Kripalu Retreat
Up to now, I have done my best to recount events in chronological order. Some of what I’ve told happened over twenty years ago, and while my memory of the events is clear, the timeline is not. Luckily, I had written down nearly every single “Big Dream,” trance experience, and daimonic encounter in my life. Unfortunately, I never wrote down the dates, and so each written encounter is dependent on another for me to puzzle together the order in which they happened. Overall, this does not affect the impact of the experiences, but it does create some frustration for me when compiling them for you in the form of this blog.
Today I am writing about my time at Kripalu, a yoga center in picturesque Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My mother gifted me with a three-day retreat to take a course called “Reiki Shamanism” with Jim PathFinder Ewing (Nvnehi Awatisgi, in Cherokee). Jim is an elder of the Manataka Indian Council of Hot Springs, Arkansas, as well as an enrolled member of the Southern Cherokee Tribe and Associated Bands in Texas and the Bear Clan Medicine Society of Russellville.
I will admit that at the time, I was wary of both Reiki and Shamanism, though I had no other words to explain what was happening to me. To me, Reiki was a scam. It was something that white people co-opted along with yoga. My mother was, and still is, a “Reiki Master,” a title I thought ridiculous and conceited. Frankly, I still think that. Taking a few courses does not make anyone a “Master” in anything. She had performed Reiki on me on a few occasions, and I could never determine if I had felt the effects of Reiki or a placebo. My mind changed when I witnessed her perform Reiki on my half-sister after she was in a horrible car accident. She had broken her pelvis in four places and needed to be catheterized to be able to urinate. For a long time, she was confined to stay on a gurney in our living room. She’d go from wailing in pain to falling asleep in only a few minutes whenever my mother performed Reiki on her.
The term “Shaman” never sat well with me. This is why I use the term Magico-Spiritual Practitioner when describing myself. I know now that it is because the modern West does not have a word of its own to describe similar sets of skills or experiences. In “tribal” or pre-Industrial and pre-Christianized societies, Shamans / Medicine Men / Wise Women / Cunning Men & Women, etc., all performed (and still do) similar tasks. They are mediators between the daimonic realm and the physical one. They negotiate with spirits to ensure good weather and healthy crops; they heal both physical and spiritual sicknesses; they find lost objects; they deliver babies and perform abortions; they meet with denizens of the daimonic realm to acquire knowledge; and so much more. These skills are not lost or left in the past; they are alive within people all over the world. They are also not confined to specific cultures or ethnic groups, although the traditions in which to learn them are - this is the basis of the entire debate over cultural appropriation and closed practices.
It is my personal belief that anyone can access at least a portion of these skills, although not everyone should. Tapping into daimonic reality is challenging in every sense of the word. It challenges your preconceived set of beliefs, it challenges your ethics, and it challenges your sense of self (& selves). Left unbalanced, it can cause paranoid delusions or an aggrandized ego. On one end, you have the folks who believe that absolutely everything is connected and that everything has meaning; nothing happens during their day that is not related to a thought they had or an event that has occurred. And on the other end, you have the folks who believe that they are the most powerful person who has ever lived, and woe to anyone who dares think otherwise! Anyone who browses Reddit or attends Pagan Pride festivals will have run into more than a handful of these types… If you are one of these types, touch grass.
During the “Reiki Shamanism” course at Kripalu, we were led into trance two times a day; once before breakfast and again before dinner. Being without food assists in reaching trance, and eating immediately afterwards helps to ground and return to the physical. The following paragraphs are my experiences.
Entry one - “As the drum lulled me deeper into the trance, I could sense an end to the tunnel. I now stood at the entrance of a vast cavern, its size unknowable in the darkness. My hands raised before me to feel my surroundings. Wind grazed my face, and I heard the fluttering of wings. A crow approached. He grew larger and larger until we stood face to face. I caressed its dark beak, and it nuzzled my neck. Its texture was like that of a fingernail. I ran my hand through its feathers. The crow slowly became violet. It then urged me to hop onto its back! I climbed on, and together we flew over a river. I became very nervous and asked for it to bring me back, and it did. I spent the remainder of the session apologizing to the crow for not feeling brave enough to venture with it, but it seemed completely indifferent.”
Entry two - “I appeared at the tree again (my entrance into the Otherworld), stepped into the hole, and walked down the dirt tunnel. The crow sped past me to show me that the “room” at the end of the tunnel was different than before. It was no longer a completely dark cavern. It was lowly lit but bright enough to make out a stone circle. The stones were enormous, easily three times my height, and covered in moss. On the stones, there were worn and blurry symbols. There were none that I could immediately recognize. The number three popped into mind. In the center of the circle was a small pond. The crow flew over it and landed on the shoulder of a man with a white robe. His facial features were blurred like the symbols, but I could see that his eyebrows were very bushy. The crow then flew onto my shoulder. He, the crow, grew larger and larger until he scrambled off my shoulder and landed by my feet. The man in the white robe instructed me to look into the water. Crow, now much larger than I, grabbed my shoulders with his talons and dove into the little pond. We appeared over a vast ocean, and the word “Norway” came to mind. Crow flew us to a small and cold island off the coast of what I gathered to be Norway. As we walked along the coast, I saw clothes tied together and dangling off of rocks. More clothes were strewn about, but I could see no people. I became very uneasy. I told Crow that I wanted to see more of the island, but he brought me back to the stone circle and the robed man. Facing the pond, the man told me to put my hands out and to send a blue mist to the island. I did so, and soon enough, the entire island was covered in a thick mist. It felt like a healing session for the land itself, but I did not understand how I was doing it.”
Entry three - “I met up with Crow, but this time we did not go anywhere. I began to feel very warm. Memories of past events and conversations flooded my mind. I may have fallen asleep. Crow and I stayed underground and in total darkness. My body began to tingle, and I felt hotter and hotter. Surely I was sweating. I put all of these flooding thoughts into a bottle, which I then strapped to my belt. The thirty minutes went by very quickly.”
Entry four - “I recalled a dream that I had last night. Black feathers were pushing through my skin and growing out of my arms. I was half man, half crow.”
Entry five - “I became Reiki attuned for the first time by a woman named Grace Walsh. After dinner, we met on the terrace and then walked around the grounds until we came upon a very tall tree. In truth, this tree was three trees that had grown together. Their trunks wrapped around each other at the base and sprawled out towards the top. She performed a ritual on me while I sat on a wooden bench facing the trees. I had my eyes closed and could feel the symbols she was making on my head. She put my hands together against my chest and then to my head. She repeated this several times. I began to feel lighter and less anxious. At the end of the ritual, she told me that she felt a very strong monkish energy within me. She also said that she saw a robed man emerge from the trees.”
In entry number two, I believe that what I had viewed was the aftermath of the 2011 massacre by Anders Behring Breivik on the island of Utøya. He slaughtered 69 people at the AUF’s summer youth camp, half of whom were children.