Shamanic Ritual and Practice
Introduction and Overview
Shamanic practices you may have heard of, such as retrieving a power animal or returning a soul part, are complex mixtures of ability, technique, perhaps ritual, and certainly a strong relationship with one's spirit helpers. On the other hand, Calling in the Directions or cleansing others or personal cleansing,are more specifically about ritual, such as to prepare the practitioner for shamanic work, or to encourage his or her relationship with their spirit helpers.
A shamanic practitioner is engaged in returning him or herself and their clients back to a natural human fullness. Ritual is an extraordinary way to orient and prepare oneself for practices that strongly rely on the practitioner maintinance of a balanced and sensitive consciousness. With a broadly shamanic aim of rediscovering, gathering and encouraging back the innate template of human fullness, shamanism has a 'toolbox' of very powerful ritual means to prepare for and encourage this.
Shamanic rituals you should learn include a personal style of cleansing. Or if you are practicing with others, knowing how to cleanse each other. These are grounding, clarifying, and focusing practices that have the deepen and strengthen whatever work or experiences follow. A personal cleansing consciously seeks to free one from the unwise choices or acts that this body has engaged in over its lifetime such that he or she can step forward as a better, more compassionate, aware, and positive force in the world. When cleansing another, we learn how to remove our ego from caring for others, and step forward into life with a sense of service.
The simplest way of taking in all of shamanic practice including that of ritual, is to recognize that it is all simply about the wholeness of the human being. Having a 'full self' is particularly important in shamanic understanding of health and well-being, and the loss of parts of oneself a primary cause of unwellness: a paradigm that has a different perspective than a contemporary medical model.
There are shamanic practices that are just barely ritualized, and those that have much clearer and identified steps. For instance, a practitioner learns to develop his or her awareness in the natural world so that teachings, healing and information can be found. This practice may have very little by the way of specific steps. However, a soul retrieval where a lost or split off part of a person is found and returned, or a power animal retrieval where a person is reempowered by a needed or lost part of their power, are much more clearly specified with respect to the spiritual geography, the journey and procedures of the practitioner, and the methods of returning the soul part or power.
You may be called upon to open a circle of others who wish to celebrate life, the Earth, or other Earth-centered or shamanic practice. For this, there are the variously found but widely similar rituals of opening circle, known as Calling in the Directions. This is a lovely, and intense psychospiritual 'orienting' practice that engages the full person and prepares one for spiritual work.