Spirit Walk Ministry"A Shamanic Studies Ministry"
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Spirit Walk Ministry
Quincy, Massachusetts
United States
email
- Spirit Walk
- Awakening
- The Journey
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The Spirit Walk
A path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others in leaving it if that is what your heart tells you to do. Look at each path closely. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good, if it does not it is of no use.
~ Carlos Castenada ~
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A Spirit Walk is when you heed the calling of your spirit, journeying where your spirit leads you, so that you may experience that which you to need experience in order to realize your reason for being here.
A Spirit Walk is living not from ego, but from complete being. It requires that you be totally present and totally accepting, so that old habits and ideas do not continue to foster the illusions that have lead you away from your true path.
A Spirit Walk is as much a literal as well as a figurative right of passage. It is a pilgrimage from one state of being to another. While it may involve a journey from what you have come to know as home, it is also a journey to return home, to the spiritual home that you wandered from in the course of living.
A Spirit Walk is not a linear journey. You will encounter many crossroads and travel down many roads, often taking new paths and sometimes returning to old ones. In the end, you will find that you have come full circle, returning to where you began.
If you can turn away from the illusions of the world and reawaken to the awareness of the truth that has always been within you, then your Spirit Walk will have returned you to the harmony of body, mind and spirit that the course of living has enticed you from and returned you home to your true Way.
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What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do; especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road..
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Shamanism is not a religion; it is a way of being. It is the direct experience of spiritual knowledge and the shamanic experience can be found in every religious faith. The Shamanic Journey is an investiture, a pilgrimage that one must undertake on the way to becoming a shaman. It is a transformation of spirit and becoming a shaman starts from within. One must strive to be free of illusions, one must be able to see beyond the limitations of preconceived notions or biases and one must be fully committed to “The Journey”.
The word "shaman" originated in Siberia and it describes a specialized type of holy person who practices not only with prayer, ritual and offerings, but through direct contact with the spirits themselves. The label of "shaman" eventually came to be incorrectly applied to any medicine man or medicine woman of the indigenous tribal cultures. But, shamanism cannot be so simply and broadly defined.
A shaman does not follow the laws of man; the shaman follows the laws of Nature and of Spirit. The shaman must be able to live astride two worlds; the world of perceived reality and the world of intuitive reality. The shaman actualizes this duality of existence by venturing into what is called the "shamanic state of consciousness" or the "shamanic ecstasy" and it is during these cosmic journeys that the shaman will travel to other spiritual realms, encountering the people, animals and spirits that inhabit the mystical realms of the Universe.
Though it is a personal and individual experience, shamanism is tribal in its nature and needs to be experienced within the cultural elements of the differing tribal lands. The shaman must be attuned to the universal mythos of each tribal region in order to understand the Spirit of the Native Land. Though the essence of the shamanic practice does not change and its elemental ritual experience remains immutable, shamanic rituals and experience will acclimate to different times and cultures.
In tribal societies the role of the shaman is to be "The Vision Seeker" for the community. It is the role of the shaman to travel beyond the realm of the material, into the realm of the immaterial, in order to commune with the spirits that guided and protected the tribe. With the purpose of the shaman’s journey being to maintain the harmony between the tribe’s physical and spiritual needs, the shaman might, for example, go forth on a vision quest before a hunt to meet with the spirit of the animal to be hunted, in order to create a spiritual accord between the hunter and the hunted.
In modern society the most prevalent example of the shaman at work comes in the guise of mass media advertising, though this represents the darker side of shamanism. Where the true shaman will paint pictures, sing songs and tell stories meant to awaken and liberate the people to a new awareness, the advertising shaman will use these same methods in order put them to sleep and enslave them in the prison of a false reality.
Ultimately, becoming a shaman will usually require that one be chosen by a spirit, totem or deity to be that spirit guide's emissary in interacting with the material world. A shaman will be also called to accept a relationship with a spiritual mentor who will work with them to awaken the emerging shaman to the power within them and will help them set forth on their shamanic journey, be that as a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader.
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“The Role of the Shaman”
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Shamanic Ecstasy is the real "Old Time Religion", of which modern churches are but pallid evocations. Shamanic visionary ecstasy, the mysterium tremendum, the unio mystica, the eternally delightful experience of the universe as energy, is a sine qua non of religion, it is what religion is for! There is no need for faith, it is the ecstatic experience itself that gives one faith in the intrinsic unity and integrity of the universe, in ourselves as integral parts of the whole; that reveals to us the sublime majesty of our universe, and the fluctuant, scintillant, alchemical miracle that is quotidian consciousness. Any religion that requires faith and gives none, that defends against religious experiences, that promulgates the bizarre superstition that humankind is in some way separate, divorced from the rest of creation, that heals not the gaping wound between body and soul, but would tear them asunder; is.no.religion.at.all!
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An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music and one cannot tell about music so that another person can get the feeling of it.
~Mark Twain "The Musterious Stranger" ~
Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.
~ Socrates ~
Just maybe, going crazy could be the evolutionary process trying to hurry up mind expansion. My mind didn't snap, it was trying to stretch itself into a new shape.
~ Lily Tomlin~
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The enemy of awareness is the illusion of separateness that we create out of our own self-centered perceptions. Our perceptions are shaped and colored by the degree of awareness with which we analyze experiences and it is out of this that our illusions arise. The source of this deception lies in the illusion of the ego that we are separate from the Oneness of Creation. True awareness is nurtured when we accept that we are part of the Whole and release ourselves from the illusion of separateness.
From one's individual perspective, life seems to be regulated by subservience to societal rules of behavior for personal achievement. To accomplish this personal achievement the individual establishes an unnatural internal rhythm in adherence to these behavioral patterns of self-interest and self-centeredness, yet these very ideas of self-interest and self-centeredness are what lead to the sense of isolation and separateness that are synonymous with illusion.
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To dance then, is to pray, to meditate, to enter into communion with the larger dance, which is the universe.
~ Jean Houston ~
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© 2007- 2012 Spirit Walk Ministry
Spirit Walk Ministry
Quincy, Massachusetts
United States
email
