My Journey
by econoshamanic
I'd been looking for a teacher to teach me shamanism. No, I longed for such a teacher but wasn't sure how to find one. On this day, I was reading an article about how to find and work with a shamanic teacher and was wanting this for myself soooooooo badly. My wife and I decided to have lunch at a vegetarian Buddhist Chinese restaurant in Queens. When we sat down at our table, I looked up, and at the next table was Parashakti, a shaman whom I knew from the New York "scene" but had never spoken to. In fact, I'd wanted to speak to her for the past few years, but hadn't.
I was suddenly paralyzed in my place. Although I was looking at my menu and trying to decide what I wanted to order, I couldn't concentrate. I was disoriented, sweating, shivering in my place. My wife wanted to know what was wrong with me. I couldn't answer coherently. I felt magnetically drawn to Parashakti's table, but my mind created many reasons not to bother her. Just when I told myself I couldn't possibly bother her while she was enjoying time with her husband, he got up to go to the bathroom. The magnetic pull got stronger. Would I have the courage to get up? What will happen? How did I get here, anyway...?
I took my first steps on the path in the early 1970s, with the help of the Plant Spirits. They gave me visions and a spiritual perspective I didn't have previously, but what they didn't give me at the time was emotional maturity. Still, from that long ago, I felt the Call and knew my life would be about answering that Call.
In 1978, I was initiated by an enlightened master, and that initiation resulted in a powerful Kundalini awakening. I devoted my life to meditation and study, lived for two years in my teacher's ashram and afterwards, for six years, co-hosted a meditation center in my home.
By the late 1980s, I was married and a series of events in my work life had brought me to accounting -- a career my mother always wanted for me, but that I never really wanted myself. But the force of karma was at work, and before I knew it, not only was I an accountant, but I had entered graduate school in pursuit of a doctorate in accounting and economics.
Being in graduate school had a strange effect on me -- it pushed a whole slew of emotional buttons I'd managed to ignore my whole life. I became confused and infatuated with the pursuit of rationality. I turned my back on the Call. The result was increasing dysfunction and unhappiness. In name, I was still on the path but inside, I knew I was lost.
Starting in 1993, my life started to fall apart. I was afflicted with numerous diseases -- both physical and mental that doctors could not explain. I became addicted -- mostly relationship addictions -- but they were strong and devastating. I had no anchor anymore. The spiritual traditions I'd followed had no answers to what was going on inside of me. There was the sense that all of this was instigated by a process that was fundamentally spiritual and evolutionary, but the effects on my life were painful and destructive. All I believed to be true about life, or at least MY life, was taken away from me. I didn't know who I was. After ten years of this descent into hell, I found myself living in the unseemly underbelly of life -- with characters I'd never have hung out with and risking my very existence on a day-to-day basis. My wife left me; my friends didn't want to know me. I was alone, I had nothing, I had died.
And then I was born. Initially through the grace of my old friends the Plant Spirits, whom I had not visited in over 25 years, I had a rebirth and then -- wonder of wonders -- I found I had many spirit allies!
What was amazing about my rebirth was that with it, I found my shamanic vocation. I suddenly "knew" I was meant to be a shaman. I barely knew what this meant. I would soon find out. First, I discovered I had some talent for wandering the worlds of spirit and non-ordinary reality. I found that my own healing and spiritual evolution now involved working in non-ordinary states -- shamanic states, where incredible healing and transformation were taking place on a daily basis. In the past, I'd practiced meditation diligently and done lots of psychotherapy and still no relief from my endless emotional pain. Now, in shamanic trance, the psycho-spiritual afflictions of many lifetimes were resolving and integrating. In my studies, I would read about shamanic initiations and was amazed to find myself reading descriptions of my dark experiences over the past ten years. Indeed, in this physical world of consensus reality, the spirits had dismembered me and put me back together. I found that such "shamanic illnesses" were common among shamans in many aboriginal cultures. The spirits had been teaching me diligently for a long time.
And then I knew -- it was time for a human teacher. For a long while I searched and found some excellent teachers who taught me much informally, but I couldn't commit to any. I was longing for a teacher to commit to.
And now, here I was, in a Buddhist Chinese restaurant in Queens. I approached Parashakti and we talked. She told me she was just starting an apprenticeship program and invited me to join the group. She wrote her phone number on the back of the article I had been reading on finding a teacher!
Since my shamanic work began, I've recognized that my particular calling is shamanic shadow work -- going into non-ordinary reality to be with my disowned dark side, being with my pain, accepting myself in my wholeness and welcoming back all the parts I'd rejected in my life. Further, I've learned that it is through the rejection of soul parts that we create dysfunction in the world. I began to journey in ways that allowed me to see how this works on a collective level. I see how all of us -- six billion plus people all disown our own darkness and then project that which we reject in ourselves out onto the world around us. We dream this world according to what we reject in ourselves. No wonder we live in a world of war, disease, terrorism, disregard for Mother Earth, and (currently) economic crisis. I now know that my path is to serve by helping people to reclaim their lost soul parts and re-integrate them, for the purpose of healing the earth. My method asks nothing less than taking 100% full responsibility for creating our world, to own that responsibility, to feel it until something in us "dies" and only then to learn to dream with intention. I call my method of earth healing econoshamanics -- the art of owning the dream that creates the structure of our world and then changing it! I am in the process of imbibing these teachings myself so I may share them in a healing and loving way.
Much of this work has happened under Parashakti's tutelage. It was she who shifted my focus from self-healing to service (which has in turn, accelerated my self-healing!). It was while working with her that I found and picked up my "medicine" and now walk in a more wakeful way, understanding the tools I will use in my public mission. I've worked with Parashakti and several of her elders. All are very powerful shamans who have facilitated an inner alchemy that is evident each day and that truly, is only beginning.
I'm answering the Call again!
AHO!!!!!
econoshamanic teaches accounting at a large university on Long Island. He is Parashakti's shamanic apprentice and is also enrolled in Grof Transpersonal Training to certify as a Holotropic Breathwork™ practitioner. He calls himself “econoshamanic” to honor the two sides of his life – the rational accountant and the shaman – and to hold space for their integration. He is married and has three incredible feline teachers. He is in the process of launching, "econoshamanics", a shamanic process whereby we come face to face with how we dream the world, take responsibility for the condition of the world we dream and learn to put healing intention into our dreams.
©2009, Kevin D. Sachs, PhD. All rights reserved.