My Shadow

My keen eye reveals my gentle prey.
My Shadow snarls and shouts and I kill the small bird.
My mother chastises and coos and shames me for my act.
My father frets and turns red, and slams the door as he leaves to do his chores.

In my Shadow Life I kill the bird;
feel remorse in the violent act;
grieve for the bird and for the child's lost innocence -
then I take myself in my arms and love me fiercely for my humanness.

And I love my experience for its ancient wisdom.

Shamanic Living

Shamanism as a methodology affords its practitioners to live fully in the everyday, ordinary reality of life, and at the same time access non-ordinary states of consciousness at will for the purposes of healing, advice or gaining understanding. In indigenous cultures, the shaman acts as the psychological and medical healer of his community. Non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by the steady beat of a drum, physical deprivations such as fasting or ingestion of enthenogens have been employed by nearly all mystical wisdom traditions; they allow practitioners to discover how to live a richer, more meaningful life. Shamanism, together with quantum physics and chaos theory, which I encountered during my studies at Bryn Mawr, gave me answers to the questions I had asked since childhood: Who are we? Whence do we come from? Where do we go? My travels to Ecuador, Nepal and Peru and my studies there with powerful shamans provided additional answers to these perennial questions. All my teachers, in ordinary and non-ordinary reality, assist me in developing and shaping my intellectual, spiritual, intuitive and psychic faculties. At this point in my life I feel so capable to participate joyfully in the universal dance of life. (By Jeanne-Rachel Salomon ’00)