FAITH
At the centre of ourselves, at the centre of the Medicine Wheel, at the centre of the universe lies faith. It is the all-encompassing pillar that supports life, the world-tree on whose branches can be found the multiplicity of life. Faith is the sense of the sacred, of that which has highest value. It is the prioritising of what the Lakota call Wakan Tanka - the 'holiest of everything'. Keep that priority, and you will remain fundamentally on track.
Faith is something we have lost, that we even look down on as irrational. But you look at the faith that went into building the old churches, the huge resources and sacrifice over hundreds of years. It was deep ceremony. Sure, there was a fair bit of nonsense around it as well, and the requirement to believe in a miraculous ancient event. But the sheer power and centrality of it to people's lives is evident, and it is the normal state of affairs for humanity.
Shamanic faith is like this: it is the sense of the sacred power within the natural world, that is its foundation, that continually dreams it into being. Life is sacred. We can give thanks for our life, just for the simple fact that we exist, many times every day.
A SURE FOUNDATION
Why are there 4 directions? Because we have a left and a right, a front and a behind. These are the 4 basic ways we use to orient ourselves, to know where we are. This is the foundation of the Medicine Wheel - a philosophy and a symbolism that is as profound and intricate as you like, yet rooted in everyday experience. And who is it that we are? We are made of what the world is made of. It comes to us very concretely as Sun, as Rain, as Soil and as Wind. Or Fire, Water, Earth and Air. I call them Initiation, Emotional Awakening, Incarnation and Perspective. The Directions and the Elements interweave according to which Wheel you are using. Between them they tell you who you are and where to go. This is the beauty of indigenous ways. They are rooted not in abstract concepts, or belief in the divinity of historical figures, but in immediate, concrete experience. They therefore provide the most reliable foundation from which to live. During the Covid lockdowns I wrote a book on the Medicine Wheel. Buy it, leave a rating on Amazon, and I will give you a free astrology reading 😀 
The cover of my next book, out in Dec. A...
The cover of my next book, out in Dec. Actually, that's not quite true. The 1st in my fantasy trilogy, The Stolen Queen, is due out in June.
 COMMUNITY We all want community. But you're not going to find it, not if you are serious about being true to who you are. That is not what regular humanity wants, for whom belonging comes first. At best, you will have a few friends where you won't always agree, but where open discussion is still possible. Even then, such friends will come and go over the years. Maybe beyond that there are one or two friends where there is a spirit connection, like a breath of fine air, who have been sent to you, that endure, and who you know you will always cherish. But that doesn't make it easy, for the spirits still want us to learn 
SHAMANISM and THE MODERN WORLD
The
great project of modern shamanism is continually to reclaim the natural
human, within our headlong technological trajectory. It is a difficult
task, and extremely interesting. Technology is natural to humans. In
some ways we know better than the world, in many ways we do not. We need
to work alongside humanity, and be wary of the counter-cultural
assumption that it is all corrupt. That is a self-serving cop-out, a
spiritual bypass. THE UNIFYING MYTH OF SHAMANISMThe unifying Christian mythology of the West collapsed because it had separated itself from the natural world. The Spirit lay elsewhere. Nature was looked down upon, the province of the beasts. But we are nothing other than the natural world, it is she who nourishes us, cares for us, ensouls us. Shamanism understands this: it is its foundational living idea. We do not have a complex mythology to replace the Christian story. But we do have this one very simple story: nature is ensouled, and we are indivisible from her. That is enough. That story is deep enough and connected enough to carry a civilisation on its shoulders, one that will not this time collapse from its internal contradictions, much as the indigenous societies never seemed to collapse for this reason.
FAITH
Thinking out loud late at night in my van in the Peak District. Faith has always underpinned my life. I had a deep experience of it when I was 22, listening to a Buddhist talk about faith. I had a deep, joyful experience of homecoming. I felt I'd found something I'd been looking for all my life without knowing it. Buddhism was the nearest vehicle to hand. But there was always a wholeness, a soulfulness that was lacking. Shamanism gives me that fuller experience of faith. Faith in what? Not in anything objective. That is why it is a nonsense to talk about the existence of God as if he can be objectively apprehended. It is faith in the subjective pole of existence, which begins with the personal experience of Spirit, and expands to the realisation that the one Spirit underlies and underpins everything.
Spirit is vast, compassionate, all-powerful, and all-knowing. It is not an aspect of life, it IS life. You look at what went into building the old churches, and it is apparent that our ancestors experienced a level of faith of which we have no conception. We truly live in the Dark Ages. This is why I object to the teaching of Shamanic healing ways as a mere add-on to other modalities, which may themselves have the need for rational respectability lurking behind them. That is all wrong, it is the cart before the horse.
Shamanism begins with the experience of faith in the Spirit, and in the natural world, to which we belong, as the expression of Spirit. You may or may not end up doing healing work, coming out of that foundation of faith, that takes years to build, and which is the stuff of life. Fools Crow's remarkable healings were always based in prayer to the Great Spirit, to 'the holiest of everything', as he more literally translated Wakan Tanka.
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