One initiation is plenty, but, a shamanic practitioner often has many throughout their life. Why would this be? Usually they are each different types of initiation and take the practitioner into a different level of understanding or work. I have had a few experiences since 1987.
This next experience occurred on March 17, 2012, while on a 2-year long apprenticeship program with another of my teachers, Cecile Carson, M.D. The overall personal theme that arose for me had to do with a traumatic childhood memory that had resurfaced and caused great fear in me. As instructed by Cecile, the journey purposefully required me to be spiritually dismembered or taken apart in order to be shamanically re-membered or reborn. Being re-membered, much as being reborn, refers to being spiritually put back together as whom we truly are rather than whom we thought or believed we were.
To experience this phenomenon, my group journeyed into the non-ordinary realm to a dimension called the upper world, where most initiations occur. While there, a murder (flock) of crows, one of my totem animals, came and ate away my entire midsection. In my spiritual form, I could actually feel this happening. First, they ate my stomach. This act symbolically represented the tearing open of the fear that I couldn’t survive or deal with remembering the trauma. Then, they ate my throat, which represented tearing my voice open to remove my inability to speak my truth. My guides re-membered me by explaining that, like a loving parent, the universe takes care of me in all ways. The crows then placed a piece of the stone lapis lazuli in my throat to empower me to always speak my truth. Even as I lay open and wounded, I knew I was okay without these old parts that had caused me so much pain in my past.
While we can hold an intention for our journeys, we can’t predict what our initiation experiences will be like. They mostly come as they are needed to teach us something important about our Selves (intentional capital S meaning true or higher self). The final example I will share was about letting go of ego and control.
In 1987, I had experienced the death of my personality by becoming one with all that is. Little did I know then that many years later I would experience a deeper version of that initiation in quite an opposite manner.
This experience occurred deep in the Amazonian jungle of Peru, an 8-hour boat ride up the Amazon River, in November 2012. I was in a Shipibo village with 16 other people from around the world. We, a shaman and a medicine man, were shamanically journeying in sacred ceremony inside a rustic, circular temple. Again, I left my body. However, this time, it wasn’t until I returned that I realized that I had been “gone.” Once I was back, I knew that I had been in a “no-place” or “the void.” This time, though, the experience was far from blissful. I, Regina, had quite simply vanished, didn’t exist! I had no memory of being alive! There was no calming energy field surrounding me, nor was there a presence that comforted me! I was just…gone! And, I was terrified! I didn’t want to go back, yet I did…several times. Each time I returned, I begged my spirit guides not to take me back there again, where it was dark and empty. Eventually, the journey thankfully ended and I was back in the ordinary world to stay.
After I safely returned home to the states, I journeyed again and asked my spirit guides where I had been taken and why. The answer they gave was that I hadn’t been taken anywhere outside myself. Rather I had been taken into the deepest part of myself so that I would experience what it was like to not exist and to be completely out of control. Mission accomplished! I was told that my whole life up to that point had been spent holding so tightly to control that they knew this was the only way to show me how important it was for me to let go and to use that energy in a much more productive way. To this day, that deep teaching reminds me that whenever I am in control mode, ego is leading the way and it is time to let go!
To learn more about shamanism on your own, here are a couple of good books you may choose to read:
Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with another Reality – Michael Harner
Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life – Tom Cowan
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