In the summer of 1991 I was invited to enter into a process which is hard to describe. The invitation came from a man, to whom I shall refer as “WM,” and I also find it difficult to describe and label his role in the process. However, the invitation, and my acceptance (another word which lacks precision in this particular context) of it, have precipitated new awareness and new confusion in me. This paper will be an attempt record and make order of some of this awareness and confusion, in the hopes that it will be useful to me and perhaps to others.
WM is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect. He is a powerful shaman, in the Native American tradition, as well as a sophisticated and accomplished psychotherapist. I also like him personally. I have spent all of my professional life standing (and sometimes dancing) at the intersection of what I have labelled as “psychotherapy” and as “spirituality.” Another way to describe this history is to say I have wanted to be a shaman. WM’s invitation was to let him help me fulfill that desire by having him serve as my teacher, mentor, guide, guru, or whatever. Again, words fail me at this point, so all I think to do is to offer a cluster of words that seem to surround the experience, and hope that the reader can converge from them to something useful.
Fortunately, I have come down to just two words that come repeatedly to mind when I try to describe the process: teaching and induction. My perception is that WM is teaching me something and is also inducting me into a shamanic tradition. I will therefore, at least for the purposes of this paper, refer to him as my teacher and to the process as shamanic induction.
What has been most striking about my experiences to date with shamanic induction is my resistance to it. The second most striking aspect has been the direct parallel between resistance in this context and resistance (as I have observed it in myself and my clients) in the context of psychotherapy. Since I am so new to this process in a way, and feel I am virtually swirling in my confusion (hence the title of this paper), I imagine I am in a unique position to describe an experience which may seem difficult to recall a few years from now (like reading an important dream I recorded in the past and have then forgotten/repressed).
Right now I am conceptualizing the source of my resistance in terms of fear. I am aware that I am both afraid that the process of shamanic induction will go very well, and that it will go very poorly. If it goes well I will become a powerful shaman in my own right, like WM. If it goes poorly I will “flunk out of shamanism school,” a phrase that came to mind when I was discussing this matter with my wife (and best friend), and which reflects in its glibness how profound the issue is for me. (If it is not obvious to you how I connect my glibness with the profundity I experience in the issue, trust me; this much I do know about how I resist).
The common denominator I see behind each of my fears (both passing and failing) is that somehow I would not be happy going down that road. This fear in turn reflects my lack of faith in what I think of as the evolutionary process. That is, I do not trust or have faith in the process to which I am currently trying consciously to surrender and concurrently resisting at an unconscious level–the process of shamanic induction. I do not trust that it will lead me to a place I will like, wherever that may be, and so I am afraid. I presume that this fear will be one with which anyone who has been seriously involved with psychotherapy can easily resonate.1
At a conceptual level, I find that the language of psychotherapy is also helpful in thinking and talking about what is being resisted in shamanic induction. In its most generic forms I think of resistance in psychotherapy as being directed at the experience of one’s personal unconscious. In shamanic induction it seems to me that one simply substitutes the experience of the transpersonal unconscious as the goal of one’s resistance. This substitution reminds me of a debate I used to have a decade or two ago with a friend who maintained that spiritual direction was a process quite distinct from psychotherapy, while I argued that good psychotherapy was inclusive of what I understood to transpire in spiritual direction. When I recently tried to engage him in another round of this always-interesting debate, I was a bit disappointed to find that he was not longer willing to play his role. His acknowledgment that perhaps I had won the debate led me to realize that perhaps we were asking the question in the wrong way. It struck me that good spiritual direction may actually be inclusive of psychotherapy, and that the personal unconscious may be so thoroughly embedded in the transpersonal unconscious as to render meaningless and/or futile any consideration of the personal unconscious outside of this larger context. This perspective seems consistent with the old maxim that anyone who stays seriously involved for a significant period of time as a participant (regardless of role–either client or therapist) in psychotherapy will inevitably end up exploring spiritual matters. It is also consistent with the notion that the issues which propel us toward involvement in psychotherapy (again, regardless of role) are inevitably spiritual in nature.
Now let’s move from the conceptual to the experiential. I will try to describe (I find I have the impulse to use the word “confess” instead of “describe”) what I have observed of the specific forms of my own resistance to the process of shamanic induction.
Much of my resistance seems fairly “primitive,” in the usual psychotherapeutic sense, in that it is based on denial and repression, and is often acted out quite directly. Other variations involve intellectualization, projection, and almost any other form of resistance one can imagine. WM and I exchange audio tapes and I have managed to both lose tapes he has sent me, and to push the wrong button so that I erase what is on them as I try (consciously) to listen to them. He offers exercises for me to do which I then construe as “assignments” being forced upon me by some illegitimate authority whom I cannot trust and therefore must resist. I analyze his exercises and teachings in terms of other conceptual systems (psychoanalytic theory, Buddhism, A Course in Miracles, etc.) so that I can avoid feeling their power for me. Similarly, when I have powerful experiences of synchronicity with nature (something this particular shamanic path emphasizes), I will sometimes try to analyze the experiences to death. When this intellectualization fails I will sometimes simply repress the experiences, only to be amazed that I have done so when WM reminds me of them later. The same thing happens of course with powerful dreams that clearly have to do with the process of shamanic induction. More generically, I have questioned (both to myself and to him) WM’s authority, sincerity, ethicality and competence. Finally, I find myself using the exercycle in my basement for physical conditioning, rather than going for a jog outside in nature, thereby avoiding some of the communing with nature which I have always loved and which is so central to this particular shamanic path.
There is also an entire category of frightening stories I tell myself about the possible implications of shamanic induction, all of which reflect the basic lack of faith in the evolutionary process which was noted above, and all of which lead one toward the conclusion that the whole thing is dangerous. For example, I raise the question of how the changes I am inviting will destroy all the relationships I currently value (with friends, family, gurus, etc.), because in my changed condition I will either no longer value these people, or they will no longer want to relate to me. I think about the old concept of the “amotivational syndrome” attributed to heavy marijuana use, and conjure up a frightening image of myself as no longer striving for power, wealth, fame, and sexual gratification–an image which I do not construe as being one of liberation, but rather as one of being lost and confused about who I am. I tell myself that this particular shamanic path is not the one for me because I am far too sophisticated and special to be involved in something as trendy as the current wave of interest in Native American spirituality. I imagine being rejected (or worse) by my neighbors if they see me communing with a tree in my yard at sunrise as part of one of the exercises given to me by WM. I speculate about the true nature of evil and tell myself how the shadow side of the personal unconscious is nothing compared to the transpersonal shadow, something which I could not possibly be ready to confront more directly or consciously at any point in the future, no matter how much I might evolve as a shaman or as a human being. I tell myself that I will be seduced by the shamanic powers I may acquire, and will use them inappropriately so as to do harm to others or to just make myself confused and miserable (sort of a spiritual version of Elvis’ last years). I remind myself of what a shameful thing it is to be a neophyte (as I now am with regard to this path), since I should already know everything important that there is to know. I visualize “flunking out of shamanism school,” reminding myself that the resultant narcissistic wound would scarcely be survivable, given the rigidity of my defenses having to do with regarding myself as special and chosen. I tell myself that it is dangerous to get in touch with how powerful my spiritual longings are, just as I have done with my sexuality and rage in psychotherapy, conjuring up frightening images of loss of control.
What I know at this point about dealing with my resistance is in part reflected by the fact that I am writing this paper; it seems important to recognize and explore it. I am also grateful that WM is a sophisticated psychotherapist, so that he is comfortable (or at least as comfortable as anyone could be) with my explorations, including the ones that involve projecting things onto him. It feels helpful to conceptualize the basis of my resistance in terms of my fear that I cannot trust the evolutionary process, in that I can sometimes then cut to the chase and ask myself where I stand at the moment on that particularly fear, as well as invite myself to consider what I imagine to be the alternatives (Like not evolve? How does one do that? Accept that I am evolving but keep telling myself that it is inherently dangerous and that I should therefore live in chronic fear? That sounds like a lot of fun.) It is obviously helpful to keep some kind of record of dreams and other experiences that transcend one’s usual logic, so that the tendency to repress important material, or to keep it repressed, is mitigated.
I am always intrigued by the evolutionary process. It is often said that when the student is ready the teacher appears. In this case it seems that when the student was ready the student appears, in that WM issued his invitation to me based on my having appeared to him in dreams. In any case, I wonder about the events and circumstances in my life that made me ready to appear to WM. What comes to mind is a relationship with my wife that is tremendously supportive of spiritual exploration and evolution in general, a growing sense of feeling “solid” as a psychotherapist (meaning both that I do good work and that I can support myself and my family doing it), a very good friend who has passionately and respectfully been inviting me to explore more deeply joining him on this particular path, the loving support of a fairly new partner in the practice of psychotherapy, and just the accumulation of experiences (my own and those of others) which contradict all the scary you-can’t-trust-your-own-evolution stories. I try to pay attention to such experiences and to remember them.
1I got up early one morning (i.e. what many people would consider to be the middle of the night) to put the finishing touches on the final draft of this paper. As I was going over the part about trusting one’s evolution I suddenly recalled a fairly elaborate dream, as well as some fragments of other dreams, which I had had while I was sleeping and had repressed almost immediately upon waking up. Although highly symbolic, the content of this dream material certainly had running through it the theme of trusting one’s evolution. I did not finish this paper that morning because I spent the rest of the time available to me recording this dream material. Later that day a client who rarely reports dreams came in to report that he had dreamt about me that same night. The dream (or perhaps a fragment of a larger dream) was one brief and simple scene: He and I were facing each other and I said to him: “Trust in God.” The effect associated with the dream was simply peacefulness, and I suspect that it signals a turning point in the therapy.