You don't have to go to the Amazonian rain forest or take hallucinogenic jungle herbs to be a shaman. Don't need a journey to Tibet in order to practice the secrets of Tantra. Don't need to tie your legs into a pretzel for the deepest perfect Yoga.
You were a yogi in the crib, at 6 months old. Stretching out, curling up, rolling over, bouncing, you performed a complete sequence of asanas, fingers and thumbs dancing with esoteric mudras of Buddhic blessing. You were a shaman in the play pen, your throat a bone rattle, your belly a drum, your joyful gurgling the incantation that invoked the animal guides, a dog, a cat, a parakeet. The sounds your body made were tantric bija mantras full of Shakti: "Yah!" "Hum!" "Phwat!" "Hri!" "Bham!" Even if you had no idea what you were saying, you practiced the art of creation through the Word.
Even as a fetus tumbling through the womb, you circled the vast Zodiac Dharma Wheel and embodied the constellations, fish, bull, lion, scorpion. Were you not purified in the sweat lodge of birth? What better baptism than the microbiome? Surely, as a newborn, you carried every talisman required for the shamanic journey...
Your skin the robe of the Deer Priest. At the center of your ancient brain a holy sepulcher, with a hidden medicine bundle, the amygdala. In the deep well behind your cortex, a visionary jewel, your pineal gland, spurting streams of sapphire wisdom toward your forehead. On your fontanelle a diamond cup, blending Christall light into seven colors of the rainbow, pouring distant stars down your backbone. Your diaphragm a lyre, strung with gut, resonant with Pythagorean intervals of thunder and silence.
Did the fiery tendrils of your cardiac plexus terminate in the outline of your flesh? Of course not! You were an edge-less field of organic radiance. Your neurons rooted in loam through the soles of your feet, twining with mycelia. Your vagus nerve a Tree of Life on a trellis of bone at the center of a dusty vineyard. How succulent those heavenly spheres entangled in your branches, lighting up your cortex, each twig a wick, each leaf a flame, returning planetary fire to the sun. Did your senses drink the world in, or flow outward to suffuse it like an incantation?
But then, alas, the priests and professors gave you an "education." They taught you to superimpose a mind full of concepts over the boundless mystery of Mother Matter. You learned to analyze and divide, to distinguish Eve from the Serpent (they are one and the same dangerous wisdom), the Sensuous from the Spiritual (they are one and the same divine energy), the Heavenly from the Profane (they are one and the same delight). Now is the time to lay aside what they taught you, and re-member your unfallen body of original astonishment.
The root meaning of "shaman" is "one who sees in the dark." Is this age of deepest darkness not the best hour to awaken, and realize your power? Witness the full moon of your own divine beauty, rising in the sacred night between your eyebrows. Stroll with the Goddess in the cool of the evening, through the terrible holy flowers of your sacrum, your belly, your heart, your throat, your forehead, your crown. Gaze into the light of glory that glows in the heart of Un-knowing. Your body is Eden. Your birthright is innocence. It was never lost. Now be breathed.
Photo: Six month old yogi.
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