It is the rare contemporary person in the USA who knows what to do with death; how to approach death, how to ease the dying when they are suffering, how to tend the transition from living to dead, and how to deal with those folks who have been dead for a while, but their issues just won’t go away. This all begins with understanding what it means to be “The Living” and how we are in relationship with Death, dying, and the dead. This week host, Christina Pratt, offers an Ancestral Overview that puts all the pieces of the Living and the Dead into place. We can use this map to better understand how to grieve the dead after a year of so much loss, tend the transitions as they are happening, and work with the long dead to create the kind of Ancestors that support us in doing the hard things that are also the right things in a world that needs us to be better humans.

Death, Dying, and The Dead: Ancestral Overview

The Deep Liberation Process is time tested over 30 years and fine-tuned online with 950+ people. The core of its uniqueness is a fractal clearing process that allows you to navigate to the root of stuck patterns, stories and beliefs that uproot your healthy grounding and boundaries and reclaim your freedom to act in alignment with your authenticity and purpose. They also prepare you to step into the Shadow Transformation Process and completely transform what feels impossible to change. Join us for the final part of our series as we look at what we need to learn and do together to co-create a sustainable, just, and free way of life together? Author and practitioner, Langston Kahn, and host, Christina Pratt, explore the potential of the Deep Liberation Process skillset to support us in shadow transformation and ancestral healing. Together we can step into the fierce, unyielding heart of transformative love and restorative justice with anyone who will step into it with us.

Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma - Part Three

The Deep Liberation Process is a literal and accessible path forward—from wherever you are—out of your unconscious, everyday repetition of history and into the engaged, mature expression of your true self. This experiential skillset has 3 parts, each its own course, that build one on the other. With these skills you are able to release limiting beliefs, clear emotional turmoil or numbness, and free yourself at the root in the past that support the persistent patterns that frustrate your life. Join us for Part Two of this series, as author and practitioner, Langston Kahn, and host, Christina Pratt, discuss the potential is collective work and other exciting aspects of Advanced Energy Body Clearing, offered every third year. At this level the Deep Liberation Process skillset gives us the ability to work in focused collaborative effort to undermine and transform the systemic injustice we share and dismantle the internalized patterns of unconscious colonizer thinking that colors our innovation and collaborative creation.

Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma - Part Two

The Deep Liberation Process invites us to discover how we can divest our energy and liberate our imagination from the oppressive systems and broken culture we inhabit. This is not a solo job. It is both personal and collective, but one we can only do together. If we learn to do that—to embrace and celebrate diversity, both human and nonhuman—then we will share in the manifestation of a more just and joyful future together. If we don’t, we are abandoning why we are here completely. Join us in a new series, as author and practitioner, Langston Kahn, and host, Christina Pratt, discuss a literal and accessible path forward—from wherever you are—out of your unconscious, everyday repetition of history. With this experiential skillset you can step into the fierce, unyielding heart of transformative love and restorative justice with us and our global Deep Liberation Community.

Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma - Part One

Langston Kahn

So often in spiritual circles we are taught to see our humanity as something we have to overcome or deal with. Even when we understand the importance of practices like grounding, we often see them as boring or an unpleasant burden. What if our humanity was one of the most exciting aspects of ourself? What if our humanity was where an ecstatic conversation with the archetypal realms and the Gods was waiting for us? Join shamanic practitioner Langston Kahn as he discusses what might be possible if we were able to fully liberate and rest into one of the most fundamental aspects of our being, our humanity and how we might engage its unique intelligence.

Liberating Our Humanity With Langston Kahn

Centering the heart’s wisdom is rare in our plethora of movements, traditions, and modalities that we engage to tend our Body, Mind, and Spirit. Many modalities engage tools of the body, mind, and spirit to bypass our emotional experience and the way of true love. Yet our heart and emotions are wise wild teachers for emotionally mature spiritual adults. Concluding this three part series, Langston interviews Christina on the opportunities we can create for the times we are in when we choose to access the wisdom of our heart and our emotions. Join us this week as they explore how to more fully center the wisdom of the heart in our lives and practices. Discover the ways the heart and our emotions are uniquely suited to guide us towards a more just, connected, and liberated world.

Rescuing the Heart at the End of the World - Part Three

With all of our Body, Mind, and Spirit practices we still rarely address the heart or our emotions. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or pathologize when intense. We are often taught to bypass our emotions rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be. With so few references for what a healthy adult relationship with emotions looks like, it can be hard to even imagine what a mature life affirming emotional response might feel like. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt to explore “emotional maturity” and expressing our emotions in service of life and the more just world we are striving to create. Join us as they explore how to discern between appropriate emotional intensity or indulgence, true peace or bypassing, and how to liberate and honor our authentic emotional response.

Rescuing the Heart at the End of the World - Part Two

Today there are a plethora of movements, traditions, and modalities that promise to help us tend our Mind, Body, and Spirit. However, rarely is the heart or our emotions addressed. Even when our emotions are mentioned, they are often treated as something we need to regulate, discharge, or transcend. And any experience of emotional intensity is pathologized. Rather than allowing our heart and emotions to be the wise wild teachers they are meant to be, many modalities engage tools of the body, mind, and spirit to bypass our emotional experience and the way of true love. This week Langston Kahn interviews Christina Pratt on the importance of reclaiming our authentic emotional response in times of transition. Join us as they explore this key component of accessing the sacred wisdom of our heart where our mind, body, and spirit can come into true harmony.

Rescuing the Heart at the End of the World - Part One

At the core of living well is the ability to center love as a place of power in any circumstance. This is equally, and in some circumstances differently, true individually and collectively. To center love empowers us to remember what we care about, what has value, and what is meaningful for us to commit time, energy, and resources toward. It reminds us why we should bother. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she shares practices and explores the dynamics involved stepping into love as an act of revolution, liberation, and creation of a new world. This week look at how the Cycle Teachings help us to meet the waves of stress that keep rolling in from climate change, pandemic demands on space and time, social strain of living with life narratives that refuse to ground in reality, and the heartbreak of not knowing how to show up as parents for all of the ways this is affecting our children.

Centering Love as a Place of Power

As we navigate times of great uncertainty and opportunity it is more important than ever to be intentional about how we use our energy. The vast unknown of the future is shaped by how we individually and collectively choose to respond to our current moment. However, until we free ourselves from the harmful stories and energetic patterning of white supremacy and settler-colonialism we carry within us, we will continue to create new versions of the problems we face today. This week guest host Langston Kahn, senior teacher at the Last Mask Center, offers a new podcast exploring how we can engage our skills to liberate our imagination from the confines of oppressive paradigms and put our energy in service of birthing a more loving world.

Liberating Our Imagination with Langston Kahn

Why Shamanism Now is a weekly live Internet radio show hosted by Christina Pratt and featuring guest interviews and live email and phone questions and answers. The show airs every Tuesday morning at 11:00 am PST on Co-Creator Network. To participate in the live call, go to http://www.co-creatornetwork.com/hosts/shamanism/host_bio.htm . Christina is an authentic, non-traditional contemporary shaman. In practice since 1990, she specializes in mending the soul and transforming the parts of life that feel impossible. She is the director of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing in Portland, OR.

This is such an incredible podcast, so much good info and wisdom. Thank you for sharing with us.

Great show

thank you for living your soul’s purpose so that I could search for mine.

grateful

Why Shamanism Now is a weekly live Internet radio show hosted by Christina Pratt and featuring guest interviews and live email and phone questions and answers. The show airs every Tuesday morning at 11:00 am PST on Co-Creator Network. To participate in the live call, go to <a href="http://www.co-creatornetwork.com/hosts/shamanism/host_bio.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.co-creatornetwork.com/hosts/shamanism/host_bio.htm</a> . Christina is an authentic, non-traditional contemporary shaman. In practice since 1990, she specializes in mending the soul and transforming the parts of life that feel impossible. She is the director of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing in Portland, OR.

Why Shamanism Now - A Practical Path to Authenticity

Sandra Ingerman

“There is a lot to understand about the results of bridging the powerful and ancient method of Soul Retrieval into a modern day psychologically sophisticated culture,” says author, therapist, and internationally recognized teacher, Sandra Ingerman. “In Western cultures we are not always supported to live a life filled with meaning. We often cannot connect the dots to how our lifestyle has created emotional and physical illnesses we are dealing with today.” This is why the quality of training people receive to perform soul retrieval healings is critically important. This week Sandra Ingerman joins host, Christina Pratt, to discuss what to look for in soul retrieval trainings and why.  Sandra is our next guest for the Society of Shamanic Practitioners sponsored interview series.  In this series we explore how contemporary shamans are meeting the challenge of their world where the relations of things are profoundly out of balance.  It is the ancient role of the shaman in all cultures to tend the balance of things. How are we meeting this extraordinary need today?

Soul Retrieval Training with Sandra Ingerman

When we are not aware of our soul’s true purpose or simply not aligned in our actions, contemporary life can fill quickly with diseases of the soul. People, high and low functioning alike, feel a sense of alienation and betrayal that runs deep while the source of those feelings remains a mystery. Many are so depressed or fatigued that they don’t have the energy to care about what is authentic or what aligns with their heart. Many others find that, though they are doing all the right things, that passionate sense of meaning and purpose just isn’t happening. “Contemporary life is filled with so much promise of happiness and fulfillment, but to access what life promises, we all need skills, healing, and support in our transformation,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. Many are betrayed again and again by the failure in our culture to offer valid and effective paths back to our soul and its purpose for being here. Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina about finding the most direct path to living your soul’s true purpose.

Your Soul’s Purpose and Transformation: Part 1

Author, professor, and peacemaker, Stephan Beyer, joins us this week to discuss his new book, "Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon." Stephan explains, “Singing to the Plants seeks to understand one form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and my own experiences with two master healers of the Amazon.”  Join us as we discuss the use of plant medicines (plant hallucinogens or entheogens) in shamanism in the Upper Amazon and its relevance—should we or shouldn’t we—in shamanic practices outside of these traditions. We will reach into the depths of Stephan’s personal experience to discuss the healing potential of shamanism as well as the potential to do harm through attack sorcery. Ultimately we will explore the idea that shamanism is “irreducibly social” such that all shamanic healing as well as harming takes place within a cultural context where shared values like trust, reciprocity, or generosity are at the root of personal illness and suffering.

Author, professor, and peacemaker, Stephan Beyer, joins us this week to discuss his new book, "Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon." Stephan explains, “Singing to the Plants seeks to understand one form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and my own experiences with two master healers of the Amazon.” Join us as we discuss the use of plant medicines (plant hallucinogens or entheogens) in shamanism in the Upper Amazon and its relevance—should we or shouldn’t we—in shamanic practices outside of these traditions. We will reach into the depths of Stephan’s personal experience to discuss the healing potential of shamanism as well as the potential to do harm through attack sorcery. Ultimately we will explore the idea that shamanism is “irreducibly social” such that all shamanic healing as well as harming takes place within a cultural context where shared values like trust, reciprocity, or generosity are at the root of personal illness and suffering.

Shamanism and Plant Medicines

In shamanic cultures around the world it is the Trickster who made the world as we actually find it; not a perfect Eden, but complex, messy, beautiful, and painful. It is the crazy logic of the Trickster, life saving and sacrifice demanding, that can help us to navigate where our blindness, deafness or simple stubborn refusal to do what we know we need to do gets in trouble. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, in this replay of a favorite show on the Trickster. Author Lewis Hyde writes, “The Trickster cannot be trusted. It is a contact that puts us slightly at risk; we open ourselves to disruption whenever we call on him.”  But it is that opening that allows miracles, the impossible, surprise and the reversal of fortunes. The Trickster reveals the short cuts that allow us to get to the full, loving expression of our soul’s true purpose in spite of ourselves.

How the Trickster Teaches Us

What are the ethics for receiving shamanic healing? Much is written about ethics for practitioners, but is it really ethical to drop all the issues of your life in the lap of any healer and ask them to heal you in one session? Is it ethical to get angry about a session when the healing offered doesn’t play into the story you carry about your woundedness? Is it ever ethical to ask for healing, which is always an effort of energy expended, without offering anything in exchange for the healing energy spent on you? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the very prickly issue of the ethics for receiving shamanic healing. This week we slash expectations for magical cures and effortless life changes in the hopes of revealing how contemporary people can come to an ancient healing form prepared, informed, and ready to do what is needed to follow up responsibly.

How to Receive Shamanic Healing

Whose life do you want to be living? And how do you live the life that is an expression of your unique genius? To have the energy to live authentically we need to cultivate a vital and robust energy body. To do that we need to attend to both the energy that we are, the energy bucket, and the energy we bring into the bucket. Qi gong, time in nature, and naps can fill the bucket, while a day that requires you ignore your body, work beyond your ability to think, and drink caffeine to survive the day usually empties the bucket. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how cultivate the different dynamics of good energy body hygiene, part four of our series. Shamanic skills and awareness can help us to focus our energy on practices that are efficient and effective in cultivating good energy body hygiene.

Cultivating a Vital Energy Body

What if you had a chance to hit the restart button on your authenticity? To peel back all the layers of trauma to reveal the magnificent human being you came here to be? What would you risk pursuing if you knew you would be held by a community to love and support you through the entire process?This week guest host Langston Kahn, senior teacher at the Last Mask Center, will interview students involved in the first year of the Cycle of Transformation, a 4-year training process offered which begins with a week-long residential workshop, Masks of Illusion and the Authentic Self. They will explore together what brought them to the Cycle, how their lives have been changed by the first year of the teachings and what it’s like to be supported in transformation by a contemporary shamanic community.

What if you had a chance to hit the restart button on your authenticity? To peel back all the layers of trauma to reveal the magnificent human being you came here to be? What would you risk pursuing if you knew you would be held by a community to love and support you through the entire process? This week guest host Langston Kahn, senior teacher at the Last Mask Center, will interview students involved in the first year of the Cycle of Transformation, a 4-year training process offered which begins with a week-long residential workshop, Masks of Illusion and the Authentic Self. They will explore together what brought them to the Cycle, how their lives have been changed by the first year of the teachings and what it’s like to be supported in transformation by a contemporary shamanic community.

The Cycle of Transformation: Part One

Mary Shutan

There are many different types of spiritual awakenings, from kundalini rising to shamanic initiations and everything in between.  This often misunderstood range of human experience is explored beautifully and thoroughly by spiritual healer and author, Mary Mueller Shutan, in her new book The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and The Conditioned Layers of Reality from Findhorn Press. This guide is unique in helping the reader to understand what experience they are in the middle of and how to shape the experience into a meaningful transformation. Drawing from her extensive training in multiple healing forms, Mary joins host, Christina Pratt, to share the different layers of going to sleep, the many ways we wake up, and how to free your awakening process to become the direct revelatory path it is meant to be.

The Spiritual Awakening Guide with Mary Shutan

The shaman’s working relationship with spirit defines the practice or the healing as “shamanic”. It is the basic working relationship of shamanism and it is built on four even more fundamental relationships. The first fundamental is your relationship with the invisible world as a whole. The second is your relationship with ordinary reality and how you understand your place in the world around you. The third fundamental is your relationship with your personal energy in larger energetic reality around you. And finally your shamanic practice is guided by your relationship with your humanity and the quality of the choices that shape your path to your destiny. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how you cultivate health, well-being and efficacy in your practice and the fundamentals that are absolutely essential if you feel you are called to take that next step from shamanic practice into shamanic healing..

The Fundamentals of Shamanic Practice

The spirits teach us about love, one way or another, in each and every contact with them in journeys and out in nature, in dreams and meditations, in ritual and ceremony. So why do humans struggle so to find love? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores finding true love in the New World.  The Old World Story told us that love was scarce and we had to go out and find it. The deeper truth about love it that is exists within all things and our task is simply to cultivate the love innate within us. That doesn’t sound very sexy or dramatic, but the pull of attraction doesn’t have anything to do with love. Attraction is orchestrated by our Shadow and the aspects of our self not yet held in love, so following our attraction is our second mistake. The journey to find true love is the journey of becoming the person that you see in that vision and letting life take care of the rest. Join us in the New World where the messages of true love are all around us and love is abundant.

Finding True Love

The most direct path to living your soul’s true purpose is both individual and communal. As individuals, people often feel lost, fragmented, or unknown to themselves. Others may feel whole, but have lost the simple art of connecting deeply in inner dialogue with their soul.  Living in this way, at a distance from one’s self, creates anxiety daily and the life path that unfolds leads further and further away from the True Self.  Individually we must relearn the skills of deep inner communication.  Communally, we must come together to tend the critical gates in life: birth, adulthood, and death. This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares her experience teaching communities to tend the gates for each other and individuals to engage in meaningful inner dialogue with heart and soul. Join members from the Last Mask Center Community as they interview Christina, asking what soul healing Last Mask Center offers for individuals and communities, why these teachings work, and how our passionate expression of our soul’s purpose is exactly the medicine the world needs at this time.

Your Soul’s Purpose and Transformation: Part 2

Evelyn Rysdyk

There is nothing quite as powerful as making your own power objects and shamanic tools. Artist and shamanic teacher, Evelyn C. Rysdyk, joins us this week to share her new book, A Spirit Walker’s Guide to Shamanic Tools. This is a beautifully illustrated guide to creating, decorating, consecrating, and using sacred tools in ritual and healing. Evelyn explores everything from how to use little known tools like shamanic mirror and wind staffs to responsible ways of obtaining your materials to the sacred process for creating your own drums, rattles, bundles and staffs. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she and her guest explore part three of the Shamanic Practice Series: creating shamanic tools.

Creating Shamanic Tools with Evelyn Rysdyk

Sovereignty is the supreme power to self govern and it is the core of a life lived well. What does sovereignty mean in a time when we “follow” others, blame outside authority for what’s not working in our world, and give our power away daily to fears, anxiety, and habits generated by what we think others are thinkin? If we are to be the New People to shape a truly New World, we must reclaim and cultivate the old shamanic understanding of sovereignty as the center that is alive and connects all aspects of life. It is the place that we stand and what we stand for. If you cultivate sovereignty you can step into right relationship with your destiny which in turn gives you the freedom to choose to live the life of your true calling. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores how you can use your shamanic skills to become the center of your own life and co-create your destiny.

Sovereignty and Your Calling

Everything has a heart, even fear. In our chronic, cultural avoidance of fear we miss the heart of the matter and in that miss the way through the fear and into a new way of living. Instead we delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped only to find ourselves cycling through our litany of fear-based stories, day after day, relationship after relationship. “With the intelligence that comes through us in shamanic journeying,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “We can get past the anxiety and panic and touch the heart of the matter. Once at the heart of things all manner of interesting possibilities unfold.” Join us this week as we explore the elemental nature of fear and path rarely taken through the heart of it.

The Heart of Fear

One of the biggest challenges for us to understand in the New World is sovereignty or the supreme power to govern yourself.  The sense that we have supreme power terrifies most people because we witnesses abuse and misuse of power every day at home and around the world.  Add to that the fact that your supreme power carries with it your supreme responsibility to govern yourself, your energy, your thoughts, your choices, your physical health and most people are diving for the couch and some electronic device to escape. Why are we so afraid to live well? This is the question host and shaman, Christina Pratt explores this week offering shamanic remedies for the cultural issues that ail us and challenges for the soul cultivation that lies just out of reach. What better gift can you offer the next generation but the image of a life lived well?

Why Are We Afraid to Live Well?

David Kowalewski

Not all who die leave the realm of the living easily and these souls need help. From the beginning of people the shaman has served this role, the “psychopomp,” and transported the souls of the dead home, assuring their safe and complete journey through the death process. Each traditional culture defines the psychopomp’s work in its own way, influenced by that culture’s beliefs about the soul, death, and the process of dying. However shamanic people hold the universal belief that the souls of the dead need to move on to the Land of the Dead or they become a source of stress, physical illness, and mental distress for the living. As our world continues to amplify the conditions that cause a soul to need help crossing—violent death, unlived lives, despair, addiction, and spiritual ignorance—those who are able to escort the soul are needed even more. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt and her guest, David Kowalewski, Ph.D., psychopomp, university professor, shamanic healer, speaker and author.

Psychopomp—to Conduct the Souls of the Dead with David Kowalewski

Earth is the teacher in transformational processes showing us how to engage the power of the heart through our strength of heart and to make things manifest. Earth is the element of manifestation and without your body you wouldn’t be manifest. Our body is our earth element. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, for the new series, Working with the Elements. This week she explores how we can work with the earth element to cultivate the qualities of grounding, place, presence, and sovereignty. In a world where isolation and loneliness fuel depression there is big medicine to be found in the ability to work with the earth to create a sense of belonging, connection within, and interconnection with the larger reality.

Creating Presence and Autonomy—Working with Earth

The highly skilled wounded child arises when an adult learns an assortment of excellent skills to move out of the pain caused today by their unreconciled childhood without healing the wounds of that childhood along the path of that journey. The highly skilled wounded child tends to over-react and under-react regularly and then take responsibility for using their skillset to clear the painful reaction without investigating why they over or under reacted in the first place. They learn to clearly communicate to others how the others need to behave differently without seeing their own righteous positionality. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the growing phenomenon of the highly skilled wounded child, how to recognize this behavior in your self, and most importantly, how we can use our shamanic skills to heal the wounds of the past, cultivate resiliency, and bring our mature courageous hearts into action in the world.

The Highly Skilled Wounded Child

Shamans are made by spirit, through initiation and training, to become the answer to the prayers of the people. What could the world community of shamanic practitioners and healers, contemporary and traditional, become if they truly believed they were the medicine for the illnesses of humanity in their time? Shamans don’t just drink ayahuasca, do ceremony in workshops, and heal individual people one at a time. They restore health in communities, balance and harmony to the earth and remedy the old dream where it has, in reality, become a nightmare. Join host, Kate Smith, and her guest, Christina Pratt, as they continue their discussion of the transformations we must engage to become the New People who share the shamanic skills needed for us to create a more beautiful and sustainable New World.

Shamanic Skills for the New World: Part 2

How do we walk the line between the Old Story Rules and the New System we are creating? Once you have found the path to your soul’s purpose, how do you stay the course? Our lives are often a great web of responsibilities, expectations, addictions, and distractions that create conflict in our hearts and rob the clarity in our minds.  In that tension between who you have been and who you are becoming one hesitates to act and loses confidence that there was ever true guidance at all. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she answers listeners’ questions about the day-to-day effort and art of living your soul’s purpose. The secret is remembering that we have only one true responsibility, which is to live our soul’s purpose. And no matter the situation that arises on that journey, we have the most power to create change on ourselves in the moment.

Living your Soul’s Purpose

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