A shamanic practitioner looks at childhood, suggesting ways to reconnect with that shamanic state of consciousness we had as children. The Monthly Aspectarian: Who can deny the rate of change that is accelerating us further into the future every day. It's very interesting that the oldest of spiritual practices are now coming to the forefront. Tom Cowan: I think as people start leading more complicated lives, they look for more simplicity in their spiritual life. I get a lot of delight out of thinking that I make a living by beating on a drum, which is one of the oldest spiritual tools that we know of . . . it goes back thirty, forty thousand years. I think people are looking for something that's very basic and permanent. TMA: How did this all start for you and how did you get to where you are? TC: I grew up in St. Louis back in the late '40s and '50s and early '60s. During those years, I had a sense that there were conscious beings and spirits in nature. I've always been attracted to parks and wilderness, and camping and hiking because of that, but I never spoke to anyone about it. And then as I got older, I realized that Natives' indigenous spirituality is focused around these very same kinds of beings, spirits of nature. I began to look into it more seriously. And then in the 1980s when I was living in New York City, I met Michael Harner, took a workshop in core shamanism from him, and really felt like I had come home. It gave a structure to what I had been practicing, thinking about secretly most of my life. I met Harner in '83, so that means I've been practicing shamanism for fifteen years now. In the early years of practicing shamanism, it's very common for people to drift toward Native Americans to find out more about their spirituality -- because there's a lot of similarities between core shamanism and Native spirituality. Although I learned a lot and have been inspired by Native people, and still am, that never felt real comfortable for me. I knew it wasn't my heritage, so I started looking back into European traditions of magic and mysticism and shamanism and healing -- and particularly my Celtic background, Irish, Scottish, and German. Out of that research, I wrote Fire in the Head and started teaching. And that's kind of the way I got to where I am today. TMA: The work you are doing now has to do with reconnecting people with their childhood spiritual selves? TC: That's right. Exactly. TMA: What sort of things do you do? TC: Well, let me tell you how I got onto this. Over the years as I've been practicing shamanism and meeting other people who do, I was struck by the fact how so many people realize a parallel between the shamanic practice and things they did as children. It was just too much to ignore, so I started looking at it more systematically and putting together exercises and workshop ideas specifically to look back at some of the things we did as children that were very shamanic. For example, most children have some kind of invisible friend. It could be an elf or a guardian angel or a fairy or an animal that they talk to . . . but it functions as a spirit guide or a spirit companion until when they're around eight or nine, ten years old, they lose it. TMA: These episodes may also be brief. TC: They could be brief, yes. TMA: So a lot of people would have very little memory of it, whereas some of us remember very well. TC: Yes, I find that all the time. And there are people who can't remember anything before they were twelve or fifteen. Typically, you don't remember much before age three. That's kind of the normal place where memories kick in, but you know, I think that's typical of our time. In tribal cultures, as I understand it, adults don't have these big memory gaps about what happened when they were children because their life flows very smoothly, and the magical or mystical things they did as children are also the same things that the adults are doing. There's no difference in culture between adults and children like we have. Adults take seriously a kid who says, "I heard a deer talking to me in the woods today." In fact, the adults would say, "I know that deer. He talked to me, too." As a result, they don't have these memory gaps and their natural mysticism continues right on into adulthood . . . but that's not true for us. I think we lose that when we're educated by the school system, and also by the fact that we have a separate culture for children. They have certain toys, they have their own games, they have their own rooms. They're supposed to play with each other rather than play with adults. In tribal cultures, adults and children play together. In fact, that was true in Western Europe up into the Middle Ages. Adults and children listened to the same stories, played the same games and wore the same kind of clothing. TMA: They would have been engaged in the same kind of work. TC: That's right, kids worked alongside their parents. That whole idea of apprenticing -- you began to learn your job, whatever it would be, when you were about seven or eight years old. And girls working alongside mothers and grandmothers. By the time they were eight, nine, ten years old, they knew how to cook and do the women's chores. TMA: Oh boy, we'd better cut that out. [laughter] TC: No, I wouldn't cut that out at all. It's our culture. I know what you mean, but it's not the same. Girls did learn their father's job -- sometimes if it were farming, the whole family knew how to farm -- but still there were jobs that men did and jobs that women did, and little boys and little girls tended to learn their jobs from their father and mother, respectively. But that's not true in our culture. TMA: How are you helping people reconnect with their childhood selves? TC: Through the shamanic journey and other kinds of visionary experiences that are part of core shamanism. Memories do come back. Let me back up a minute, though. In addition to the spirit, the invisible friend, most kids have a place where they like to go, where they feel safe -- what we call "a power spot" in shamanism. They could daydream there, fantasize there. It might have been under a tree or in the backyard or in a vacant lot or sometimes even in the house, maybe up to the attic. We reconnect with those. A lot of kids have a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal, something they can't live without. They carry it with them all the time. They realize some kind of power or magic or security that comes from it, and that's very similar to other power objects that we use, whether they be rattles or crystals or sacred feathers or stones. Shamans tend to have a lot of paraphernalia, and as kids, so did we. Also, children have songs and riddles and nursery rhymes that they repeat over and over again in a kind of chant-like way, which is sort of similar to power songs. There's a number of things we can play around with and look back at in the course of a weekend workshop. Another thing that's very important that we try to look at are childhood illnesses and accidents, even maybe near death experiences, because typically in a tribal culture, when those things happen to a person, the elders and the shamans start to interpret them as a call from the spirit world to go deeper into your life, to meet the spirits that will heal you, and maybe become a shaman. A lot of people had experiences like that as children, but there were no adults around to put it in that spiritual context . . . so it just passes as "a horrible year in my life when I was twelve," or something like that. We re-look at those too, and at what might be the spiritual call that was occurring then. In my book, Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice, there's a chapter on childhood which says a lot of what we're talking about here. Let me say this, because some people get misconceptions about the weekend workshops. It's not a therapy weekend; in fact, I'm not a therapist. It's not to heal old childhood wounds or to discover horrible dark secrets about our childhood. TMA: Those things can occur. TC: Those things can occur, yes, but the workshop isn't specifically to do inner child work, as some people do in their therapy. I tell people that right at the start, that if healing takes place along those lines, that's really good . . . because sometimes it does. But that's not the goal. The goal is really to look at childhood from a shamanic point of view and to recapture the child consciousness that we had, which really is, I think, the shaman's state of consciousness. I think that's important to know. TMA: I've tried to encourage my own children to hold onto that way of looking at reality. TC: I've been putting that into the workshop, too. I love this workshop because I learn something every time, and because there are parents there who feel the same way. I didn't realize there would be an interest when I started this a few years ago, but people are really interested in how to work with children shamanically. There are a lot of really wonderful ways that we explore working with children. For example, if a child has an accident and breaks an arm or a leg or whatever, or has to go to the hospital or needs an operation, if the parents know something about shamanism, they can get a power animal for the child. I know some parents who actually do a ceremony for healing for the child, and invite the child's friends and their parents. You may have three or four kids and three or four sets of adults, and they get a power animal for the child to help heal the wound or get him through the fears or whatever it is. They'll dance the animal and they'll rattle and drum together, and it puts the whole traumatic experience into a spiritual context, a community context. A child will always look back at that experience as not having just been a frightening time when they had to go the hospital, but a time when their friends came over with their parents and had an enjoyable evening. There are always a lot of people in the workshop who are teachers or therapists or somehow involved with children, even if not their own, so that's a component to the weekend also. TMA: Fairy tales and nursery rhymes were not originally intended as nursery rhymes, they're just old stories. TC: A couple of other things we do is to look at these -- because again, most of the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that we think of as kid stuff evolved in the Middle Ages as just stories and rhymes. In fact, adults told them and sang them as much as children did. A lot of them were really filled with sex and violence. TMA: The nursery rhymes that people repeat to children now . . . most people have no idea what they meant or what they evolved from. TC: Yes, and it comes as a shock to a lot of them to discover the incest and fratricide and people killing their parents and parents killing their kids -- or abandoning them or beating them or cutting their legs off, or whatever. It's gory. They were not intended as nursery rhymes; they were just stories. People have always had a fascination with sex and violence. But -- they often had morals. It wasn't a moral just for a child, it was a moral for adults, too. And there was a cathartic element -- if you sat and listened to these stories at the fire at night, you could kind of release some of your frustration and anger. But then around 1600, we started developing this concept of "childhood," that children are innocent and they should be educated in schools and have their own rooms and their own clothing and their own culture. As adults got farther away from the natural world, the farming communities, they stopped telling these stories, or being interested in them, and they became stories for kids in a more sanitized form. They were not originally intended for children. The point is, it's amazing how many of them involve fear and involve children and danger, whether it be Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella. When you think about all of them, they're about some young boy or girl or young adult who is threatened in some way or in danger. In the workshops, we do some shamanic journeys into these tales and nursery rhymes to find out what is the danger, and is there some spiritual way of handling the fear or the danger. For example, Little Miss Muffet -- why is she afraid of the spider? Was it really a tarantula that could sting her and kill her, or is it just a little spider? In the process of doing a journey into something like that, people begin to see some of their own childhood fears, or some of the worries that they have about children. Again, it's another way of looking at something common to childhood, namely, fear, because we learn most of our fears after we're born. According to the people who study childhood and infants, we learn almost every fear that we have. TMA: That fails to take reincarnation into account. TC: That's right. You can be born perhaps without memory of those fears. You have to relearn them. There are only two things a newborn baby fears, and that's being dropped . . . not being supported, or a sudden sound that startles them. And those are really startle effects, not fear. But things like fear of the dark, fear of animals, fear of strangers, fear of not looking right, fear of toilets . . . TMA: When does abandonment come in? TC: At two or three years old. A child that is always being held in the arms of an adult -- as most tribal kids are -- does not fear abandonment. There's a wonderful study from back in the '50s or '60s by a woman who worked with some people in the Amazon. She was amazed at how kids and adults lived and worked and did everything together, and how fearless they were . . . riding canoes in white water rapids, being close to a fire. These little ones were even carried in canoes through white water rapids. There was very little strife or violence, very little anger. She was trying to figure out why this was, then she realized that children never were left without an adult holding them, even if the "adult" was their eight-year-old brother or sister. They were constantly held in arms until they naturally started to crawl away. As a result, they don't have abandonment fears. Abandonment fear is one of ours. TMA: You were talking about Celtic shamanism when you were here last. Is there any connection between that and reconnecting with the childhood self? TC: Even though that's really another whole area, actually there is a connection. When I teach Celtic shamanism, most people, whether they're from a Celtic background or not, if they've been raised in the West and have read the classics and fairy tales and King Arthur and the Grail, and Robin Hood, and the Green Man, the Green Knight and the fairylore, have picked up a lot of what is Celtic shamanism. Those stories are even more ancient than the modern versions that we hear and study. They go back to the very early tribal times. Even without being Celtic or having studied Celtic shamanism, people in our culture, I think, already know something about it. They've encountered the stories usually fairly young, as children. So Celtic shamanism is a very accessible way of practicing shamanism for people of Western European background.
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