Articles

Spiritual Adults

In many shamanic cultures all adults journey and use various techniques to enter altered states and communicate with the spirit world. Most authors misinterpreted this fact, naively stating that all adults in these communities are shamans. However, the ability to enter altered states makes us human, not shamans. Humans are physiologically designed to enter altered states.

The adults in these shamanic cultures are different from us. The difference is that they are spiritual adults. Spiritual maturity demands that adults take responsibility to maintain an active, working relationship with spirit themselves. They do not look for an intermediary in gurus, priests, psychics, or therapists to do it for them.

Spiritual adults understand that living in balance is fundamental to maintaining a good working relationship with spirit. They notice signs that they are not seeing reality clearly. They take responsibility to do whatever it takes to return their inner state to balance. Spiritual adults live in loving appreciation of all life, including their own body. They enjoy people, community, and sex as ways that celebrate life and maintain health and well-being.

Spiritual adults take responsibility to communicate with the spirit world for assistance and inspiration. Spirit is solicited for input on all important decisions. Spiritual adults understand that a relationship with spirit is an interdependent, working relationship. They "feed" or give it energy to it to keep it strong.

In our current atmosphere of confusion and misinformation about shamanism, people think they have to become shamans for the training to be valuable. People rush off to get "initiated" in four weekends or "certified" in two years and a trip to some exotic locale. In this craziness we miss the most important thing shamanism has to offer contemporary people-a reliable path to spiritual maturity.

Balance is essential. Shamanism offers skills to notice the signs from life and your body that you are out of balance before real problems manifest. It also offers us skills to trace the cause of an imbalance to its source and to clear it there. This personal awareness is simply as a way of life for a spiritual adult.
Shamanism offers an array of skills for living lovingly in the body: grounding, boundaries, protection, clearing and self-healing. The practices encourage doing what you truly have passion for and honoring your own physical limits to maintain health and well-being.

Shamanic techniques offer us the ability to have a conversation with spirit to get life instructions, explanations, and often a good joke. The connection with spirit is action based, unlike prayer and meditation. Most importantly shamanic techniques offer us ways to communicate with spirit that spirit actually understands as communication and responds to directly.

Finally shamanism gives us practices to give back to spirit through offerings, time, energy, reciprocity and gratitude. It offers practices that allow us to take the sacrifices life demands and transform that pain into a sacred request for something new.

Spiritual adults use shamanic skills to work with spirit to create amazing contemporary lives filled with meaning and joy. These lives are better than you can imagine because they are inspired.