Kirrilee Price

This is an edited excerpt from a presentation I made in 2020 as part of the Four Seasons Journey (run by the School of Shamanic Womancraft).

Trauma is not so much a distressing event, but rather our response to a distressing event. Trauma is stress which exceeds our ability to cope with or to integrate. It is a normal reaction to a horrible event, yet the effects can literally change the way our brains are structured and bring other challenging consequences which affect one’s ability to function in the world and thrive.

Peter Levine is a well known psychologist and expert on trauma, and he studied shamanistic cultures in relation to trauma. He describes how these cultures see trauma as a whole-community issue, not an individual one. From a historical shamanistic paradigm, trauma is a result of an aspect of soul becoming separated from the whole, leaving the person in a spiritual liminal space and incomplete (Levine & Frederick, 1997).

In this paradigm, the remedy must also come from the shamanic realms., reuniting and reintegrating soul parts. In traditional cultures this would have been the role of the shaman.

Levine recognized the spiritual aspect of trauma and brought it to western psychological circles. As the dominant culture has moved increasingly toward an individualistic mindset, aspects of the shamanic approach – in the past the sole realm of the shaman – are now available to the individual. People have access to enough information to gain an understanding of the physical and neurological effects of trauma, and in addition psychospiritual understanding.

What Levine highlighted through his research into a different cultural approach to trauma is a modern shamanic way that connects our individual journeys with a larger picture: the awareness of the whole, and the purpose of healing for ourselves, our families, our society and for all generations: past, present and future.

Vicki Noble calls female shamanism the process of the ‘gradual mastery of the self and the healing or recovery from the chronic disease of our time’ – the world illness of Patriarchy. That for a woman to re- possess herself and to center there is a monumental task, taking years of difficult, painful work.

She writes that the blood cycle and the blood mysteries are at the core of female shamanism. The word ‘shaman’ comes from a Siberian language and means ‘the one who knows’ (Noble, 1991).

Arnold Van Gennep was a French ethnogropher and folklorist, who developed a rite of passage paradigm which has three elements:

• 1^st – Separation – the person is removed from the previous social or cosmic world
  • (for me it is the time ‘before’ – before the memories)
• 2^nd – Transition – the space where the person wavers between two worlds – a liminal space of chaos, ordeal and symbolic dismemberment.
  • (this is the space I am in now in accepting memories. I think of Coyolxauhqui, and Alexandra Pope refers to the liminal space of the premenstruum, which connects to week 3 of the menstrual cycle, and is where I am in my cycle right now too).
• 3^rd Incorporation – the initiated is absorbed or reintegrated into a new world
  • (when the memories have finished coming. When I have a formed a new sense of myself. When I see how the trauma has contributed to ability, has contributed to me as a whole person and how it can be used as my gift).

Van Gennep’s paradigm is mirrored in the birth process – safe womb space, constriction of birth canal, entrance into the world and into a new cosmic order – and in the menstrual cycle process (Lahood, 2006).

Neva Walden explored the relationship between holotropic ritual and healing in the framework of sexual abuse. She suggests that abuse victims are locked into the second phase of Van Gennep’s paradigm, left in the shame, separation and death parts of the process. ‘The trauma, largely unrecognized, is compartmentalized and isolated yet at the same time unconsciously (psycho-dynamically) structuring her relationship with the world’. (Walden in Lahood 2006). A shamanic healing crisis is often accompanied by outer life conditions that cause us to face death as a real possibility….and therefore to encounter life as a choice.

The shamanic journey is an inner journey, often to the realms of the goddess of Death – she who would destroy the old forms in order to make way for the new. Vicki Noble writes that ‘the process the potential shaman is opening into is one of dying. She will never be the same person she was before she began. She is on a path that requires her death, the end of her identity as she has known it’. The menstrual cycle is a literal process of death and rebirth each month, as are the year of the seasons and the life cycle of the seed.

Vicki Noble, again, writes that ‘there is so much for us in the descent myth, if we can just allow the experience without outside intervention. Our willingness to face the dark is the key to our own development’. Stan Grof wrote that ‘death is a necessary and positive part of the process – of every process’.

Alexandra Pope, the co-founder of Red School, explored the concept of the ‘liminal state’, which I think is akin to a shamanic space, and which also relates to the realms of death. She describes the liminal space as the transition moment between one part of the cycle and the next. It is the moment of letting go of something before anything has arrived to replace it. We are faced with nothingness, and the line between the conscious and unconscious becomes thin (Pope, 2014).

Vicki Noble describes the shaman as having a foot in two worlds – the seen and unseen. This realm is where ‘we step out of the world, out of our mundane life into a kind of in between territory. No longer confined by the material world, it’s a place where we can travel into the farthest reaches of ourselves and the universe’.

Jane Hardwicke Collings teaches the ‘wheel’ – a map made up of corresponding layers of seasons, moon phases, times of the day, phases of the menstrual cycle, life seasons and so on. This map can be applied to one’s recovery journey from trauma, as one does not stay in the void forever. One emerges, renewed, lives life, creates, processes, before the next round of trauma emerges through mind or body, ready for healing and calling for descent again.

Jane HC writes that the shamanic craftswoman is the ‘gatekeeper and way-show-er’. She is courageous, because she knows that to hold and shine the light for others she cannot hide. She is on the same journey. She knows that to heal others she must heal herself. She must be present to her own journey, attend to her own practice of self-awareness. The Shamanic Craftswoman is comfortable and experienced with the landscapes and possibilities of the shamanic journey (Hardwicke Collings, 2021). Barbara Tedlock writes about the discovery of a fox’s body in a burial site that was 60,000 years old and how the fox was known to be an ancient spirit guide to shamans (2005).

There is the story of Inanna, making her descent into the underworld where she confronts the goddess of Death, dies and rots for three days. She volunteered to go, giving up every shred of identity in the process – in order to die and be reborn, returning to her community with the power for healing. I think of Coyolxauhqui, who was utterly dismembered. I think about the Lone Wolf, who leaves to go forth and make new discoveries which are eventually brought back to the pack. I think of the Owl, who sees in the dark, who can see 360 degrees.

These threads weave the narrative of trauma into a journey with purpose. It is a narrative where nothing is broken or sick, and nothing needs to be fixed. These paradigms of truama and recovery can provide a touchstone, a point of hope, and give purpose to the difficult experiences of our lives.

References

Hardwicke Collings, J. (2021). Shamanic Womancraft. https://janehardwickecollings.com/shamanic-womancraft/https://janehardwickecollings.com/shamanic-womancraft/

Lahood, G. (2006). Skulls at the banquet: Near birth as nearing death. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 38(1).

Levine, P.A., & Frederick, A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Noble, V. (1991). Shakti Woman: Feeling our fire, healing our world. Harper One.

Pope, A. (2014). The wild genie: The healing power of menstruation. New Generation Publishing.

Tedlock, B. (2005). The woman in the shaman’s body: Reclaiming the feminine in religion and medicine. Bantam Dell.