Hearing about Shamanism for the first Time

As I said, I met a lot of new people on my journey in 2004, got a lot of new contacts and learned many new things about their culture, their thinking and what they thought of religion and spirituality.

Several people whom I got in touch with told me that they were interested in shamanism. When I heard this the first time I did not know that word and could not understand its sense. I obviously blamed my lack of English vocabulary and asked for an explanation. I was told that shamanism was the ancient spiritual healing practice of the Native Americans of America.

In the weeks I passed on my journey, I heard the word ‘shamanic’ quite often and people showed me more and more what exactly they meant when they said they did ‘shamanic work’. They told me about rituals that they did with feathers and with smoke, about sweat lodges in which people spent hours in the heat waiting for some visions, meditating in a way and about offerings to Gods of nature.

In several ways I heard many things which I could relate to and understand as something similar to my religious practice. Until I had fallen and hurt my leg I had been doing daily rituals and when someone told me that they regularly did fire ceremonies, I thought there was nothing strange about that. This was what spiritual people did in my opinion.

Some time later however I heard people tell about spirits that came up during rituals, of ceremonies in which you combine different parts of your soul which were lost over the course of time, of people who got crazy in this kind of ceremonies and much talk about ghosts and beings that are all around us.

To be honest with you, I sometimes thought the people talking to me about this were crazy themselves. I knew however that there were people in India, who were just in the same way confused about such talk. In India, this kind of things are called ‘Tantra’, when you do rituals to call ghosts or when you talk about spirits that enter bodies or leave them again.

I still don’t know whether the Native Americans originally really did all these rituals and included all those ghost stories in their belief or whether that was an addition of modern spirituality. Whatever it was, since I had heard those ghost stories, I kept a polite distance from these people and their practices.

With time I also got to know that many of those who considered themselves shamanic practitioners were also heavy meat-eaters. I obviously did not agree with this philosophy at all. They said they would eat meat and thank the animal or the spirit before eating it. Really, that may have been morally fine in a time when humans did not grow and grains and in places where there was no other way to feed yourself than go hunting. But I believe in today’s time that animal spirit that you believe in would not be very happy – I mean, you have a thousand other things to eat and you don’t miss anything if you don’t kill the animal. You already know it is wrong you killed it – thanking for it won’t make it better!

Well, as I said, there were a lot of new things that I heard, a lot of people with ideas that were new to me and I just never managed to agree with shamanism.