Is the popularity of ayahuasca a threat to the tradition? "From Brooklyn to Australia, there's a growing demand for ayahuasca, a tribal, hallucinogenic tea said to have both spiritual and curative properties. But, like any globalization fairy tale, the world's embrace is threatening to suffocate the tradition at its source." (from Motherboard) Read more... Submitted by Kevin Turner, Kyoto, Japan. 

 

As a service to the community, Sacred Hoop magazine editor Nicholas Breeze Wood is offering a free PDF download of a "Special Guide to Shamanism." This collection includes 27 articles about shamanism from some of the best known shamanic teachers, writers, and practitioners in the world. In the editor's words, "I hope it helps people grow in their own practice, helps people to listen to the spirits, both as a benefit to themselves, and more importantly as to benefit to their community." Download the Guide....

 

So many people find themselves struggling through the dark passages of grief, depression, and angst in a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of destruction. In this essay from shamanic practitioner Lora Jansson, we are invited to look at this process as one of many ways the spirits initiate and call us. --NC, assistant editor 

 

It all began to fly apart almost one year ago. Depression about the planet, and the fate of the wild animals cut me apart like a hulking surgeon wielding his shiny scalpel while towering over me. I could feel his breath, and I felt bound to the operating table.

 

This was not my first time being dismembered by this hopelessness about the planet and her relations.

 

And this was new because a crippling anxiety came with my depression that made me shake for some hours every day as if I were receiving errant electric shock treatments. I had never had a breakdown with such anxiety before.

 

And it was all partnered to a knowledge, a CERTAINTY that some doom was coming that was so great that none of us could survive it. I could not only feel the grief of the earth and animals, did not only convulse as I shook with my own panic, but knew that all of this? All I was going through? This was the warm up for some catastrophe of such proportion that the world was going to be ripped apart.

 

Being a shamanic practitioner is like being a sword fighter in some ways. The sword cuts and swings in two ways. In one, shamanic power feels much more like a magical wand, able to ease suffering, cure illness, and help us all evolve.

 

That's the sweet side of the sword. This story explains the second way the blade flashes.

 

Many years ago, I engaged in a powerful shamanic initiation, the Bound Shaman, where I was shrouded by a blanket, with both hands and feet tied with rough rope that also wrapped taut around the blanket in a series of knots. I could not breathe or move. We were told some teaching might come from our helping spirits while we were suffering, and perhaps, they would free us of the suffocating blanket and painful knots if we sincerely asked for a teaching.

 

From "Your Grief is Your Sister" (November 30, 2016) by Lora Jansson, onetribeonly.com. Lora is an FSS Three Year Graduate and shamanic practitioner from Washington state.