Shamanic Journeying
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Journeys to Receive Instruction for Creating and Performing Ceremonies
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to release and transform fear, anger, or a block to your creativity.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to help you manifest a dream or desire.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to celebrate a life transition such as puberty, menopause, marriage, a move, or a change in career.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform for mourning or to say goodbye to a loved one.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to honor someone in your family or someone with whom you work.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to bring joy or health into your life.
• Ask for a ceremony that you can perform to honor the change in seasons.
Journeys for Social Issues
• Journey to ask for help in resolving a conflict with a loved one, friends, family, or coworkers.
• Journey to ask to meet with the power animal of the business or organization where you are employed. Ask the power animal how it can help you to restore balance and harmony in the environment in which you work.
• Journey to ask for help with creative projects.
• Journey to ask to meet the power animal of your relationship or family.
• Journey to ask about the power of words and how the vibration and intention coming from the words we speak can create healing and peace.
• Journey to ask how you can help heal a social wound.
• Journey to find out how you can be of service and help heal environmental or global problems.
Journeys for Exploration
• Journey to explore and experience the landscape in different levels in the Lower World and Upper World.
• Journey to meet different helping spirits in the different levels of the Lower World or Upper World. Learn what messages or information they have to share with you.
Chapter 9: Integrating Your Journey Practice with Your Community
Journey groups have formed around the world where people journey together and then share their experiences, giving people a strong sense of community and the gift of being witnessed by other journeyers. In most journey groups, the members journey on their own issues and on questions for one another. When you ask other journeyers to journey on your behalf, you will often get helpful and new information that you did not receive yourself.
Some groups journey collectively on a question, such as a question about a global issue or some aspect of current events. For example, how to address the climate changes in their community or a social issue about which they are concerned. Many groups will ask about how to honor a change in season or the current phase of the moon, or to create rituals together as a community. Each member of the group will receive a unique piece of information that can be woven together to inspire and educate the whole group. There may also be similarities and synchronicities among the answers given, which will underscore something of particular importance.
Many well-meaning journeyers report that it is hard to commit to a once-a-week journey group. The feedback I receive is that meeting twice a month works best and results in the most consistent level of attendance. I have also noticed that the groups that stay together the longest journey for each other as well as for community and global issues. These groups evolve into true communities where individual issues are addressed as well as issues that affect the entire group.
I would like to offer one warning for those who choose to journey in a group. Please do not compare the information you receive with the other group members. Sometimes this produces a feeling of envy between group members who wish their journeys were more like someone else’s. It is critical to honor your own unique style of journeying—as well as each other’s style—rather than deeming one style to be more advanced than the others.
If you are new to journeying, you may consider sharing this program with some friends as a way of creating a group of journeyers in your community. Then you can journey on your own and perhaps meet every two weeks to do some group journeys together.
Shamanic journeying is an incredible tool to receive healing and guidance in our lives. With the help of our spirits, we can be guided to create a life filled with meaning, joy, and passion. We begin to wake up from the spell we have been under that says we are only what we seem to be in the material world. We begin to engage in a dance with life and life’s cycles. We learn to move from a life of fear and survival into one in which we begin to thrive.
You are embraced by the love of the universe and the helping spirits. Open your heart to the love, wisdom, and healing they have to share. In doing this, you can not only change your own life, but the changes in consciousness we can achieve together through shamanic journeying can transform the world as well.
Resources
For information on workshops taught by Sandra Ingerman, please either write to:
Sandra Ingerman
P.O. Box 4757
Santa Fe, NM 87502
or visit Sandra’s Website:
www.sandraingerman.com.
For a list of local shamanic teachers and practitioners in your area, visit www.shamanicteachers.com.
About the Author
Sandra Ingerman, MA, is the author of Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self, Welcome Home: Following Your Soul’s Journey Home, A Fall to Grace, Medicine for the Earth: How to Transform Personal and Environmental Toxins, and How to Heal Toxic Thoughts: Simple Tools for Personal Transformation. She has recorded a three-hour lecture, The Soul Retrieval Journey, The Beginner’s Guide to Shamanic Journeying, and Miracles for the Earth with Sounds True.
Sandra teaches workshops internationally on shamanic journeying, healing, and reversing environmental pollution using spiritual methods. She is recognized for bridging ancient crosscultural healing methods to our modern culture, addressing the needs of our times. Sandra is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a professional mental health counselor.
About Sounds True
Sounds True was founded in 1985 with a clear vision: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. Located in Boulder, Colorado, Sounds True publishes teaching programs that are designed to educate, uplift, and inspire. We work with many of the leading spiritual teachers, thinkers, healers, and visionary artists of our time.
To receive a free catalog of tools and teachings for personal and spiritual transformation, please visit www.soundstrue.com, call toll-free 800-333-9185, or write to us at The Sounds True Catalog, P.O. Box 8010, Boulder CO 80306. (Image I)
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Back Cover Material
“Sandra Ingerman skillfully teaches us how shamanic journeying can be used for guidance, empowerment, renewal, divination, and healing. This is an exceptional resource and guidebook.”
—Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., author of The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life
A Beginner’s Guide to Shamanic Journeying
The shamanic journey is a practice common to all indigenous societies throughout history. By listening to a drumbeat or other rhythmic percussion, the shaman enters “non-ordinary” reality—an altered state of consciousness beyond time and space—to access spiritual guidance and healing, assist others and the planet, and reconnect with the cycles of nature. Shamanic Journeying offers you an interactive learning experience to discover how to journey just as traditional shamans have for centuries.
With the instruction in this book and the accompanying audio CD, internationally respected teacher Sandra Ingerman illuminates:
• The original role of the shaman in indigenous cultures
• How to meet and work with your “power animals” and other spirit teachers
• How to navigate the Lower World, Upper World, and Middle World—the three divisions of unseen reality
• The keys to successful journeying in our modern culture
Sharing fascinating accounts of the powerful results of shamanic journeying and answers t
o the questions common to most beginners, Shamanic Journeying is an accessible guide for exploring the visionary worlds of the shaman.
CD includes drumming for three journeys.
Sandra Ingerman leads workshops on shamanism around the world. She holds an MA in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sandra is a licensed marriage and family therapist and professional mental-health counselor. She is the author of the books How to Heal Toxic Thoughts, Soul Retrieval, Medicine for the Earth, and more, as well as the Sounds True audio programs The Beginner’s Guide to Shamanic Journeying, The Soul Retrieval Journey, and Miracles for the Earth. For information about further study with Sandra Ingerman, please visit www.shamanicvisions.com/ingerman or www.sandraingerman.com.