Letting Go – Day 14
30 Days of Letting Go Day 14
By Jenny Griffin
Shamans and Dreamers: Shamanic Death
Today we have Black Feather with us again, this time to discuss the role shamanic death plays in the rites of passage of a shaman. (For more on Black Feather, visit Black Feather Medicine or The Power of Change).
JG: I understand that it’s important for shamans to undergo some kind of ritual or initiation in many cases, in order to become a shaman. Can you tell us about your own experience and how it relates to letting go?
BF: It’s not that there’s any one event that ‘qualified’ me as a shaman, so much as there were events that opened me up to the capability and compassion for helping others. It’s more a matter of experience, or rites of passage, if you will. And it isn’t that all those happened only in this life, either; it’s been (and will continue to be) an ongoing process. To get a little specific though, some significant experiences took place in a past life I visited in which I was a young native girl. My father, a shaman, was murdered by people trying to steal his medicine. Though we were in separate locations at the time he was killed, I’d been journeying with him at the time, ‘playing chase’. I thought he’d been distracted because of me, made myself ill to my death over it, and carried that guilt as part of my soul’s signature ever since. Journeying back to that life to gain clarity about the event not only allowed me to release the guilt and sorrow I’d felt, it helped me release/retrieve a part of my soul that had remained there. By letting go of the limited perspective I’d had on what had happened, I also gained an appreciation for how Divinely orchestrated our souls’ journeys are, and how much Angelic help is available to us.
