This past October, I was blessed to have been invited for two weeks of Advanced Training Courses with the Four Winds, in Los Lobos, Chile. I, along with most of the faculty, were guided by the voice and energy of the gifted Lynn Berryhill, who has been a shamanic practitioner and teacher for about 25 years.
Journeying with Lynn was an experience all it itself, and we did so at least once each day. The meeting room in Los Lobos was floor-to-ceiling windows, we sat on the floor with back-jacks, and in the cool October (Spring) mornings we clambered in from eating breakfast outside, greeted warmly by the wood-burning stove that amazingly heated the whole room. Sitting in a circle, facing each other and the altar, we began with some time in stillness and then shared our experiences and reflections of the previous day. Then, Lynn would pick up her drum, and the pace of the day was set. Her steady and clear voice rode with ease on the hoofs of her drumming, and we were carried effortlessly.
My first experience with Shamanism was through a healing session, which blew me away and ignited a force within me I never knew I had. From that moment on, I devoured books and information like a thirsty desert traveler who finally discovered water. That was when I was first introduced to Shamanic Journeying. I bought a beautiful, huge drum, I learned the map to the lower world, and I began to visit. I did this a few times a week, and each it felt more like a home I was begin drawn to, rather than ‘going’ somewhere.
Shamanic Journeying has been around since humans could maintain a rhythm. It is actually one of the oldest practices, and is common to peoples from all over the globe. There are many wonderful resources about Shamanic Journeying, each has their own way of explaining the process. My first encounter was with Sandra Ingerman, the books of Paul Francis, and many others along the way.
I have uploaded in impromptu recording on what Shamanic Journeying is, in my view, as well as a short guided Journey to the Lower World, just as a simple introduction.
The symbols and creatures and messages I got in those first journeys were so appropriate for my life, I felt a crumbling of ‘reality’ as I knew it. It was hard to believe that the process of going down through the roots of a ‘tree of life’, and entering a ‘lower world’, which was immediately clear in my mind’s eye, would reveal insight to issues and questions I had been grappling with for a while.
Sitting in my little meditation room, often when it was dark out so my mind would be less active, I drummed or listened to tracks and found myself in beautiful landscapes. In the first journeys I found animals whose characteristics (at the time I cheated and looked them up) were precisely the qualities I needed for the questions or issues I posed. What really blew my mind – and got me hooked – was when I saw unknown to me plants in the journeys, asking what their medicine was, and then coming ‘back’ to Dr. Google only to see that what I was told in the journey was what they actually do.
One time I was guided to a tiny waterfall, a stream really, that made a puddle on the ground below it, and as the journey progressed, I became the water and then I was drawn into the ground and began to see life on the surface from the point of view of the water (Nope, no hallucinogens – just my morning coffee!). In my life at the time I was struggling with a choice that would set new things in motion. As I experienced the surface from the point of view of the water, I felt my ‘body’ disperse into the soil, expand and release. It was a viscerally liberating feeling, the expansiveness and the unlimited space I could occupy. It felt safe and welcome in the soil, as it received me with gratitude, stretching my aquatic limbs.
When I came back up and into my ‘real’ life, I felt different, but my mind could not put together they symbolism (it is always trying to interpret, the poor thing). So, I did what I had read one can do after a journey… make space for the message to appear. Later that day, in an idle moment while cleaning up the house, it dawned on me. Not as an interpretation, but indeed as a message.
It has been a few years since those early journeys, and it was a delight to be led by Lynn, this time to the Upper World, with maps that were not my own. It was powerful to share the experiences with this group of strong practitioners, and to take the journey messages to another level with the processes we were taught.
As I mention in the recording, what I appreciate most about the Journeying process, is that it is a way for us to start listening to our inner guidance, to allow the symbolic to answer, rather than running to Google God for all the guidance and questioning we have in our lives.
