and others, and helps you to relax and trust that you are held safely in the arms of life itself. There is a meaningful plan for you; the Inner Shaman knows exactly what that is and will inexorably lead you to it. The only thing that can deter you is fear.

Discovering your Inner Shaman will help you to override any tendency to feel like a victim, to feel disempowered, to fall into laziness and lack of motivation. Embracing the Inner Shaman will make you more efficient and more productive as you systematically erase the energy leaks in your life. Worry is an energy leak, as is being concerned with what others think or how they see you. The Inner Shaman does not care. And yet, at the same time, the Inner Shaman is the energy of love.

I have chosen to refer to this powerful core of being as the Inner Shaman because I believe this is the best, most accurate description. Shamans are unique and powerful individuals who operate in indigenous cultures in every continent. They have existed since the beginning of history. Through an inner calling and their own hard work and initiative, shamans perform critical service for their communities. They are known by many other names: maracame among the Huichol of Mexico, man or woman of knowledge in the Toltec tradition in southern Mexico, paqo in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, medicine man or woman in North American tribes, and many more. In modern times, shaman has become the generic name for these powerful teachers, philosophers, and healers. They are the world’s oldest spiritual leaders, individuals who, among their many duties, heal the sick, perform ceremonies to harmonize the community with the environment, battle negativity, communicate with the ancestors, work with allies for the good of others, gather knowledge, teach through storytelling, act as seers and prophets, and lead their people. They spend a great deal of time gathering power and energy to perform complex supernatural feats and travel to other dimensions and distant locations, such as the star cluster the Pleiades, located in the constellation of Taurus, also known as the Seven Sisters, to gather knowledge and experience.

This path, the shamanic path, is first and foremost a path of heart, service, and generosity, and the love of Spirit and all creation. It is also the path of balance. Shamans the world over strive to live in complete harmony with nature, the environment, the cycles of the seasons, the weather, and the varying patterns of the stars, moon, and sun. To accomplish this, they cultivate the intelligence of the heart. Within the heart lies the clarity of mind to see with expert knowledge of this world and worlds beyond.

While some shamans fall prey to greed, power, and the dark arts—which is true in any profession—as a group, shamans are the people who take the greatest responsibility for the well-being of the planet and all its inhabitants, including animals, plants, and all the elements. Equally, shamans hold great care and responsibility for the spiritual realms. Although most of these practitioners do not admit they are shamans, to refer to them as such is offering them the greatest compliment, the highest of honors.

Shaman is an ancient word from the Evenki tribe in Siberia, a reindeer people, and it means the one who sees in the dark, or the one who knows. The Inner Shaman is the core awareness, the wise one within you who knows and sees the truth, who walks in beauty and balance, who has access to infinite knowledge, infinite power, and infinite tranquility. What better name could there be?

MY JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY

My own journey toward reconnecting with my Inner Shaman was a long and circuitous one. As a child I was introduced to the great shamans of the Bible, who demonstrated their knowledge of the Inner Shaman in acts of heroism and enormous compassion. Moses, at the direction of Spirit, parted the waters of the Red Sea, directed a rain of hail, and drew forth water from a rock. Jesus cast out devils, calmed tempests, changed water into wine, healed the sick, and appeared to his apostles after his crucifixion. These stories of shifting the normal laws of physics, directing and harnessing the forces of nature, introduced me to the enormous powers of the awakened heart.

I attended a Jesuit university during the late sixties, where I was introduced to the great religions and philosophies of the world. After reading the story of his life in Autobiography of a Yogi, I began to study the powerful teachings of Yogananda. For the first time I realized that miracles had often been performed by people outside the Christian tradition. At Berkeley, where I went to graduate school in clinical social work, I was fortunate to be introduced to the Korean Zen master Seung Sahnime, a joyful, round-faced teacher who in his broken English managed to convey to me an entirely different perspective. I will never forget him pointing to his shiny bald head in response to my questions and saying lightheartedly, Too many thinking. Put it all down. Only go straight; keep don’t-know mind. Then he laughed with tremendous mirth. These were, I was to find out later, the basics of the shamanic approach to life. Much later, I was to discover that Master Seung was the most exalted Zen master in all Korea and world-renowned. Little did I know!

I began to read voraciously, diving into the world of metaphysics and the perennial philosophy, the understanding that one truth underlies all the world’s major religions. I read Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, Madame Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, Manly Hall, and Aldous Huxley. Jane Roberts’s channeled Seth books turned my view of reality on its head. It was the first time I encountered the concept that I created my own reality. This is a basic principle in shamanic understanding.

After completing my social work studies at Berkeley, I needed thousands of hours of experience to get licensed, so I got a job at Napa State Mental Hospital in California on a locked ward for adolescents. For two tough years I worked with young people suffering from severe mental illness. Then, emotionally exhausted and just twenty-eight years old, I decided to head to the Far East on a solo quest for adventure. In India and Thailand, I met people who demonstrated supernormal abilities to alter the conventional laws of nature. I saw people walk on fire and glass, bend heavy steel with their concentration, foretell the future, and demonstrate the ability to simply know things about me that no one could have told them. Witnessing these events excited me, relieved me, unnerved me, and produced profound disorientation all at the same time. My world was rocked—and I knew that this new way of seeing was what I longed for most.

In Nepal, I met and studied with a Tibetan Buddhist lama who taught me that learning involves much more than hearing words; he simply downloaded knowledge into me by pressing his forehead into mine. In Varanasi, India, I had a life reading that foretold my future with surprising accuracy and helped to save my life much later in my journey. At the time, being told how and when I was going to die sent me into a spiral of anxiety and depression. Fortunately, I was to learn that I could change these seemingly fixed plans, and now I have outlived the date of my foretold demise by many years. Through my shamanic practice, I recovered my freedom to choose my future.

When I returned home, I suffered from culture shock. To make sense of all that had transpired on my travels, I began to study with a man whom many in my circle were talking about, Reverend Lewis Bostwick. He didn’t look the part: he was a portly man in overalls with no formal education who had started the Berkeley Psychic Institute in an old house, where he held informal classes. He taught me a great deal about the Inner Shaman, although the terms he used were God of your heart and space. He made me aware of the enormous power of the inner self and demonstrated time and again what it could do. He could read just about anyone’s mind. With a flick of his hand, he could remove a negative thought or a programmed pattern. Although I held a master’s degree, I felt I was in kindergarten in this new pursuit of knowledge.

In 1980, I decided it was time to get my doctorate in psychology, and chose the California Institute of Asian Studies (now CIIS) in San Francisco. Here I was exposed to men and women who had studied with shamans, which led me and my wife, Lena, to apprentice for ten years with Guadalupe Candelario, a Huichol shaman or maracame. The Huichol live in the rugged sierras of central Mexico and are one of only two tribes who managed to escape conquest by the Spaniards and keep their way of life. Among their people are many men and women who practice the old traditions and are renowned for their knowledge and expertise in shamanism. For over ten years, we drove over a thousand miles to central Mexico to work with Guadalupe in secrecy. We were to tell no one, not even our friends, that we were engaged in this apprenticeship. Sometimes he would come up to the States to work with us on our home turf. In the beginning, the apprenticeship was hard for me because Guadalupe ignored me and spoke only to Lena. After several years, he saw I was truly committed and embraced me in earnest. I had gone down the rabbit hole so deep I could never go back to the way I had once