Or - on why the Artist as Shaman Practitioner training is so key for these times and what will be reached into if you study with me!
Here I am in my Byres Road cafe land again; music in my ears and thoughts in my soul. Today it's a Snow Patrol mood. The lyrics lay their tread deep into the parts of my being that I am only just now starting to uncover and feel as the leaders of a new trajectory.
There is only you and me in this life
And I don't wanna fuck it up now
There is nothing for me in these past lives
There is only what I wasn't yet
I have been thinking about this blog post for a while; about what is being tapped into in my learning about myself and about the work I help to bring through into this world. When I sit with another holding space or helping learning, the responsibility is huge. I don't want to fuck it up. In everything that we do together it is about creating the potential for change and new growth and what someone hasn't managed to be yet. I do truly want all of us to uncover what it is we haven't had the chance to fully be and that quite honestly has kept us all returning to this plane again and again to uncover and manifest. Each of us has lost something. The finding of it is a power that can reshape the world.
I have a restless, visionary soul. I am deeply uncomfortable in this world. It feels like being sentenced in a kind of hell when I look at this lifetime from a certain perspective. I don't understand a lot of the workings of society and the idea of settling in a steady life makes me want to run for the hills. I don't get duality. I don't understand why everyone doesn't want to live their days trying to make the world a communicating and beautiful place. I heavily feel the responsibility to move on human consciousness and help bring balance and change. I don't understand why so many minds close down and choose separation and bitterness. I don't understand racism, class systems, why people would even imagine that having money brings prestige. I really don't understand why the diversity of humans and the right for people to choose their preferences, gender or no gender, sexuality, culture, lifestyle and appearance isn't accepted in some places.
But the fact is, I have to accept that all of this is just part of the story we are all in together. We are here to stare deep into the heart of separation and fixed states and help something new and also ancient come into shape.
I don't think we will know who we are or what might be possible until we open up with kindness and curiosity to what might be waiting to take shape before our eyes. This means sitting with separation and fixedness. 2024 has been the year that I have really taken a pause in my life to deeply be with every separating thought about myself or others I harbour inside myself. I been working alone and diligently to help any disappointment and frustration have a space to be and have gently and urgently made time to listen to what has arisen. It's been a sludgy project! Luckily I have trusted that transformation into compassion is one of only two possible outcomes. It's been a hard year because I haven't been hiding from the truth of my experience and the extent of my withdrawal from connection and at times the difficulty has made me really believe the extent of my separation. I guess I am in the space that so many people of my age arrive at where we meet the potential to harden into rigidness and bitterness or carve the opportunity to practice a kind of tonglen (see Pema Chodron!) and liberate the true human nature.
There is nothing for me in these past lives
There is only what I wasn't yet
The shamans are those who cross the bridge from one state to another. The shaman visionaries will perpetually evolve and dissolve the borders of this reality to find another more true ones. They free us from fixed states and support the emergence into new and more loving forms. The artists are the shamans of tomorrow. I know this with my whole heart because the shamans are the artists of yesteryear.
I work with so many people who strive help affect change and bring new visionary models in. I watch and work alongside many of the youth of today who are also opening up channels that is helping a new age find its feet. When I ask my spirits what the 2020s will be remembered as they say these words: 'This will be the age of the shaman". We will see!
As you know shaman is the word I have an ambiguous relationship with because of an honouring that this word isn't from my lineage in this lifetime and the enormous gratitude I also have for it saving my life by pointing me to the experience of shamans. The shamans I read about in 1996 helped me to understand what was happening in my being as one who felt visions and could see the dead. It is also the word that helped me to open up my path with how I truly felt art when I felt that the art world couldn't hold me anymore because at that time it separated the project of living as a spiritual being and someone who operates with interventions in the the fabric of reality.
For me, Art is and always has been the spirit of communication. You know it wasn't easily accepted in the late nineties and early noughties to bring the subject of spirits and healing into conversations about the workings of the art world. I remember my tutors suggesting I should be an art therapist when I made performances as what I called the Art Doctor speaking with cliffs and waves! I also recall the experience of using the word play in an 'art crit' and being corrected that the word play wasn't really a word we use in art vocabulary. A lot has changed and today I sense the art world as becoming less about a political agenda and more about a reconnection of the human with wider realms. Art is a spirit that operates across many timeframes and dimensions and it is exactly the same as the creative force that brings us into life and that imagines and calls attention to whatever is looking to be brought into wholeness.
So now that we have connected Shaman and Artist, how about Lawyer? I am taken back to a strong memory of being 16. We are standing at a bus stop. Me, Kiran and Ranjit are waiting to get a bus to Morley and I am telling my friend's older brother that I am going to go to art college (which needed no A levels at that time) and his incredulous response. 'Why would you do that?' he asked. 'Why not be a lawyer, you have the brains to be a top lawyer'. Well, I considered his thoughts a bit, but my knowing was really that art was my path. Looking back, I don't think I really did have the brains to be a modern day lawyer. My brain is wired in a way that is very lateral thinking and prone to sudden shifts in frequencies and far too in need of a creative palette for the dimensions of a modern courtroom to hold space for me. But you know for the past twenty years. in all of my journeys back to the beginning of time to ask about how the original humans were operating, I am always shown shamans and told that they were the original lawyers. The purpose of the original lawyers was to communicate through the realms and help keep balance. How cool is that? Maybe I operate as a shamanic lawyer and in some way my friend's brother saw something in me that was also true.
And the human. Oh god this one creates more problems for me than any of the other titles! When I think about belonging with the human race I feel more like a tree, a plant or a star being than a human. However the version of human that I connect with when I teach shamanism fits perfectly for me. This is that we are the only species on this planet that can shape shift, merge, hold huge empathy, absorb and energetically be imprinted to the extent that we humans do. We are the species who can build and co-create a reality. For me this is the shaman human or visionary/seer. It is also the artist. Artist as actor/performer, painter, gardener, parent, life bringer, life liver.
Artist Shaman Human Lawyer - the truth about these titles is that they are all the same thing.
If you come on the Artist as Shaman practitioner training with me you will travel deep into the soul of the contemporary shaman artist lawyer human and will build a strong and sturdy practice that translates with core shamanism, trains you strongly within a counselling matrix (I am a trained pluralistic counsellor) and yet also opens up your own unique way of working as a creative maestro with the mediums of your choice. It listens to the spirit of the age and supports the emergence of the powerful and creative artist shamanic practitioners of these times. It has compassion at the heart of healing pursuits and provides a framework to uncover and heal the stuck places of your own scripts and storylines. It is a small intake and offers one of the most attentive and reasonably priced practitioner trainings there is. Plus it is insured as an online course so you can access it anywhere in the world.
Wanna join?
There's an offer on reduced costs open until 1 September.
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