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Pagan Values Blogging Month: Judgment vs. Compassion

Note: I actually wrote the bulk of this weeks ago, but life has gotten incredibly crazy as of late thanks to school, my internship site, and a whole host of other things. Still, I wanted to get at least one post published for this theme. Enjoy!

Compassion: to feel with. In terms of human interactions, compassion is to allow yourself to not only feel for other people (sympathy) but to feel with other people (empathy). It is becoming an active participant in another person’s suffering. Or, if you want to take this beyond anthropocentrism, it is active participation in another being’s suffering. (It can also be applied to emotions other than those associated with suffering.)

Compassion, comparatively speaking, doesn’t get a lot of time in pagan discussion because it’s a “nice” emotion. Sometimes I feel that many neopagans are so afraid of being perceived as fluffy, frou-frou New Agers, prone to talking about “love and light”, that we create a front of cynicism and worldliness. We separate ourselves from those other people by seeming more serious, and denigrate the sensitivity that may be expressed by others. We think that because we aren’t just talking about The Secret and wrapping the entire planet in soft pink energy that we somehow have a more mature, developed way of approaching the world we live in. True, sometimes complex emotions are unnecessarily compressed down into 140-character sound bites on Twitter, and I could write a ton about how “the law of attraction” is stuffed full to overflowing with primarily white, middle-class privilege.

But what too often I see as being touted as an improvement over this sort of “fluffiness” is people extolling snark as a legitimate response to anything they disagree with and a way to bolster their in-group membership by rallying others in a dogpile over the target of their disdain. I see the people who spend the most time telling others just how wrong they are being lifted up as paragons of their traditions, while those trying to help people do things “right”, whatever that might be, are often struggling just to be heard. I see some pagans who are in a veritable emotional arms race to latch onto ever more aggressive and “not fluffy” deities, spirits, practices, etc., often insulting the practices of anyone less competitively hardcore as being less real or true.

All these things center on moralistic judgment as a value. It’s just one of the many violent forms of communication that so many of us have been socialized with and which we are told is the correct, tough, powerful way to communicate, no matter the expense levied to ourselves and others. I first became acquainted with the concept of a violent form of communication when I took a course on nonviolent communication (based on the works of Marshall Rosenberg) during my graduate counseling psych program. Rosenberg defines moralistic judgment, one of his “life-alienating communications”, as a judgment that:

…that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values. Such judgments are reflected in language: “The problem with you is that you’re too selfish.” “She’s lazy.” “They’re prejudiced.” “It’s inappropriate.” Blame, insults, put-downs, labels, criticism, comparisons, and diagnoses are all forms of judgment. (Rosenberg, 2003, p. 15)

A clarification: Moralistic judgment is contrasted with value judgment, which is used to judge which values are right for us, as opposed to applying our values to other people in a moralistic judgment. We can say what we value without determining whether someone’s agreement or disagreement with our values makes them good or bad people, right or wrong. When I refer to judgment in the rest of this post, to include as contrasted with compassion as a value, I will be specifically talking about moralistic judgment, not value judgment.

Many pagans value those who make moralistic judgments on others, whether it’s judging someone as less competent, less appropriate, or just “doing it wrong”. We may not want to admit this as a collective value, but it’s there nonetheless.

The thing about judgment in this vein is that it is often exceptionally self-centered. The person making the judgment is focusing on their feelings on the matter and expressing those feelings in aggressive, negative, hurtful manners, without ever taking the feelings of the other person(s) into account. Yet at the same time, it’s also a way for the person to relieve themselves of having to examine those feelings, because they’re focusing their response on someone else instead of looking at what prompted the whole mess in the first place. So a lot of the time this can be summed up with the thought process “Here is something that makes me feel in a way I dislike. I’m going to respond to my feelings by attacking what I perceive to be the cause, which is external to me”. While, for example, someone interpreting the goddess Morrigan as a loving mother isn’t nearly as dangerous to my health as someone pulling a knife on me, you would think that the insult was just as grave given the viciousness of the personal attacks I’ve seen that have come up as a response to “You’re doing spirituality wrong!” discussions. And never have I seen anyone doing the “correcting” take a look at why they feel so insulted about the idea of a cuddly carrion crow that they must make ad hominem attacks in addition to their history lessons.

Is it any wonder, then, that we adopt cynicism to protect ourselves?

Yet when we justify our cynicism and our snark and our aggression toward others, we are perpetuating the very cycles of violent communication that have contributed to us walling ourselves away from the world. In fact, I feel it is a tragedy how much we are allowing ourselves to miss out on when we approach the world through so many layers of defense. How much more intimacy and genuine emotion and honesty could we experience in ourselves and others if those defenses were no longer there? What if “feeling with” was the default, where we all mutually respected the vulnerability of everyone involved?

There are payoffs for compassion for yourself and for others. When you allow yourself to be open to both your actual feelings as well as those of the other person(s), you’re able to get a much more complete picture of what’s going on, and you can make a more informed decision as to how to respond (instead of instantly reacting defensively). This makes it more likely that everyone gets their needs met, because instead of communicating with more and more defenses, everyone is able to clearly state what it is they need, and is more likely to understand what’s preventing those needs from being met.

Compassion teaches better connection and general communication skills. There are pagans who claim to be nature-based, and yet it’s a surface-level connection based mostly on imagery and abstract concepts, without really feeling with other living beings, human and otherwise. Or they’ll talk about connecting with a tree in a meditation, but then they seem completely incapable of understanding why someone whose supposedly improper practices they just insulted is so unhappy about that judgment (when they really, truly deserved it for doing it wrong, right?). There are few more powerful ways to really connect with any other being than through compassion—to really open yourself up to what that other being is experiencing in that moment, not just through imagination and assumption, but through direct interaction. While you don’t have to divorce yourself from what you feel when, say, you’re in an argument, the quality of connection you can have together is much better when you’re able to really listen to what all parties are saying instead of only focusing on trying to get what you want. And that practice can help to strengthen not only that relationship, but improve all your relationships across the board, whether with another person, a deity, etc. And communication works much better when people are listening completely, not just harvesting choice phrases that they can then use to defend their own points without considering others’ thoughts in total.

And compassion takes bravery. Anyone can snap and snarl at someone else, and keep putting those walls up higher and higher, and feel safe and protected against the world (even if there’s no actual safety to be had). But it takes a lot of guts to face the risk of vulnerability that compassion requires. Sometimes that may end up being a situation where you’re the one feeling the sadness and hurt of someone targeted by a group of snarkers, and putting yourself at risk of drawing their fire by defending their target. Other times it’s more intimate and personal, really and deeply listening to a significant other you’re arguing with at the risk of “being proven wrong” by deciding their point is valid and thereby possibly sacrificing whatever you thought you were originally fighting for. To be compassionate takes a lot more work and courage than to simply continue being negative and defensive as a matter of course, and that effort builds character and emotional skills in a way judgment never could dream of accomplishing.

In the United States, the gender dichotomy is highly pronounced. While there have been some inroads in gender diversification, the overwhelming pattern is still that men are supposed to be masculine (stoic, not emotionally expressive, strong) and women are supposed to be feminine (emotionally expressive, weak, passive). Compassion is generally relegated to the latter artificial category, a sort of emotional ghettofication. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.

Terrence Real, in his book How Can I Get Through To You (which was an assigned text for my Masters-level couples counseling course), related a trip he made to Tanzania. He asked some of the local Masai what makes a great morani, or warrior. One very old man in the community answered thusly:

I refuse to tell you what makes a good morani…But I will tell you what makes a great morani. When the moment calls for fierceness a good morani is very ferocious. And when the moment calls for kindness, a good morani is utterly tender. Now, what makes a great morani is knowing which moment is which! (Real, 2002, p. 76)

So much for the (largely male-and-masculinity-dominated) pagan warrior ethic that focuses mainly on being strong and protective. While there are certainly times and places for ferocity and aggression, like so many other people in the United States, American pagans in particular tend more toward judgment than compassion. The continuation of witch wars and snark communities, the divisiveness of “Well, we don’t do things like THEY do because WE’RE better”—these all have judgment at their cores.

I feel strongly that compassion is a worthy value for pagans to consider adopting more frequently. It takes work–I still slip up a good deal myself despite my words here–but it’s a good goal to work toward, I feel. If we want to reduce the prevalence of moralistic judgment and other violent forms of communication in our community, then compassion is a particularly effective medicine. When we feel what another is feeling, we cannot attack them without attacking ourselves (and if we have so little compassion for ourselves that we feel this self-sabotage isn’t a problem, so much more the reason to examine why this is). Through compassion we are disarming ourselves, but we are opening ourselves up to the possibility of finally breaking through a vicious cycle, and spending our energy on more constructive efforts than simply building more and higher defenses against others.

Sources:

Real, T. (2002). How Can I Get Through To You? Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women. New York: Scribner. [admittedly very heterocentric, but a good book nonetheless]

Rosenberg, M. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer Press. [a bit outdated compared to Rosenberg’s more recent emphases, but still a worthy read]

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Vegan Skindancing

So I’m in the process of writing a new book; it’ll be on totemism, but it’s going to be something of an experiment–and that’s all I’m going to say right this moment 😉 Also, in case you missed it, I have an article on animal parts and paganism on Witchvox this week.

Anyway, I was paging through my previous books about totemism and animal magic in preparation for working on the new book, and I read over the part in Skin Spirits where I talked about vegan alternatives to using actual animal parts. It seems a little odd to sandwich that into a book all about using dead animal remains for magical and spiritual purposes, but really, the basic principles in the book apply even if you don’t have actual animal parts to work with. Since not everybody has rushed out to buy the book (not that I would complain if you did!), and since I still really like this concept, I thought I’d share it here.

See, it’s all about the spirits in the remains. The main spirit/soul of the animal departs on death, but what is left is a sort of spiritual “residue”, a haunt or memory if you will. It’s that which I work with when I do skindancing, or make artwork, or anything else involving animal parts. The actual work described in Skin Spirits, though, can really be applied to any animal spirit.

Let’s take skindancing, for example. I started dancing in a wolf skin at Brushwood Folklore Center way back in 2002, and while the Pacific Northwest hasn’t yielded very many opportunities for dancing*, I still try to get out to dance when I can. (Sunfest next month will be my next known opportunity, and I’ve always loved dancing there!) Now, I’ve always danced in an actual skin; my first one has been retired, and I’m on my second, who hasn’t gotten nearly enough time out at the drum circles. The basic concept is the same regardless of what skin I wear, though: I am connected with the spirit in the skin, and with the more overarching totem, Grey Wolf in this case. The spirit in the skin helps to serve as a conduit for the totem, being closer in nature to that totem. (In my practice, I conceptualize totems as archetypal beings that embody everything about a given species, to include individual animal spirits.) So not only is the spirit getting a body to wear for an amount of time, but the dancer gets to experience a bit of what it is to be a wolf, or a deer, or a bear, or whatever animal is being danced.

You don’t, however, need an actual dead animal for this, though. Vegan costumery can also work just as well. After all, look at the various animal masks made of wood and other plant materials in indigenous cultures worldwide. Are those going to be less effective in connecting to the totem or other animal being than fur or feathers? Perhaps there may need to be a certain amount of work to add to the plant materials what comes naturally in animal materials, but this can be done. Some would observe that the very act of creating the mask or other costumery in the image of the animal creates the connection with the animal; however, you can even go a step further and make the costume into a spirit house.

Basically, you’re inviting an animal spirit that does not currently have any physical form to come and live in the costume you create. You can do this prior to creating it, during the process, or after; it all depends on how you want to make the invitation. Some people find that contacting the spirit beforehand and having its guidance during the creation process works well. Others may find that having a completed house ready is a better option, especially those who prefer to buy other people’s creations. How you invite the spirit in is up to you; while the actual trappings of the ritual may vary from person to person, the intent is to either invite a specific spirit in, or set a sort of “open house” sign up to invite a spirit of the appropriate species to take up residence. You can even talk to the relevant totem and see if s/he can connect you with an individual animal spirit to work with.

There’s also the potential for “created” spirits. If you put enough energy into something, it can literally take on a life of its own, even if you didn’t intend it that way. (This resembles the concepts of servitors and egregores in Chaos magic, by the way, among other parallels.) If you’re going to deliberately go this route, talking to the totem can be very helpful in getting feedback on determining what qualities of the species to infuse into the costume as you create it or begin working with it.

As to the actual materials? I’m a big fan of using secondhand things, so stuff like old faux fur coats works great. There are also manufacturers of fake animal teeth, claws and bones; the Bone Room has particularly high quality reproductions of a lot of different animal skulls. And if you’re artistic, creating your own out of various media is most definitely an option.

What you want is to have something that you can wear while dancing or otherwise invoking the spirit and the totem, and something that the spirit can feel comfortable living in, a sort of movable shrine. Whether this is made of real animal parts or not, may you find it to be a highly effective connection to the beings you’re working with!

* For some reason, at every pagan festival I’ve been to here in the Pacific Northwest, instead of dancing in a moving circle around the fire like everyplace else I’ve been, people just stand in a circle and dance in place. It confused the hell out of me at first. Some places have been wonderfully accommodating, and the people who have gotten to know me well have been awesome enough to share space with me so we can each dance our own way. Others…well…not so much. FWIW, I am always looking for opportunities for wolf dancing at drum circles! (Hint, hint!)

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Thunderstorms and Wildflowers

(Apologies to those with feeds for the number of pictures lengthening this post.)

Earlier this week, I decreed Wednesday to be “Take a Fucking Hike Already!” day. I haven’t been out as much as I would like as of late, and so in an effort to get more outdoor time as well as make myself some schedule self-care time, I decided to take one afternoon every week for extensive hiking or similar outdoor endeavors. I headed out to Washington to Catherine Creek, which I had heard has absolutely beautiful wildflowers this time of year (or so said the author of the Portland edition of 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles). I also recently replaced my old, dying camera with a refurbished Lumix care of Woot.com, and though it’s proven its worth in photographing my artwork, I wanted to see how it did with nature photography.

So I jumped in my car Wednesday morning and headed out into the Gorge. Even in the middle of the week, the parking lot at the trailhead was almost entirely full, though it has capacity for about fifteen cars before you start parking on the grass. The day was absolutely brilliant–sunny, upper 60’s, some breeze from the west. I got my gear (such as it was) situated, and headed on up the trail.

Now, I had had the intention of hiking the entire 4.1 mile loop. However, my progress ended up being significantly slower than I had intended because I kept finding really pretty things to take pictures of. Before I even got to the trailhead, in fact, I had already pulled over to the side of the road to take pictures of some poppies:

And then there were mossy carpets spiked with bitterroot:

Plus some verdant young oak leaves:

And pine trees, both live…

…and long dead…

Never mind the tadpoles.

And the turkey vultures.

As I proceeded up the ridge, I had a great vantage point to see a massive array of dark clouds coming up over the mountains to the southeast. At first I figured they would most likely pass by to the north and east of where I was. However, the wind shifted, and I began to worry as they started my way.

It wasn’t until I heard thunder, though, that I decided that being up on an exposed ridge was a great way to become a headline; “Hiker killed by lightning strike”, while it sounds less dramatic than it probably would be, is not what I’d like my last word in this world to be.

So I made my retreat back down the trail, only having made it a little over a mile up in the first place. The rain started to fall just as I got to my car, and so I headed back west toward Portland and sunnier skies.

This hike really exemplified postindustrial humanity’s relationship with nature in a very basic nutshell. Human being goes out with shiny technology to take a particular slice of nature back with her. Bigger, scarier and much more uncontrollable slice of nature thwarts nicely planned activities. Retreat ensues. Unlike many people, though, I didn’t see it as a waste of time or a reason to curse the storm. I was grateful for the time I got out on the ridge, and was rather philosophical about not having any control whatsoever about the storm coming in and changing anything. If anything, I felt fortunate that I had enough time to get off the ridge and to my car safely, and that I got to see a phenomenon that’s pretty rare on my side of the Cascades (I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard thunder in Portland, which is entirely different from my experiences growing up in the Midwest!).

And I did get a poem out of it, too:

Catherine Creek, 5/18/2011 – by Lupa

Stem-threads bow their heads;
The ladies hold their hats against the wind.
The sun yields to massive paws
Of a bear rumbling across the ridge.
Only the birds are defiant:
Ravens pick at wet, grey fur;
Vultures ride the warm breath;
Swallows look no further than their brush.

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A Brief Quote

As an addendum to the discussion on “Natural” vs. “Artificial”, I was reminded of this quote that says what I was trying to get at:

It’s dangerous to think of ourselves as loathsome creatures or as perversions in the natural world. We need to see ourselves as having a rightful place. We take pictures of all kinds of natural scenes and often we try to avoid having a human being in them…In our society, we force ourselves into a greater and greater distance from the natural world by creating parks and wilderness areas where our only role is to go in and look…We lavish tremendous concern and care on scenery but we ignore the ravaging of environments from which our lives are drawn.” –Richard Nelson, as meta-quoted in The Sacred Earth, edited by Jason Gardner

This reminds me of Richard Louv’s Nature Deficit Disorder, the byproduct of children no longer having access to wild, open areas to simply explore in and play, but instead being increasingly hemmed in and protected.

In order to connect, we have to allow ourselves to be connected.

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Wolf and Environment

For a number of years now, the grey wolf has been the primary North American charismatic megafauna to be associated with the environmental movement, particularly that involving preserving wilderness habitats. Beyond the environmental movement, wolves capture imaginations (and cliches) like no other animal in the American consciousness, from werewolves (both scary and…uh…well, not quite sparkly) to truck stop t-shirts, and then some. Unfortunately, attraction in the symbolic value of wolves doesn’t always translate to care for the actual physical animals; I’m willing to lay odds people spend more money on wolf statues and shirts and other tchotchkes than they do donating time and/or money to nonprofits that work to preserve wilderness, or contacting their elected officials about wilderness and wildlife protections.

And because Wolf is such a popular totem, s/he’s often taken for granted. It’s gotten to the point where some people are reluctant to admit that Grey Wolf is their totem because so many others essentially choose Wolf because s/he’s “cool” (to borrow an idea from this excellent essay by Ravenari). And, bringing things back to the environmental movement, I’ve heard environmentalists stereotyped by more conservative factions as “just people who think wolves are puppies and trees need hugging”. Which can make it tough sometimes to admit either being an environmentalist or liking wolves/Wolf the totem/etc.

To be fair, there are reasons for the sparkly stereotypes. There are environmentalists who think that all you need to do is recycle your old newspapers, or who are convinced that everyone needs to get off the grid and be vegans. And there are people who claim Wolf as a totem who never go any farther than that claim, and maybe reading the entry for Wolf in Animal-Speak (not no actual books about wolves). Sometimes people grow out of it and get more critical thinking skills or depth of understanding; others simply stay put. Either way, Wolf often becomes a mere mascot for surface interpretations of pretty complex topics. But that doesn’t mean that there is no value to the Wolf = environment connection.

For example, I was reading about how wolves are not only hunters but skilled scavengers as well. Hunting is dangerous, especially when it comes to going after big game. The payoff is better in the amount of meat, but the risk of severe injury or death is significantly different between hunting a rabbit, and hunting an elk. And carrion is even less dangerous, as long as it isn’t too old and moldy. So what wolf, needing to eat out in the wild to survive, would turn down an easy meal? Yet scavenging isn’t seen as sexy in American culture, other than in certain subcultures where the DIY (do it yourself) ethic is valued. Wolves, in mainstream culture, are usually depicted as ferocious hunters taking down large game, sometimes even supposedly as lone hunters. (Anyone remember that scene in Wolf where Jack-Nicholson-the-werewolf takes down a full-grown deer all by himself–in human form?*) In popular media, scavenging is largely left to the much-maligned vultures (this maligning is largely undeserved, as I explain here).

Human scavengers get a bad rap, too. There’s a lot of pressure in this culture to buy the newest, most bestest material goods EVER. If you buy secondhand, or get things repaired, it’s assumed that it’s because you simply can’t afford anything else, poor you (literally). Yet a lot of the people who apply the Reuse portion of Reuse-Reduce-Recycle to their everyday lives are perfectly capable of buying new–but choose not to. Of course, you have people who have to go that route, whether it’s only being able to buy clothing at Goodwill, or spending a lot of time dumpster diving out of sheer necessity.

So we can metaphorically equate the scavenging efforts of wolves to those of humans, as well as the attitudes toward scavenging–it’s supposed to be invisible in the powerful. At the same time, hunting, and particularly solitary hunting, is seen as the epitome of skill and worth, and so people who primarily make their living at a well-paying day job and throw their money around are seen by many as more successful or important than someone who lives more modestly within their means. The pursuit of the individual paycheck, and the hunt for the big game, is seen as superior to making use of what the “successful” have discarded.

Yet Wolf is an important symbol in all this. Wolf does both, and finds both to be nourishing. Having the skills to be able to both hunt and scavenge means more opportunities than in specializing in only one of those. In addition, scavenging carcasses is a necessary way to prevent the spread of disease, and other effects of leaving dead bodies around too long, as well as requiring fewer deaths overall; it’s good for the environment. Similarly, though for some different reasons, human scavenging and getting the most use out of secondhand resources is also good for the environment by creating less demand for new materials and reducing waste.

So there’s a good bit to be learned from Wolf in all this. Versatility, and not being afraid to do what needs to be done, regardless of what that is, are key points here. Wolf is both Hunter and Scavenger, and perhaps Wolf’s human counterparts may be able to take this lesson and apply it to real-world change.

* Okay, admittedly, Jack Nicholson made an awesome werewolf as far as I’m concerned. However, his awesomeness should not be taken as natural history by any stretch of the means.

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So You Want to Be an American Shaman…

A recent comment brought up a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. There was a request for more specific examples of how one can incorporate shamanism into general American culture (with the caveat, of course, that different subgroups in the U.S. and even individual people will react differently).

My personal favorite way is to find established roles in American culture that are more or less analogous to the shaman. There’s no single clear “shaman” role here, but elements of it may be found in several professions/callings.

The key in finding these roles is to look at the function of the shaman or similar figure in the cultures in which they are found, and then find roles in this culture that function similarly on some level. This is not a particularly animistic culture, and most people think the concept of spirits is either evil or insanity. Therefore there is only a relatively small slice of Americans who would be willing to consult a “shaman”. However, it’s still possible to fulfill the functions of a shaman while in a profession more commonly accepted here.

So what are the functions of a shaman? A lot depends on the culture, so please don’t take these as anything more than generalizations, but commonly:

–The shaman is a bridge between two worlds, whether between the community and a neighboring community, or the humans and spirits, or humans and non-human nature, etc. This can facilitate cooperation, but can also be integral to aggression, such as shamans working malevolent magic toward rival communities in times of war.

–The shaman is a healer, using physical and/or spiritual medicines and methods to cure ailments of the body, mind and spirit.

–The shaman is a mediator and may be called on to help with conflicts in the community.

–The shaman may or may not be an integrated part of the community, depending on culture. In some cases, the shaman functions as somewhat of a social scapegoat or outcast upon which the ills of the community are cast.

–The shaman is the keeper of rituals and lore, the applied mythology that creates meaning and facilitates passages in the community.

These are just some examples of functions of the shaman. So where are these found in American culture?

–Counselor/therapist: This, of course, was the path I chose. To my mind, one of the foundational functions of the shaman is as the mediator between worlds, and in addition to external relationships, this includes intrapsychic communication among different levels of the self. As a counselor, I will be helping people gain better insight into themselves and how their minds work, which can also be applied to clients’ relationships, life choices, and other external circumstances. While often shamans may go on journeys alone, in some cases they take the client with them into the journey. In the same way, a counselor may take a more directive approach in giving the client advice and prescribing treatment, or may be more collaborative and integrate the client in the decisions surrounding therapy–how much direction depends on a variety of factors including the client, what’s being treated, the “energy” of the individual session, and so on. In most cases the journey is into the psyche, not the Otherworld (though some would argue there’s no difference other than semantics), though some therapists, such as those incorporating narrative therapy, may help clients create and carry out personal rites of passage, sometimes even including friends, family and other relevant people.

–Doctors and other medical professions: A friend of mine became am EMT as part of her shamanism. Like it or not, the Western medical system is the dominant paradigm of healing in the U.S. This paradigm, however, is not as monolithically pharmaceutical as it once was, however. Preventive medicine is a bigger concern, and doctors are carefully integrating complementary medicines which are shown to be effective. When treating my acid reflux, my doctor, for example, is a well-established internist, but she consults her hospital’s database of treatments which includes both omeprazole and probiotics. Given that things like antibiotics and heart surgery are the reason that the average lifespan in the U.S. is in the upper 70s/lower 80s, any “healer” would be highly unethical to dismiss Western medicine entirely. In fact, a shaman should recommend whatever is most effective, not whatever is most trendy. This means that some shamans may want to get training in Western medicine, whether that’s first aid training, or medical school, or any point in between.

–Clergy: While the term “clergy” often brings up Christianity in most Americans’ minds, clergy as a function transcends religious trappings. A clergyperson is someone who is a spiritual leader in their community, who holds the rituals and mythos of the religion, and offers guidance within the structure of that path. Pagan clergy most often resonate with the role of shaman, but really, there’s nothing keeping a clergyperson of any other religion from also applying that function to themselves, other than personally perceived boundaries.

–Artist/writer/musician: The right-brained wellspring of creativity found in all arts is a wonderful tool for journeying and other practices of shamanism. A shamanic performance ritual, for example, relies a great deal on the suspension of disbelief to help the audience “know” that the shaman whose body is in front of them is also flying in another realm, perhaps even having turned into another animal or other being. Creative works, whether visual, auditory, etc. can all be portals to other levels of consciousness/planes of reality, and art may consciously be used to facilitate the same sorts of tasks that a shaman in another culture–who may also be an artist–may perform. The art does not have to be “shamanic” in nature; we do not have to take the methods of indigenous people instead of, say, acrylics and oil paints, scrap metal mixed media, DJing, spoken word, etc. What’s most important is the inspiration to shift one’s consciousness for a particular purpose.

–Scientist: One of the things that frustrates me to no end is the anti-science threads through spirituality in general, and neopaganism in particular. “Science” is seen as “cold”, “unfeeling”, lacking in imagination, etc. just because it doesn’t prove the objective experience of spirits and magic. Yet, to me, science is a source of great wonder and awe at the world around me. The Otherworld is an amazing place, and I don’t particularly care whether it’s all in my own head/collective consciousness or not, with no objective reality beyond the human psyche. But I do not try to put it in the same place in my cosmology as the world of atoms, or astrophysics, or the natural history of nonhuman animals, or photosynthesis. And to me, the things that scientists are discovering and exploring are every bit as important and inspiring as any journey I’ve had. The scientist doing research into new and uncharted territory goes into places where most people could never fathom and brings back information and knowledge to aid the populace. If that’s not shamanism, I don’t know what is.

These are just a few examples of analogous roles to the shaman in this culture. I’m sure my readership could think of more, and I’m certainly open to suggestions! So–whaddya think?

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“Natural” vs. Artificial”

One of the things that has bothered me for a while about paganism, environmentalism, and really, the way so many people in postindustrial cultures approach nature, is the concept of “natural” vs. “artificial”. In short, this is usually defined as anything made by humans, particularly things that can’t occur in any other way, such as petrochemicals or double-paned glass, being artificial. Artificial things are especially seen as bad things, so the emphasis is often put on human-made things that cause significant, widespread destruction to other parts of the environment, such as pollution or strip mining. I’ve seen many pagan folk refer to anything “artificial” with a sneer.

I just don’t like that at all. Here’s the thing. I am fully behind evolution as a base explanation for how various living beings came about. While I feel there is subjective value in things like creation myths, and I think they tell us a lot about the human psyche and methods of meaning-making, they do not replace evolution as the generally objective explanation for how we all got here in the first place. Stories of dragons do not carry more scientific weight than the fossil record.

Looking from an evolutionary perspective, humans are animals. And we evolved big brains as our single most important adaptation to the environmental pressures put on us. Everything we have created, from culture to architecture to medicines to religion–all these are the product of the brains we’ve evolved. Not every product of the brain is immediately noticeable as having pragmatic purposes, and indeed there are some interesting extrapolations of survival instincts repurposed into impractical (and yet sometimes incredibly fun!) pursuits. However, there is nothing that we do that did not come about as a result of our evolutionary history.

So put in that framework, all the things we build–homes, roads, cars, computers–are just extensions of the instinct to have shelter, get food and mates, raise young, etc. We have taken the basic need to build a nest and turned it into an unthinkably complex system of shelters and things to acquire shelters (and other resources). For brevity’s sake, I will be referring to this as the human nest-building endeavor.

So it is that humans make VERY big nests. And it just so happens that we are better than any other animal at excluding other species from our nests at will. Birds, for example, will remove parasites and other unwanted critters from their nests to protect their young; so will mammalian parents. We’ve just gotten really damned good at the same thing. We are weatherproofing and removing plants that could undermine foundations and keeping out other animals that could introduce disease or be a threat to us and our families. And so our weathertight buildings and better mousetraps are just the natural result of taking those instincts toward nest building and funneling them through our brains.

Because we are also conscious beings aware of the many layers of cause and effect involved in our actions, we can perceive the impact we have on those other species over time, and many of us feel a sense of responsibility for that. And so we retell the story of what we have done. Because we have taken nest building to such an extreme degree, we set ourselves apart from all other animals.

But this doesn’t stop the fact that we are animals, and that ultimately what we do is natural. Overwrought, perhaps, in the same way that cancer is an overwrought creation of cells–but cancer is still natural, too, even if it is a horrible thing to have. (If we could create cancer at will instead of having it begin on its own, would we then refer to cancer as artificial?)

Now, all that being said, I still love my John Muir quote at the top of the page–“In the silence of the wild, we find the home we lost in the city”. It is healthy to get out of our nests for a while and experience what ecopsychologists refer to as “soft fascination”. Soft fascination is a quality of something which draws the attention without demanding it; wild places have a tendency to be less demanding and more intriguing. There’s a lack of stress of the sort that we often find in our human nests, what with all the obligations and schedules and factors that we have to keep track of on a conscious level, as opposed to the largely unconscious awareness of our senses, where we are so used to processing sensory input that we don’t have to put much effort into paying attention for the most part. It just happens.

And yes, being out “in nature” is a different experience than being in, say, an urban community garden, or sitting with a pet in a small apartment. Nothing in urban Portland can duplicate for me the experience of standing at the very top of Kings Mountain, in hip-deep snow, with the wind blowing all around me and the sky blue up above, with the awe and terror of a place that could kill me if I didn’t take care.

But the “natural” vs. “artificial” divide undermines efforts to reconnect with the world around us no matter where we are or where we’re trying to connect . It still promotes this idea that we are separate from “nature”, and even if we idealize that nature, we are still setting ourselves apart from it in our perceptions. It’s just a different ideal than other people who separate themselves out because they see nature as bad, or dirty, or inconvenient, or only to be exploited. Separation is still separation.

Plus, as has been mentioned by numerous urban pagans and others, non-human nature is everywhere. A pot of geraniums on a porch is just as much nature as a grove of old growth conifers. Pigeons may be ubiquitous in the city, but they are as much blood and flesh and feather as the albatross sailing solitary over the ocean. Bricks and asphalt are ultimately made of stone, reconstituted. So why, surrounded by these plants and animals and minerals, do we not feel that we are natural, just as much as when we are far away from human influence?

If you want to differentiate between things humans create and things that occur without our help, that’s fine. But I would argue against this divisive duality of artificial vs. natural, where anything artificial must necessarily be not only antithetical to nature, but also subjectively wrong and loathesome. We also need to stop seeing ourselves as “unnatural” simply because we are so different from the rest of nature. If we are to reconnect with everything else, we have to stop perceiving ourselves as separate. That’s the first step in remembering that we never really left in the first place. From there we can then proceed to remembering those connections that remind us of the effect we have on everything else, which is the point that proponents of “artificial” vs. “natural” are often trying to make in the first place.

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More on Being a (White) American Shaman

One of the comments to my last post brought up EXACTLY why I get so frustrated with (white, college-educated, more-or-less middle class) Americans saying they have no culture or that they should abandon what culture they have.

But–YOU CAN’T ABANDON YOUR CULTURE OF ORIGIN ENTIRELY. Not without spending many years completely assimilated into another culture, and even then your experience is always going to be different from that of someone who was raised in that culture by birth. For many American neopagans, the ingrained tendency toward things like independence, valuing intelligence, emphasis on having a great deal of personal choice and preference for having many options to choose from–these things are not going to just go away. The very fact that a person is trying to rebel against the culture of origin states that they feel that they can do so–and that’s a hallmark of that independence that I mentioned. You can’t start over with a blank slate. You just can’t. Your brain is not a slate.

I remember one attempted effort at community building that I was invited to. I sat for a few hours listening to an upper-middle-class white woman with Tibetan flags on the porch of her nicely restored two-story house talk about how disjointed and disconnected everyone in this society was, and how neighbors didn’t help each other any more. She talked about creating a network of people to trade skills, to barter what they had, to automatically help any one person in the group who had a need, regardless of that need.

And it sounded incredibly naive. Here I was, sitting in a group of about twenty people, and the only person I knew at all was my then-husband. How were we supposed to feel okay about offering up our services to strangers we’d never met, when we were raised in a culture that had a lot of mistrust worked into it? Before we could have some utopic vision of collaboration come together, we had to be able to overcome this enculturated mistrust. And yet the first thing we were talking about was what skills were represented. If I recall correctly, we had one person who had a trade–plumbing or electrician, I think–and about eight tarot readers–which spoke to the extreme homogenization of the group that was primarily present. So we ran up against another problem–the tendency to seek out People Like Us, and an inability to communicate with People Not Like Us.

I see people like these trying to do things like artificially create a cohesive community akin to that found in a more communally-based culture, and seeing the efforts collapse. It’s not that they aren’t earnest. It’s that they’re trying to create something that they have little to no direct experience of, and which goes entirely against what they were raised with. Most of us were raised with the concept of nuclear families as the central building block (albeit sometimes blended nuclear families thanks to the divorce rate), but still with that emphasis on the identity as an individual within that group, with strong loyalty toward one’s own interests, sometimes over and above the needs of the group. This runs counter to many communal cultures where you put the group first, and arrange your identity as an individual around that.

My point is not to try to discourage people from improving on our culture. My point is that it’s time to quit denying that we have a culture that we come from, flaws and all. And it’s in our own best interests to play to the strengths of that culture. That doesn’t mean it has to be to the exclusion of learning from other cultures. But in order to get somewhere, you have to understand where you’re coming from and what you have to work with. Cultural elements are not plug-and-play. As I have complained many times about core shamanism (most notably this post), you can’t yank things out of a culture’s shamanism and plug it into your own and expect to get the same results. Shamanisms, like so many other things, are a product of the cultures they come from. Yes, there’s the universal human experience–for example, we have a common theme of a world tree/other vertical axis because we are upright, vertically-oriented visual creatures. But we cannot divorce this extreme macro experience from the less macro contexts of individual cultures (and subcultures).

So let’s look at the strengths of where I come from–middle class, college-educated, liberal white American that I am. Here are values that I have:

–Independence: I keep bringing this up because it is a strength. Because I am independent and was raised with the idea of developing myself strongly as an individual, I was able to create an ideal self to work toward. This included countering some unsavory trends that I found in the small town I did most of my growing up in–racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, etc. My independence allowed me to deny those influences, among others.

–Self-reliance: While negatively this has been used to promote things like the misguided notion of bootstrapping, as with anything it can also be a strength. Self-reliance helped me in things like being self-employed, being experimental in my spiritual path, and being comfortable in being a solitary practitioner.

–Creativity: Ingenuity is a common thread in America. Just because it’s used for things like inventing a bigger, more gas-guzzling SUV or new ways to fuck over American workers doesn’t mean that’s all it’s for. Creativity comes up with everything from inventive protest signs to finding ways to solve the very real social, environmental, medical and other problems we face–as Einstein himself said, “”You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it”.

–Social justice: Yes, there’s a lot of injustice in this culture. But there are still many Americans who are dedicated to justice for all, including social justice. In my work in my internship, I am working with women straight out of prison who are recovering from severe addictions, and who have a high risk of reoffense. In my time here, I have learned a lot more about the efforts that are being made across the board to help “throwaway populations”, the ones that more privileged people want to pretend aren’t there, or are beyond help, just so they don’t have to put forth the work to help someone else. Just because these efforts don’t make exciting headlines doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

–Industry: That Protestant work ethic can come in handy, especially if tempered with other practices to keep it from turning into workaholicism. It’s part of what helps us actually get shit done. Surely American neoshamans can find some use for this trait?

–Opportunity: While some Americans are more stingy about it than others, we still have the core value of opportunity for all. What it takes for someone to have an opportunity extended to them, and to have the ability to actually take advantage of it, is variable from person to person and depends on a lot of factors. However, culturally we value finding and making the most of opportunities.

Things like strip malls, dishonest politicians, and massive SUVS–these are surface symptoms. It’s what they’re symptomatic of that’s really important. The values above are tools. Any of these can be used constructively or destructively, sometimes even in the same action or by the same person.

Like it or not, the values and ideals that you are exposed to for a large portion of your life do leave a mark on you that, for all intents and purposes, is indelible. You can add to your experiences and viewpoints, but there will always be at least a shadow of where you’ve been before. You can consciously claim to reject your culture, though in actuality you’re probably only rejecting certain elements of it. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to have tabula rasa, or that you’ll be able to acquire a new culture in the same way as someone raised in it. Nor can you create a new culture entirely unmarked by your past, or the pasts of anyone else involved in cutting and shaping whole cloth.

We need to own that fact. Instead of trying to claim we’re part of a cultural wasteland, I feel it is vital to embrace the strengths of the culture we do have. Disillusionment just creates illusions of its own. And those illusions can get in the way of actual progress in working against the very things we reject.

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Yes, White Americans DO Have a Culture!

One of the things I’ve periodically bumped into as a justification for neoshamans and other neopagans to draw from indigenous cultures is that “white Americans don’t have a culture”. By this they generally mean that white American culture is limited to strip malls and fast food and pasty men in suits telling us how the country ought to be run. Somehow this then translates into a dichotomy where everything that seems antithetical to this construct is considered “good”. Hence we end up with a bunch of white people playing African drums, offering rum to lwa, and shoving New Age concepts into oracles based on “Native American spirituality”.

I’m not condemning drumming, white Vodouisants, or non-Native people having good relationships with Native cultures. However, if you look at the “cultural appropriation” category of this blog, I think it’s clear that I have some issues with the way in which a lot of pagan-type folk “borrow” from cultures other than their own. Often it’s a surface treatment of the borrowed culture, with little to no awareness of the power differential between the culture of the borrower and that of the borrowed.

The other issue is that the borrowers often forget that yes, they do have a culture that they’ve been raised with and which, whether they like it or not, permeates their lifelong conditioning and approach to the world. This is why there can be such conflict when they try to insert themselves in another culture–they’re bringing more cultural baggage with them than they want to admit, and if they aren’t admitting they have it at all, then the baggage is just going to sit there and be a big problem. Just because they don’t notice it’s there doesn’t mean others don’t, either.

Let’s look at one of the hallmarks of white American culture (and, admittedly, others, though the U.S. seems to have particularly latched on to it)–individuality. As a culture, white Americans value individuality above collectivity. “Do your own thing”, “the rugged individualist”, “the lone wolf”, “just do it”–these and so many more societal messages encourage us to work independently of others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Valuing being an individual doesn’t automatically translate to having narcissistic personality disorder. Individuals often display a certain amount of unfettered creativity because they don’t feel held back by group norms. And people in a more individual-based society can still have healthy relationships. It’s just that values and mores may be somewhat different than in a more collective society.

Many indigenous cultures tend toward being more collective. Again, this is not better or worse, objectively speaking. However, there’s a huge difference between being raised in a collective culture, and trying to create community in an individual-based culture. The way one forms relationships, the values that are applied to those relationships, and the balance between self and others are ingrained from birth, and it’s harder to learn new ways of doing these things later in life, especially as an adult. It’s not impossible, of course, but it requires more immersion than what most neoshamans and neopagans who draw from other cultures experience.

Yet time and again I see pagans romanticizing collective cultures and demonizing individuality. In doing so, they ignore the conditioning they have as individuals and try to shoehorn themselves into some artificial community construct, or, alternately, attempt to join up with a more collective culture while approaching it with a largely individualistic mindset (which they often deny they have!) In the former case, all too often these artificial communities end up with short lifespans because no one really has the skills to be able to build their scaffolding from scratch. In the latter, there are numerous examples of well-meaning but clueless white people hanging around the edges of indigenous communities, hoping someone will take them in, or worse yet, inviting themselves into the community and creating quite a mess of things.

Additionally, the conflict between individual and collective ways of being manifest themselves in some of the more arrogant manners of cultural appropriation. These tend to be along the lines of “My spirituality is MINE, and I can do whatever I want with it, and if the gods/spirits/etc. talk to ME, then I can work out whatever relationship I want with them and no one else matters!” Granted, this is an extreme; I am quite individualistic in my approach to totemism and my insistence that in this culture it’s better to work out individual relationships with the totems. However, I also urge people to be aware of cultural appropriation when looking at any other culture’s totemic system, and to be mindful of where they’re coming from when approaching those other systems.

My point in all this is not to say individuality is bad and collectivity is good. Individuality in and of itself, again, is not a bad thing. What this is meant to be an example of is how ignorance of one’s own culture of origin can seriously affect interactions with other cultures. And it affects the continuing formation of neoshamanism.

See, one of my biggest gripes with core shamanism in particular is that so many people claim it’s “culturally neutral”. Which is bullshit. Core shamanism is white, college-educated, middle-class shamanism. Only people with the greatest amount of privilege would have the audacity to say that what they’re doing has no cultural trappings, because they’re the only ones who have enough privilege to ignore cultural differences. That’s part of what privilege is about: you have the option of ignoring everyone else, while everyone else has to pay attention to you.

And I see this time and again with white neoshamans. “We have no culture, so we can plug our shamanism into other people’s cultures.” It’s racist, and it’s also separating neoshamanism from the possibilities it could have in the culture that produces so many neoshamans. If we’re so busy trying to be like other cultures, is it any wonder that we have an increasingly negative view of our own?

So how do we white American neoshamans change this? Well, first of all, by admitting that we do have a culture, which, yes, does include things like strip malls and suburbs, but includes a whole lot else, too. We need to be exploring our communication styles, our values, our biases, and how this affects our interactions with others. We need to stop looking at our culture as something to be ignored or demonized (but not go the opposite direction and try to elevate it above everyone else–white supremacy is bad, mmmkay?) And we need to understand that even “white culture” is a broad artificial construct, that the concept of “whiteness” was created to try to marginalize racial and ethnic minorities, and that there are a lot of nuanced subcultures under the umbrella of “white culture”. Plus there’s the issue of intersectionality–we are not just our race, but our sex, gender identity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, ability, and numerous other things that make up our social location. We can’t ignore these influences and just say we’re “culturally neutral”. It’s impossible.

Most of all, we need to stop with this whole “All people are one people” thing. Yes, it is good to acknowledge interconnection and universality. However, “all people are one people” is too often used in the same way as “I’m racially colorblind”–a nice-sounding way of absolving one’s self of the hard work of admitting there are still very real inequalities, and saying “we are all one” does jack shit to actually address or do anything about those inequalities. It’s little consolation to people who are stuck on the bad end of those inequalities, and again “we are one” originates uniquely out of a place of privilege.

And “we are one/all people are one people” is too often used to justify cultural appropriation. After all, if we’re all human beings, then we all have the right to use whatever cultural or spiritual trappings we like, right? We’re breaking down the barriers and boundaries between us, aren’t we? Except a lot of the time it’s the people who are more empowered who are busting down the defenses of minorities who use those boundaries to feel more protected. Just read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, for example, and you can get a pretty good idea of why so many Native people are so distrustful of white people–and why walking in saying “We’re all brothers and sisters” just ain’t gonna cut it.

So I challenge you to start thinking about this stuff if you haven’t already. If you’re a white, middle-class, college-educated American neoshaman like me, look at how your culture–and other social factors–affect your shamanism. If you glorify indigenous cultures over your own, look at what you dislike so much about yours and see whether that’s really warranted. Chew on this stuff. See what you make of it.

ETA: 11 September, 2012 – The comments on this blog, to include this post, are screened. If you’re going to just leave vitriolic screeds against one group or another, don’t bother. They’ll just get trashed. If you want to constructively add to the conversation, whether you agree with what I say or not, that’s fine. But ranty bits about how “all members of [group] are [stereotype]” aren’t going to see the light of day here. This is a very sensitive topic, and I don’t want this to devolve into people virtually screaming at each other. It doesn’t do anyone any good, and it won’t help you feel better, either.

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How To Talk To Dead Things

So for those who don’t know, I have been working with animal parts in my art and spirituality since the late 1990s. It’s been a pretty continual process, and I’ve developed a lot of techniques both in the artistic and spiritual ends of the practice.

Being an animist, I observe spirits within the skins and bones and other remains. It’s not the soul of the animal that once wore these pieces and parts and collections of cells, but what remains–the spirit of the skin, collective spirits of hairs, etc. It’s like Russian nesting dolls–each cell has a spirit, and those add up into greater spirits, just as individual animal and plants spirits are folded over into the spirit of the Land. And yet they’re all their own entities at the very same time.

Back when I started all this, there was nothing on how to work with what I term “skin spirits”. I didn’t know anyone who did that sort of work. So, like the rest of my practice, I had to figure it out on my own. And it was a process of trial and error. First I had to realize there were spirits in these remains at all. And then I had to figure out how best to talk to them. (More on that in a bit.) And once we could converse, I had to be able to listen and act on that.

And over the years, almost everyone I met who worked with them had learned how to do so from observing me or reading things I’d written in articles, on forums, or in blogs about the practices I had created from scratch. In an attempt to spread the knowledge even further, I wrote what is to my knowledge the first (and only, at this point) book on the topic, also named Skin Spirits.

I do like hearing from other people who have done this sort of spiritual work, whether influenced by me or not. I know a lot of people who collect or make things with animal remains, but it’s only a small portion who do spiritual work with them, whether they’re literal animists, or simply see the ritual as a good practice. Either way, it’s an additional layer of respect that isn’t mandatory, but which can be quite artistic.

One thing I wanted to share was an introductory “how-to” regarding the actual process of communicating with the spirits in the remains. This will work whether you believe spirits are actual entities with independent agency, or elements of the human imagination. And it works with any hide, bone, feather, claw etc., though you may have to add in a little extra intuition if you don’t know the species! (For simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to use the term “skin” in lieu of listing all sorts of remains.)

First, sit with the skin in a comfortable, quiet place. Hold it, touch it, examine the colors and contours. Get to know the actual material skin.

Next, close your eyes and do your best to quiet your mind. If you need something to focus your mind on, keep focusing on your sense of touch and keep working with the physical skin.

Now, open your mind to the spirit in the skin. If you aren’t sure how to do this, imagine a cord extending from your forehead to the forehead of the skin.

Keeping the connection open, see if any images, words, or sensations come to your attention. Try not to go in with any expectations. Simply see what happens. If you notice something unusual, observe quietly.

You might try starting the conversation yourself. When I do this, it isn’t so much words as it is a stream of consciousness or flow of information, if that makes sense. However, you can use words as well. I find that the aforementioned consciousness/information “translates” to and from words well. It’s all about how your brain processes it.

If you don’t get an immediate response, don’t worry. The spirit may not feel like talking just yet. Conversely, you might need more practice in listening to spirits. One way to help this along is to basically create a vessel for the animal to use. Visualize the animal, whole and alive, in your mind. Start with letting it just stand there. Don’t try to make it do anything else. If the animal starts to move or speak of its own volition, let it do so at its own pace. This is the spirit taking the vessel you have created and using it as a conduit for communication.

As to the conversations? That’s entirely open-ended. One thing I find useful as a topic to discuss is what the skin would like done with it. After all, I started this work in the first place because I wanted the remains to have a better “afterlife” than being a trophy on someone’s wall or a status symbol in the closet. A lot of my best artwork ideas have been ones suggested to me by the spirits whose remains I’m using in those artwork pieces.

You may find after a while that the spirits may “nudge” you when they want to talk, especially if you have them out in your home where you can see them (which I feel is preferable anyway). This can occasionally be a bit much, especially if they’re persistent. You may want to learn how to “turn the sound off” for a while if it’s getting disruptive. However, take some of these opportunities when they happen, too.

This is just the very beginning of my skin spirits work. You can find out more (for free!) in the Skin Spirits category of this blog, or (not for free, but it goes to a good cause!) my aforementioned book.