The Cycle Community
As a vital, resource-rich community, the Cycle Community tends the gates of life as service to the larger community. The hemorrhaging of lifeforce and profoundly selfish decision making of dominant socio-religious culture persists by destroying our freedom and ability to become a people who can tend the gates of birth, death, and the initiation into adulthood.
Our Cosmology is expressed through stories that remind us where we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. With this cosmology, the teachings, and strong working relationships with spirit, Cycle Community members are positioned to offer services to tend birth and the welcoming of new spirits into life. Where there is birth trauma, the souls of the infant and birthing mother can be tended and the caregiver supported so that the first 18 months of life support healthy, secure bonding. This relationship is then a healthy, resilient foundation for all other relationships through life.
Our teachings define spiritual adulthood and help us to get there, even from our broken path. As adults, we can work with spirit to craft initiatory rituals for our teens, provoking their movement into agency, a working relationship with spirit they are now responsible for tending, and an adult relationship with all life, human and more than human.
Our older members share their teaching stories and unique life gifts as part of our ritual process for honoring our elders. With elders acknowledged and respected, we are better able to tend the gate of death and passing into the ancestral realm. For those who died without eldering well and find themselves stuck, we offer ancestral healing as a service to assist families in aligning and tuning their ancestral lines. Ancestral healing supports the living in the creativity and innovation necessary to move with the crises of our time. This is a key part of creating a future of restored right relationship for our descendants with all life.
This video was filmed with at a Community Teaching Story Gathering in 2019, pre-pandemic, with the people who elected to attend and to be on camera. The lifeways that we practice are not appropriated from other people’s cultures and traditions. We believe it is our responsibility to start again, at the beginning, creating our own working relationships with Land and spirit. It is our responsibility to ask for help and bring through remedies for real issues of our times. We and the mess we have been complicit in making are our problem to repair, realign with the Land, risk relationship with all things, and listen.
Stanley Krippner respectfully defined traditional shamans as "community-assigned magico-religious professionals who deliberately alter their consciousness in order to obtain information from the ‘spirit world.’ They use this knowledge and power to help and to heal members of their community, as well as the community as a whole.” The root of illness diagnosed from this point of view, like soul loss, disconnection from land, and refusal to grieve and tend death, cuts directly to why colonization, authoritarian oppression, and unchecked capitalism do so much harm.
We use the word “shaman” is this sense. We respectfully practice cultivating an animist and shamanic point of view to take responsibility for our illness, to repair our fragmentation so that we can meet others wiser than we are in community and listen. We can join others humbly and together we can repair, restore, rejuvenate our relationship with land, climate, and each other. We believe that only as diverse communities can we do what needs to be done now, with the help of our ancestors, for those descendants who are coming.
This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we could use the word “shaman” well as responsible, shamanically informed global citizens. Who gets to use the word “shaman”? And how could it be used with respect, intelligence, and some reasonable hope for the future?
https://whyshamanismnow.com/2020/01/what-does-shaman-mean/