Coming in from the Edge: Shamanic Practice and Environmental Activism

My two main passions in life are shamanic practice and environmental activism, by which I mean taking and supporting concrete action towards a fairer, more sustainable and more humane world. While I’m fortunate enough to have been able to make activism the focus of my career, until recently shamanic practice has for me been a more private affair. As I commit more fully to a shamanic path and make it more central and visible in both my professional and personal life, I’m increasingly aware of the potential power of bringing the two together. This has led me to explore bringing shamanic work more fully into service of efforts to heal our damaged relationships with both the natural world and each other. I believe that doing this will need shamanic practice, and shamanic practitioners, to come in from the murky fringes of modern life and step into central roles in current processes of social transformation.

Until at least my mid-twenties, I approached environmentalism through the lens of separation and conflict. I saw activism as a struggle between those of us dedicated to the protection of the biosphere, and those profiting, directly or indirectly, from its destruction. This presumed enemy included not only the bankers, politicians, corporate heads and others at the top of the pyramids of wealth, power and influence that underly dominant, environmentally and socially damaging, economic and political structures, but often also the wider mass of people passively living their lives within these systems. Shamanism has helped me to transform these views and come to approach activism as a process of deepening connection – with ourselves, with nature, and with each other.

Following a shamanic path means, at a personal level, fully accepting and taking responsibility for ourselves. It obliges us to stop ignoring our own wounds, making them an excuse for living within anything less than our full potential, and blaming others for how we experience and respond to the challenges we encounter in our lives. It forces us instead to enter deeply into the dark and frightening edges of our own inner landscapes. Doing that allows us to transform the pain, fear, hatred, anger and other unwanted emotions we find there into opportunities for deep insight and rapid growth. Difficult and emotionally damaging experiences that have shaped us thus become the sources of our greatest strength, vital steps on our journeys towards full self-realisation and union with spirit.

Offering service to others through shamanic healing and teaching means extending the same deep love, acceptance and understanding in which we are learning to receive ourselves to everyone who comes to us: seeing and meeting them as a perfect incarnation of spirit, accepting the stories and situations they bring to us as meaningful parts of their unique and precious unfolding. Every single person who has ever come to me for shamanic healing in some way mirrors a part of me that I have at some point rejected or held in judgement. Supporting them on their healing journey is part of a deeper encounter with and realisation of myself.

In a similar way, environmental damage and social injustice compel us to bring the hidden shadows of present-day civilisation to the foreground of our attention. The actions of their most visible perpetrators – the so-called ‘one percent’ – although they can be neither condoned nor justified, offer to industrial society as a whole the same gifts our personal wounds offer to us as people. They make it impossible to ignore that the benefits of modern life we take for granted, as currently provided, come at immense cost, that deep systemic transformation is necessary to ensure the survival of humanity, and that the need for action towards this transformation gets more urgent by the day.

I believe that shamanic practice and shamanic practitioners have vital roles to play in this transformation, as healers and weavers of stories. As healers, our skills in helping people recover from the wounds of modernity are more vital than ever before, as the prevalence and depth of psychological and emotional damage grow. These healing skills (as Mandy Pullen points our in her article ‘Ecoshamanism’ in Indie Shaman issue 31) can also be offered to places suffering environmental damage; I also believe that they can help heal social wounds and divisions, transform dysfunctional organisations, restore to corrupt institutions a sense of integrity and purpose, and help co-create new stories of our nature as people and relationship with the earth. 

All societies are structured by their guiding stories and myths. Those of modernity – largely variations on the theme of ‘Man’, through intelligence and technological mastery, learning to dominate and control nature (including human nature) – have become not only obsolete, but dangerous. Shamanism offers new stories about personal history and identity to both practitioners and recipients of healing. In the same way, it can be a source of vital new stories about the meaning of human life, the nature of society, and the position of both within the living world. The incredible power of shamanic journeying, ritual and ceremony to rewrite personal biographies can also help reshape how society portrays itself, and as a consequence how it operates.

There are as many different approaches to shamanism as there are shamanic practitioners, and equally many ways to work for social change. My personal take on shamanic activism is strongly influenced by my involvement in permaculture and Transition. Permaculture offers a set of tools for translating a holistic view of the world – informed, like shamanism, by deep observation of nature – into practical steps towards redesigning lifestyles, production systems and organisational structures, relevant to all walks of life. Transition is an international network of local communities self-organising for action towards their own visions of sustainable happiness and prosperity against a background of global cooperation and solidarity. In relation to both of these, and doubtless many similar movements for social change, shamanic activism has key contributions to make, and important lessons to learn.

Increasing numbers of permaculture practitioners complement practical action with attention to inner worlds, both with potentially synergies with shamanic practice. A key premise of permaculture is that practical understanding of ecology helps us design material systems more in harmony with nature. Shamanism shows us that, just as we are ecologically embedded in physical nature, the supposedly separate self exists within a vastly complex inner ecology, and that informed navigation of this inner world can support psychological, emotional, spiritual and social health. Shamanic tools can also help the practical aspects of permaculture, for example by journeying to meet the spirit of a place, plant, river or other geographical feature, a project or a community and incorporating the insights and guidance this provides into a design process.

Many activists in the Transition movement emphasise the importance of ‘Inner Transition’: cultivating the emotional and psychological resilience both to cope with the magnitude of the challenges facing humanity and the scale of change necessary to address them, and to step up to the personal responsibility of taking action. Classic shamanic healing techniques like soul retrieval, power retrieval, extraction and depossession can help address the trauma of embracing and sharing the pain and suffering of the world, and help transform this trauma, pain and suffering into motivation and for constructive action. Shamanic practitioners can also serve as psychopomps for the dying nightmare of greed, violence and environmental destruction as it recedes into the past to give way to a new world of sharing, cooperation and hope.

Bringing shamanic practice directly into social change movements not only provides a powerful context for its application. It also opens new shamanic paths, authentically aligned with what the world needs at this time, through which to move from talking about the need for positive change to working directly towards bringing it about. Despite their acknowledged importance (for example, by influential writers such as Charles Eisenstein), shamanic practices and practitioners remain almost as inconspicuous in social change movements as in the population at large. I know of many activists who also do shamanic work, but perhaps the majority of these choose to keep the two separate, their shamanic practice firmly in the background.

I’m convinced the time is right for a new form of shamanic activism that comes in from the hidden edges of social change movements and into the bright light of the dawn of a marvelous new world. Contemporary social change activism operates in a spirit of open-mindedness and experimentation in which new ideas and approaches are welcomed and can thrive. It also has a practical focus that offers a great opportunity to separate new age fluff from the tools, perspectives and approaches that can genuinely help to improve people’s lives, strengthen projects and initiatives and tangibly help the work of transformation to proceed more effectively.

I also believe that such deep immersion in social movements can offer contemporary shamanism a meaningful cultural context that it currently lacks. Until now, shamanic practice has had to work on the fringes of the globally dominant society because of its incompatibility with that society’s basic premises. The collapse of mainstream political and economic institutions, and especially of the worldview that underlies them, means this is no longer the case. As more people look for viable alternatives to a status quo that no longer either works or makes sense, the importance for collective understanding, perhaps even for survival, of practices that have fulfilled such crucial social roles in innumerable traditional societies, becomes more and more evident. In the same way as much environmentalist thought has in recent decades moved from the cranky fringes to the centre of political debates and popular consciousness in recent decades, it feels to me like the time is right for a new form of shamanism that accepts its role at the heart of the change processes through which society is now moving.

There’s an orthodoxy among contemporary practitioners that the label ‘shaman’ is an honorific: a title bestowed only by the community, as a mark of respect for a person’s service to the common good. I’m not for a moment suggesting we start to call ourselves shamans, but I do wonder if it’s a label to which a socially conscious shamanism, deeply embedded in movements for positive change, can reasonably aspire. It fits a feeling in me that it’s time to take pride in what we do, and at the same time seek to extend our practice, and ourselves, as fully as possible in response to the awesome, overwhelming, inspiring challenges of our time. Just as in ecological systems, much of the diversity and potential for creativity and renewal lies at the edges where rare plants and animals live their obscure and cryptic lives, many of the keys to humanity’s survival are to be found at obscure edges of the social and cultural world. I believe that this response can also be a new maturation of contemporary shamanism as it comes in from the edges and takes a central role in the adventures to come.