To wrap up our theme of Winter's Rest, here's how to learn to use this naturally quiet, reflective time to practice shamanic journeying for insights that can help you reclaim your power.
This is part 4 of a 4-part series on Winter's Rest. Also, it ended up being a bit longer than I expected due to adding details about drums and drumming.
Embracing the Hush: Shamanic Renewal in Winter's Embrace
As winter wraps the world in its serene extended night and its chill reflective quiet, it creates a sacred space for your introspection and spiritual journeying. This season, I encourage you to turn to shamanic wisdom to guide you through a transformative journey of renewal and empowerment in life, business, and professional power.
Winter's Rest and the January month are both a time for you to begin a journey practice that will connect you deeply with your inner self, exploring and overcoming the blockages that hinder your full expression of power and spirit, especially those left by challenging pasts. Let's head out on this path of exploring shamanic journeying practice, finding in the quiet of winter the perfect backdrop for profound spiritual growth.
Unveiling the Shamanic Path: A Journey to Inner Power
Shamanic journeying is an ancient path, well-known for its profound ability to heal and enlighten. It involves sitting safely, listening to drumming, and delving into the spiritual realm to seek guidance, healing, and insight. As you navigate this path, you will engage with spirit guides and animal totems, uncovering layers of your psyche and soul that hold the key to your personal power and wisdom, and receiving guidance from helpful spirits and allies on questions that previously seemed unanswerable. Journeying is particularly resonant during the winter months, when the world naturally turns inward, mirroring your own introspective quest as you craft a new year.
For you, especially if facing the echoes of narcissistic or other abuse and the challenges this may have placed in your lifelong professional path, shamanic journeying offers a powerful means to reclaim authority over your life and narrative. It's an opportunity to confront and heal from the wounds of the past, transforming pain into strength. It's an opportunity to find allies and helpers with your key business questions, whether in work-work or finding your power as an entrepreneur. Through journeys and drumming, let's start this journey, tapping into ancient wisdom that empowers you to break through old blockages, and flourish.
Navigating the Inner Landscape: Tools and Rituals
Embarking on a shamanic journey requires simple tools and practices. Despite their simplicity, these facilitate deep spiritual exploration. The most simple tool of journeying is the drum. Rhythmic drumming leads your mind into a trance-like state, allowing for travel to the non-ordinary reality. Here, as you close your eyes and send your energy field on a journey to explore this other realm, insights and healing occur as well as deep wisdom. It is a wisdom that is quite often, immediately relevant and healing. The guides you will meet are helpful and wise, sometimes quite serious, but more often a great deal of fun, and full of personality. They want to be assisting you, and are always supportive.
To understand drumming, shamanic journey drumming is a time-honored meditative practice. It utilizes repetitive drumming at a specific tempo to induce altered states of consciousness, often referred to as trance states. Here's a précis of key aspects of shamanic drumming:
Purpose: Shamanic drumming is primarily used for spiritual journeys, healing, and accessing deeper levels of the self. Practitioners often use it to enter a trance state for the purpose of spiritual journeys, connecting with spiritual guides, and performing healing work.
Beats Per Second: The drumming typically occurs at a tempo of around 4 to 7 beats per second. This rhythm is crucial as it correlates with the theta brain wave frequency (approximately 4-7 Hz), which is associated with deep relaxation, meditation, and mental imagery. The steady rhythm helps entrain the brain, facilitating a shift from normal consciousness to a trance-like state.
Brain Entrainment: Entrainment is a process where the powerful rhythmic sounds of the drum influence the brain's electrical rhythms, encouraging them to align with the drum's beats. As the brain shifts into lower frequency waves (theta waves), individuals may experience profound relaxation, vivid visions, and insights, or a sense of spiritual connection.
Tools and Techniques: The typical shamanic drum is a frame drum, often accompanied by a beater or rattle. The drum is played in a steady, repetitive pattern. The sound is considered to carry the shaman or practitioner on their journey to the spirit world or into deeper realms of consciousness.
A simple way to start a drum journey practice is to find a drum track online (i.e. YouTube). Look for something that is simple and rhythmic, preferably with rhythmic drums only, possibly rattles too. There are drum tracks that have syncopated non-tempo beats or include throat-singing and other sound overlays, but, these might be more distracting than helpful for journeying (although they're fun to listen to other times, like working or creating).
Wear headphones so you can feed that lovely drumming right into your ears at a volume that works for you. Journey as short or long as you wish. While many prerecorded drum journeys are an hour, I've found that journeys as short as 10 minutes have been effective ways to keep in touch with my guides and helping spirits when my day is too busy to do anything longer.
For a personal drum that you can handle and hold, I can recommend the Remo Buffalo Drum. I have two of these, the 14" and 16", and they are both lovely. Each one came with a beautiful beater, too. Their sound is magnificent, and being synthetic, they are more immune to temperature and humidity changes than a traditional skin drum. The Remos are lovely in the hand and a lot of fun to work and journey with. Obviously, don't drum when it will drive your neighbors crazy :) (that's why a good headphone track is essential as an alternative!).
Even the act of drumming outside of journeying is an empowering act. Just feeling the thrum of my Remos puts me in a different state of mind. As we explored with candles (The Dance of Flame and Fire), incense (The Resonant Ember), and other traditional modalities that feed the psyche and soul with ancient awakening, drumming too is a way to reconnect with your ancestral forces. You will begin to feel ancient energies surround you, feel the way the drum calls to impulses coded deep in your human DNA. (Special note: I don't mean to shortchange rattles and rattling, which are powerful as well.)
In Winter's Rest, find a way to drum and journey frequently. Record (i.e. journal) the results of your journeys. There are many resources out there that describe the "how to" of entering a journey, meeting your power animal, conversing with guides, and how to return at the callback. My main focus in THIS post is to encourage you to try it -- just start!!!! It is a fruitful and rewarding road.
Winter, with its inherent stillness and depth, amplifies the introspective and healing nature of these tools. By integrating them into your daily or weekly rituals, you begin to peel away the layers of blockage and uncover your true authentic, powerful self, ready to rise as the year progresses.
Transcending Obstacles: Journeying To Reclaim Authority and Spirit
Overcoming the barriers and challenges placed in your energy and personal-professional power path is its own journey involving reclaiming your spirit and authority. It consists of recognizing and releasing the narratives imposed upon you, narratives that no longer serve your wishes, visions and intentions to craft and live a powerful life.
Shamanic journeying offers a true and unmediated path to heal and shift out of these narratives, transforming them into a source of strength. Unmediated means it's yours to experience and gain the direct wisdom of your teachers. You do not need any third party's interpretation, discouragement, or the vulnerability of sharing the most catastrophic parts of your personal story to someone while never knowing quite who they'll tell it to or how they'll react to you. You are the empowered journeyer, and your guides are the witnesses. As you traverse your inner world, you empower yourself with the deepest possible power -- the PRIVATE power to rewrite the story of your life, asserting your voice and vision.
As you journey, interact with the guides, animals, plants, trees, places, helpers and spirits you will encounter in the non-logical journey world. You can ask your power animal helper to take you to the place or guide they think can best help you with your day's healing, request, or question.
Keep notes on your journeys such that you can read back and remember the wise words and messages, images and ideas they have given you. Celebrate these as amazing gifts of wisdom.
Celebrating Renewal: Emerging Empowered from Winter's Quiet
As the first month of the new year prepares to gently lead into the second month, reflect on this journey of yours, quietly undertaken in the quiet of winter. In the first post in this series, you learned the importance of finding clarity in winter's pause. In the second post, we covered the fire, flame and hearthside as your sacred space. In the third, heeding the adventurous call of the new year in winter's whispers of what is to come. Now, you can add to those the practice of deliberately reclaiming your power with your own journey practice.
The journey path will, now and going forward, equip you with wisdom, resilience, and a profound connection to your inner truth, enabling you to step forward into the world with confidence and clarity. Shamanic journeying provides a powerful medium for healing, growth, and empowerment, particularly for those healing from the wounds of the past. It can also help you engage with questions of growth, desire, vision and creation -- personal, professional, and building or growing the businesses you love.
This season of "Winter's Rest" has been an opportunity to embrace stillness, engage deeply with your inner self, and emerge renewed and ready to manifest your dreams and talents. Carry the wisdom and strength you've garnered from this time forward into the blossoming year, celebrating the renewal and the endless potential it heralds.
How will you incorporate journeying to enrich your personal-professional life as you #healworklife and #reclaimyourwildness?
Be well,
Katherine
