Blog Post 3 - Kenn Day

Our next blog post is written by Kenn Day, author of Dance of Stones: A Shamanic Road Trip and Post-Tribal Shamanism: A New Look at the Old Ways both available on Amazon. His new book is coming out soon, tentatively titled, Planting the Seed of Shamanism in the West, and he has been generous enough to share an excerpt with us to whet your appetite.

Kenn can be found at www.ShamansTouch.com where you can book appointments, or speak to him about possible training.

Take it away Kenn!

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In traditional shamanic cultures, the process of recognizing, acknowledging, training and initiating anyone who is Called to become a shaman is fairly clear. Though the practice differs from one region to the next, they all provide a spiritual context in which the budding shaman is nurtured. These practices have been broken down quite a bit by the violent effects of Communist rule, Buddhist and Christian missionaries and other intrusions of modern culture. Recently however, the practices are gradually re-emerging in remote regions where they survived in northern Mongolia and elsewhere.

I have already noted that such a spiritual context is missing in the West, where something that we would consider a Calling is often missed entirely, or only recognized after the subject has suffered for years. Some would argue that the trauma that many endure on their way to becoming a shaman is inherent to the process. My own early traumatic experiences certainly paved the way for the spirits to make themselves known to me. Trauma has a way of wearing thin the walls between the worlds.

One thing is quite clear in all the shamanic cultures I’ve explored. Avoiding the Call of an Ongod is not a good choice. It leads to greater illness, mental issues, and eventually, death. While a strong shamanic culture sometimes has ways to ask the ongod to pass the Call onto another family member who is suitable, such opportunities are not available for those of us Called in the West. We really don’t have a choice to not accept the obligation. There are neither strong shamans who can perform rituals to appease the Ongod, nor do most of us have another family member who would be able and willing to take our place.

For most of us, the process begins long before we are aware that we have been Called. The very idea that such things as Ongods exist is hard enough pill to swallow. This usually happens after we have already dealt with years of trauma and and doubted our own sanity.

As mentioned above, my own Calling began where I was born, in Phoenix, Arizona. My parents joined a fundamentalist Christian cult when I was around three, which had a profoundly toxic impact on my formative years. Essentially, the rules of “the Church” excluded me from engaging with anyone outside the community and engendered a deep reservoir of toxic shame. From the ages of six to fourteen, I lost my older brother to Cystic Fibrosis, my mother to colon cancer and my father to a brain tumor. When our father died, my younger sister and I were where sent from Arizona to our mother’s older sister in Cincinnati, Ohio, leaving behind everything that was familiar. It was quite a culture shock. These are only a few of the more visible traumas of those years.

By the time I entered High School in Cincinnati, I was suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, Depression and Anxiety. I was highly dissociative, responding to stressful situations by leaving my body. In short, I was miserable, filled with self-loathing and lost. It was only much later that I realized the signs of shaman sickness and that I was being Called. This is when Grandfather began to work with me in earnest, and it still took a few years before I even became aware of him.
I went through a period in which the loyalties to my parent’s religion and my own mental health competed against each other. I needed to get away from the toxic influence of the church that had followed me up to Ohio. Struggling to find a way forward, I began to explore Tarot, Astrology and the occult in general. More importantly, I gradually began to become aware of spirits and to work with them.

My first attempts were based on trying out archaic techniques found in outdated books on ceremonial magic, and they were neither successful nor helpful. However, I sensed that there was something beyond the failures of magic circles and complex spells. There was the beginning of awareness that “something” existed beyond the reach of my physical senses, which I met with a mixture of fascination and fear. There was a spirit that I would sometimes glimpse in the reflection from windows at night. There were red eyes and a looming presence that I thought of as a “hell hound”. I discovered many years later that this was a guardian spirit who has been with my ancestral soul for generations, but it was quite intimidating at first!

I have already described how I gradually became aware of Grandfather as I focused more on meditative practices. I believe he was already helping to direct my attention and perceptions to a larger world for years before I ever “met” him.

The teachings I received from Grandfather seemed to be personal directions on my own life and how to live it. At the time, it did not occur to me that they would ever be of use to others. There are any number of teachings that I have forgotten because they just didn’t stick with me, but were very helpful at the time. These often crop up again when I am working with a client and I remember the teaching that they need.

Transmission is difficult for us Westerners to wrap our brains around. It presupposes that there is an invisible source from which these teachings are sent - in this case Grandfather - and that we are capable of receiving the transmissions and extracting them to apply in a meaningful way. This is a very different method of teaching than we are familiar with from our educational system.
Imagine that you are learning about coffee. You can pick up a lot from reading about the coffee bean and how it is processed; about the various ways in which it is brewed and served. You can even listen to someone rhapsodizing about their daily ritual of making or ordering their favorite coffee. But until you actually hold a cup of hot coffee in your hands, smell it, taste it - experience it - you don’t really know what coffee is. Transmission can be a bit like having a cup of hot coffee dropped in your lap. You may not appreciate the experience at the time, but you do learn a lot. Very quickly.

All of this led to an extremely disconnected sense of community. Considering how important community is to the healing of our culture, and individuals, it is an interesting place to begin. My sense of identity was quite fractured by the trauma that I had experienced and the work with Grandfather’s teachings was only beginning to take shape. When I look back at the person I was at that time, I barely recognize myself. The changes between that person and the one I am today have been nothing less than world changing. By which I mean that my entire world view has dramatically transformed for the better.

At the time I was a staunch introvert, with little interest in socializing, and a strong tendency to respond to anyone who came close as if I were a grouchy curmudgeon. I share this so that you might have a clearer sense of how I gradually healed and became a much more accessible and engaged person.

In my early 20’s I attended a presentation by the Tibetan teacher Namkai Norbu. Since then I have realized what a tremendous opportunity that was, but at the time I was unable to really take in much of what he had to offer - at least consciously. After the lecture, I chatted with the monk who served as his interpreter. Somehow I managed to share with him my experience of Grandfather and he responded, “You have received transmission.” This led me to explore further into Tibetan practices, which helped me to make some sense of my experience and to provide some much needed context for the fact that I seemed to be receiving complex information out of nowhere.

This was also the first time that that it occurred to me that these internal experiences might be a sign of something besides mental illness. Some forty years on, I am still coming to terms with that larger context.

I am the first to admit that I can be a little slow when it comes to realizing the impact of these transmissions. Their application over the next few years began to gradually lessen my own psychological and emotional distress. My own process also allowed me to recognize that they might be of use to others as well.

During this time, by meditating daily and gradually applying what I was learning, my own discomfort began to fade. With it, my anger issues diminished, making it easier for others to put up with me. Perhaps most instructive, I realized that my experience of being present and conscious outside of my own physical body, in a different space, had begun to transform my underlying sense of what was “real” and with it, my own identity. While I still found it very difficult to engage at any depth with others, I had managed to find a few who shared some of my interests in ritual magic and esoteric subjects in general. When they saw that my mental issues seemed to be improving, they were understandably curious. This gave me my first opportunity to begin sharing the teachings with others. This would eventually become a defining part of my own identity.

From the beginning, I found it quite difficult to “translate” the teachings into words and make them accessible and effective for others. I found it easier to use the terms that we had in common, usually ones coming from ritual magic, Buddhism or other shared practices. While this helped initially, it also led to misunderstandings concerning the real nature of the teachings. What was most effective was to guide others through the experience of the teachings directly.
Eventually I started offering small group “meditations” in which I guided others through the inner doorways into the spirit realm and Shamanic Body. I was particularly shocked to find that, by following the techniques I had learned, they arrived in the space I had come to call Lodge and were able to sense the World Tree there as well.

My own experiences had shown me that the practices I was sharing could lead to some profound transformation, but I was still surprised when others began to experience these changes as well. It took me awhile to realize that these were naturally arising initiations, brought on by the experiences that they were having through the practice of entering into the spirit realm in Shamanic Body. I was familiar with initiation in a ritual context, but had not quite realized that this too was an initiation. Considering that I had already been through this experience myself, it may be surprising to learn that I had not yet realized what was happening. Watching the changes arise in others brought the process to light for me.

Initiation is one of the essential elements of any form of shamanism. It is the means whereby the person becomes a shaman. Being Called by a spirit is essential, and the training beforehand is necessary, but without initiation, it is just potential. Initiations are events which bring the prepared initiate into direct experience of the Mysteries that lie at the root of our human existence. This transforms the initiate in fundamental ways, profoundly changing their relationship with the world around them.

Initiations can happen naturally. If the spirits who have Called you become impatient, they may prepare you and then shove you into an initiatory situation. This is generally - and sometimes literally - like being hit by a truck. If you have a teacher/mentor who is able to do so, they can offer kinder, gentler means of initiation that prepare you intentionally and then present you with the experience of Mystery in a way that is both easier to receive and less dangerous for your mind and body.

The ritual initiations that I had experienced in groups that I had belonged to, created a set and setting within the context of the ritual that brought on specific realizations about the nature of Self and reality. With an effective set and setting, these revelations could bring about a significant shift in the initiate’s state of consciousness or sense of identity. However, I was already learning that the impact of these ritual initiations was very limited compared to the transformative effect of the shamanic techniques that I was learning.

As children, we all experience times in which our whole psyche shifts dramatically and we are suddenly we are more capable of walking a straight line, or throwing a ball. Everything has changed significantly and we continue with this new foundation. I now believe that, as with developmental stage shifts, these shamanic initiations arise from the direct experience of a larger Self - a Self that is much more influenced by the Celestial Soul perhaps. In the case of the “meditation” group that I led, the direct experience of maintaining a personal identity while beyond the confines of the physical body or even the physical world made the larger Self apparent. There was usually a moment in which the person realized the “reality” of what they were experiencing, which seemed to generate a breakdown of their existing ego structure and allow a new version of their identity to arise, which was able to embrace the larger world which they had experienced.

This was by no means a universal outcome for those attending the group. Perhaps a third of the participants experienced it to some degree. Of those who did, perhaps half had lasting effects, while the rest found some way of returning to the state from which they had emerged.

Unsurprisingly, these tended to be the ones who did not return to the group.

For those who maintained the shift from the initiatory experience, it seemed to generate fundamental changes in how they experienced both the world and themselves. I knew this to be true for myself, and was tremendously excited to find that it was true for at least some others as well.

Over the next decade I practiced and refined how I was presenting the teachings, while at the same time realizing more fully the animistic and shamanic nature of the practices. I moved away from ritual magic and other forms of Western esotericism and began to focus more on exploring the nature of the teachings I was receiving from Grandfather and what they had to offer. It was around this time that I first encountered Mircea Eliade’s work and embarked on a deeper exploration of animism and shamanism which continues today.

In 1983 I attended my first NeoPagan event. Until then, magick was something we talked about but I didn’t really have a sense that there were others who actually practiced it. Wild Magick Gathering was held at a campground beside a lake in Indiana. I remember that it was a full moon and that it got very foggy after dark, and then it rained. It made for a very interesting experience. I had borrowed a dome tent from a friend, only to discover that it leaked. The stead, soaking rain made for a sleepless night, wandering from one potential shelter to another.

The next day I took advantage of an opportunity to read tarot cards at the picnic tables and found that it was much more intense to read for someone beside myself or friends. Especially when I felt myself enter a trance state and begin offering much more information than what was apparent just by looking at the cards.

Spending time in a gaggle of people who self-identified as Pagan and Magickians was both interesting and informative. I could see that there was an opportunity for larger community engagement than I had believed possible.

It was in the context of these NeoPagan Gatherings that I began to offer workshops, still using terminology and concepts drawn from Ceremonial and Ritual Magic. Gradually I began to include more and more of the shamanic teachings, finding that they were surprisingly well received. I felt like I had found a home!

Many other such events followed. Starwood was another early event for me. Held at the Bear Creek KOA Campground in Ohio. It was a whirling, hot mess of women in body paint, and men in skirts, with drummers and writhing dancers around a gigantic pile of burning wood. It was around this sort of bonfire that I practiced dancing while in deep trance, allowing myself to move through parts of the spirit realm that had been inaccessible till then. This was a new experience for me and though I thought at the time that it was just my imagination, I realize now that I was exploring the inner territory that I would need to navigate fully in order to continue my healing.
At the time, along with my other psychological issues, I also had extremely low self-esteem. So having strangers seeking me out and responding positively to my workshops was both quite enjoyable and more than a little dangerous for me. I found myself feeling “fed” by these experiences. This certainly encouraged me to continue offering workshops in these venues, but it also began to establish an alter ego of sorts. I began to feel a sense of confidence in myself that I had never known before. In retrospect, I know that I created a “teacher persona” that I used to present and even to socialize at these events. While I am glad to have moved beyond the need for such a persona, I also know that it was essential for me during that time and allowed my personal healing and growth to continue.

What I learned from these experiences set the stage for my first weekend workshops. Initially I attempted to squeeze everything that I had learned myself up to that point into a long weekend. This did not work well, in that the participants were too overwhelmed by the second day to take any more in. Gradually I began to realize that I couldn’t reasonably expect all of Grandfather’s teachings to fit into a single weekend and so I expanded to three, then five weekends. We are now up to nine separate weekend workshops for the basic training series, with several more available as advanced workshops. And I am still learning more!

I was rather cocky, to put it mildly. I felt so much better and more accomplished than I had before that I felt like I had already healed and was ready to take on anything. I was wrong, but it did allow me to continue moving forward, learning, growing and gradually becoming a better person.

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