#1 AYURVEDA: A SHAMANIC ENCOUNTER

Shamanic Meditation

[This is the first in a series of three blogs regarding the circumstance of my birth, the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, and the beginning of my Apprenticeship]

After many years of studying yoga and practicing on my own, and teaching my Shamanic Yoga, I came to a point where I needed a deeper experience.  I had been undergoing my Initiation as a Shaman for two decades, and my life experience was much deeper than anything conceived of in regular yoga.  When I first Googled Ayurveda, I came across info on the three doshas, but that was not what I was interested in.  I looked around at Ayurvedic diet, and other aspects.

Two things that interested me, because they related so pertinently to the Shamanic experience, were Dinacharya and Ritucharya, i.e., daily and seasonal practices to keep healthy and in synch with the life force.  Ayurveda translates as ‘life science’, and the path, or practice of Shamanism requires a mastery of the science of living, which is why I believe a personal yoga practice is so important to the Shaman.  The Shamanic world is very active on many levels, and requires a highly developed awareness of areas of life which are totally ignored in the normal societal experience.

The “Medicine Energies” of Shamanism are built of many aspects of the world of nature as it exists in our immediate environment –our homes and yards.  So the Ayurvedic practices of Ritucharya struck me as pertinent.  The year is divided into segments of two months, instead of our three month seasons.  I thought this was interesting and useful, but upon practice, I realized that the Wiccan/Pagan divisions of the year using ‘cross-quarter days’ (the midpoints of the seasons, rather than the solstices and equinoxes) was superior.  The world-view of the yoga community is not based on the Shamanic knowledge of ‘Power’ –that force in the universe which comes to the assistance of the Shaman, and is especially apparent at the midpoints of seasons, when things begin to change to the next season.

I found many aspects of the yoga philosophy to be less than adequate in comparison to the Shamanic way.

But in my Googling, I came across an essay, which I have since lost track of, in which

the first line was, “Rest, digestion, and sexual energy –the three pillars of life.”  As I read on, I found the Ayurvedic emphasis on agni, or the digestive fires, to be very interesting and helpful.  The Ayurvedic view of the workings of the human body is very different than the normal western view.  I began to work with the agni.

I found that, after eating, I would lie down on the yoga floor to digest, and after a bit, I would be flooded with sexual energy.  I began the practice of transferring this energy to my meditation vortex.  After eating, I would go sit in the Buddha Vortex while the agni was providing its fire.  This began to add considerable energy to the vortex.

Many months later, about six months after the ending of my Initiation as a Shaman, in the month of October, 2013, this process began an important phase of my journey into my ‘Apprenticeship’.  On Friday October 11, one day after my 71^st birthday, I again sat in the vortex with a full stomach.  Again, the sexual energies arose.  This time, however, I went into a trance state.  I had turned on the “Jazz” channel on Pandora, for my meditation.  The first tunes were by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  I’ve always loved their music.  Suddenly, I was in a dance hall in Harlem, in the 1950s.  A woman across the dance floor made eye contact with me.  She was wearing an elegant, slim-fitting night club dress of satin, and it accented every curve of her ravishing figure.  The music was like I’ve never heard it.  It was a slow passage, so slow that I marveled at how powerful the rhythms were.  It was a deadly serious piece of music, to match the deadly serious expression on the woman’s face.  She knew exactly what she was doing.  Her languid stroll was intended to transfix my attention, which it did.  She entered my energy field with the intent of a woman who could wrap the world around her little finger; it was not like the world as I had ever known it.  It was the world of the rich and powerful, the jazz world of Harlem, where the players were Big Time, and the stakes were high.  She took me to the middle of the floor, and I wilted. 

I came out of the trance, and life went on.

I train hard for times like these.  These times are powerful, like the cross-quarter days which mark the turning points of the seasons.  In my journey through the process of Initiation, which took over two decades, and saw me turn from a healthy and fit man of 48 to a man losing his teeth and vitality at 71, I’ve developed techniques such as surfing the moon, and harnessing the cross-quarter days, for the power they bring, and many other aspects of adapting to the much different time-frame of Shamanic Reality.  This moment of trance, I knew, was a sigil for me.  It marked something, which would reveal itself in its own time. It was a ‘blow from Power’, as Castaneda would call it.  I knew that the next period of time, days or weeks, would reveal the import of this event.  So I marked it in my log book.

Not long after that, I fell into a terrible funk.  She had damaged my energy body.  I had been struck deeply.  It hurt to realize that I had been shown just what a punk I am.  No way in the world could I have entered that reality which she showed me, with the high stakes players, the fast women, and the genius musicians.  It was the blow to my energy body which I knew to be the signal of what was to come.