The Modern Shaman: Fierce Love at the Frontier of Madness

By Jack Adam Weber

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Shamans and Revolutionaries don’t preach to the choir, where confirmation bias is high. They go where they are unpopular, to reach those not far from the next step into sanity.

But such sanity doesn’t feel like sanity at first. This is called a healing crisis. Healing crises get worse before they get better, but the result is deeper integration, wisdom, and wellness. But because healing crises are not pretty or tidy or conducive to business as usual, they are not so popular and thereby often thought worthless or irrelevant.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Our world is in a disease crisis precisely because we have failed to heed the shaman’s message, spoken through many great courage voices—the voices urging us into healing crises to prevent unrelenting illness. Because we have collectively denied our transformations—which necessarily entails embracing the dark—we have created a strange, ironic, and paradoxical disease state on the planet. But not a surprising one.

This absurd paradox is that the dark we have denied inside ourselves is descending upon us outwardly, in the form of all the atrocities we see: from toxic agriculture to pervasive political corruption, to recent assassinations of women activists in Mexico and Latin America, fundamentalist terrorist groups such as ISIS, and the ravages of climate change chaos.

Our modern-day malady follows Yin-Yang wisdom: when inner (Yin) is diseased, it manifests outwardly (Yang), and vice versa. To reverse what is still reversible, we have to become the shamans that embrace Yin-Yang wisdom as the transformation of one polarity into the other. While light-workers are many, we now have to take our light and tend to the darkness with firm action and hands-on change.

Shamans rely on darkness, because all injury and disease pertain to the dark half of Yin-Yang. But this darkness is not evil or to be avoided, as the propaganda about witches, hell, and paganism have tried to convince us. This is the terrain for transformation. The shaman, the healer, illuminates the darkness that others don’t, can’t, or won’t see. All who deny the pain of the Earth and humanity today are such liars. When the shaman notices and embodies the dark, she makes it fertile, transformable, so dark can become light, which is the mark of true healing and sustainability. When darkness is denied it never gets to see the daylight of healing.

Shamans are less concerned with fitting in than they are following their calling in service of the bigger picture, the longer trajectory of integrity. Because they have found their own wholeness, cultivated bravery and courage, and found genuine sovereignty by making the dark conscious, they are okay being mavericks, being alone, and even feeling lonely. But a sense of calling and truth keeps them company, even when the majority dismisses them, or might even ridicule or try to get rid of them.

If a shaman, a revolutionary healer, becomes popular, she needs to check if she has dumbed-down her heart-mind, or if others have merely awakened. Such discernment requires a clear mind, an honest appraisal of oneself and other, which is never perfectly accurate, because we all carry some degree of shadow. But, the more she knows herself and has trained in being her own skeptic and genuine believer, the more accurate she becomes in assessments of reality.

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Previous articles by Jack Adam Weber:

• Arrogance in Relationships: How to Deal With and Heal It
• 11 Reasons Why Hippies (Not Psychos) Should Rule the World
• The Monsanto Years: Singer Neil Young Rips Into GMOs, Big Biz and Conformity
• ReVOLUTION: When Enough is Enough
• Sex – Truth and Dare, Pleasure and Purpose
• Relationships: The Costs of Staying When We Should Leave
• Emotional Work
• Yin Yang — Ancient Wisdom for Personal and Planetary Transformation
• 11 Crucial Tips for Better Digestive Health
• Heartbreak – Loving Ourselves Through Difficult Times

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