Chapter 2: Guides and the Self
“When I teach, I try to bring in as much feminine healing practices that involve things like waiting and watching and observing and receiving and holding, witnessing. Because that is what . . . we need if we’re going to change the balance of things. Unfortunately, there are women who follow those very masculine kinds of ways of doing healing, as I did for years and years. It was only when I had this personal kind of awakening and I realized I was doing all these things to try to heal myself [to] try to bring myself out of where I was. Slowly, I began to understand that none of those things are going to work, that it’s going to be the kinds of things that are associated with the divine feminine . . . that are going to change it.”
Jane Burns
Celtic Shaman
I love this quote because it encapsulates the skill set (and mindset) this inner work requires. Currently, the masculine (or yang) style dominates the healing field. Doing, fixing, analyzing, progressing, actualizing, etc., becomes the goal when this is the case. Instead, when you listen to the journeys, let the figures and landscapes arrive as they want to. There is no need to DO anything other than stay curious and receptive to whatever comes. There is no need to come up with anything clever, or even anything that makes sense! When we approach the Archetypal Imagination, it generally responds best when we set our thinking minds aside and look through the heart. The Archetypal Imaginal reveals itself best through poetry, dreams, art, mythopoetic imagining, and embodiment. However, saturate this domain with too much rationality, linearity, or explanation, and the Archetypal Imaginal tends to retreat. The process will get easier as you go; it can feel very unnatural at first to trust that things will arise on their own time and in their way.
Sandra Ingerman, a world-renowned teacher of shamanism, recognized for bridging ancient cross-cultural healing methods with modern culture, offers these tips for taking journeys into the Archetypal Imagination. If, when you are in the Archetypal Imaginal, you hear inner critics or other nay-sayers (“This isn’t real”, “You’re making this up”) just agree with the voice and move on.
Ingerman also says that in this realm, the language tends to be more direct, with less “filler” than we are used to in regular conversation. She adds that the figures may also communicate through:
a sense of knowing
a feeling
showing you something
a sudden realization
a sense of clarity
offering you a sign the next day
Journeys are much like dreams in the way they move forward, where one thing may not flow rhythmically into the next like a movie. I often think it’s like the books you got as a kid where as you flip through them, the characters move, except that it was hard to hold the book so it would flip without halting and skipping, or without having to restart at a random page.