We can all probably agree that there’s an overabundance of troubles in the world now, but one problem that may not be on your radar is a steady erosion of creativity in the United States since the mid-1990’s. And, based upon the findings of creativity researcher Kyung Hee Kim, PhD, what might you guess is the primary essence of creativity? If you said imagination, you would be right.
Sure, we can chew this bitter fat and assign blame to many cultural and institutional decisions. But let’s not go there (now). Instead, let’s look at how we might begin to coax it back, this imagination that Einstein said is more important than knowledge. How can we find friendliness again toward the generous well of conscious dreaming, the seed store of survival on so many levels?
Okay, what on Earth does this recent dearth of imagination have to do with shamanic journeying, you might be asking?
Quite a lot, actually. Malidoma Somé, a great Dagora shaman, said that imagination is the language of the spirits. And shamanic journeying is a joyful method for intentionally visiting the spirit/energetic/dreamtime world.
But what if after entering a spirit world filled with compassionate beings who want to help us diagnose problems and then gift us with knowledge, wisdom, understanding, teaching and healing, we aren’t able to converse with them? What if we’ve lost our fluency somewhere along the way? We return to ordinary reality empty handed, without vision, maybe without hope.
You see, shamanic journeying is one way we can envision positive change to bring back to the world of ordinary reality (physicality). We do this to make life sweeter, more understandable, more meaningful, and depending on the circumstances, more bearable. Our souls can be healed and nourished into expansion and growth. Our stories can become wiser and more relational. Because think about it, stories actually become the maps of our lives, our communities, our world.
One example: If our story tells of a world divided into humans and their various hierarchies on one side and everything else on the other (both living and “non-living”), there’s no end to the rationalization of destruction and wounding this belief could sustain. But now imagine a world constructed from a map of interdependence of all beings. Then imagine that same map also shows one possible path in which everything in physicality is experienced as everyone or “people” of infinite presentations. Wow – yes, walk along that path and everything is bursting with people-ness (as all indigenous people believe according to the irrepressible Martín Prechtel), important, alive and respected, e.g. Bear People, Rock People, Tree People, Human People, etc. And destructive hierarchies have disappeared, even among the humans. Take a moment to sit with the possibilities and changes this map might generate.
Now let’s keep going.
If everything in existence is categorized as people, it just makes sense that we can get to know, enjoy, bless and learn from these so many different kinds of people whom we had considered non-relational. So with good shamanic manners and skills to keep ourselves and others safe we might journey to the spirit (or energetic aspect) of the maple in our front yard, the fox we met on the trail yesterday, a weather event, the sun, moon and stars. We can get to know the spirit of our home, the spirit of our workplace, the spirit of a project, etc. Imagine journeying to the spirit of a photon before the Big Bang (which happened in a training with the late and profoundly great Claude Poncelet)! Infinite possibilities, because remember that we’re traveling in non-ordinary reality when we journey – outside of time and/or space.
A world navigated by this particular map would take the needs and wishes of the non-human beings and places into consideration. We gain perspective and wisdom from the non-human world. We settle into relationships of mutuality and compassion. The pain of feeling separate from creation melts away as we are able to see more from our hearts. We cease to be the most dangerous and feared species on our beautiful Earth. We co-exist. And the blessings flow, including better human-to-human relationships.
Alberto Villaldo says that shamanic journeying is imaginal, not imaginary.
He has also said that we are journeying to realms that are perceived and experienced through our hearts. Hence the name of my beginning journeying workshop, Seeing with the Heart. How wonderful to learn and use this skill to envision a heart-based future while also calling home and honing our imaginative gifts. My goodness, what wise worlds we might create!
And as Malidoma informed us imagination is the link to and language of these realms. I’ve always felt that imagination is precious and essential. It’s not to be packed away after early childhood, but should be nurtured throughout our lifespan. It becomes richer and ripens into dazzling vibrancy as it travels with us throughout all of our developmental stages.
Then when mature imagination pairs with shamanic journeying, it’s an ecstatic powerhouse of possibility as we access the compassionate realms and beings ready to help us. Together, we can gauge a world that’s derailed and find the tools, medicine, the visions that can help us reset from madness to life sustained.
