Secrets of Shamanism

JOSE AIID LENA STEVENS 93

foresee that a course of action may lead to a catastrophe. But

by altering what they do now, they can avert the catastrophe.

One method of forestalling an undesirable outcome is to give

the disaster a token opportunity to play itself out. For exam-

ple, if shamans foresee a flood inundating their villages, they

may avert the disaster by building tiny little mock-ups of the

villages and then inundating them with buckets of water. By

giving the event a token reality, shamans control the situa-

tion, possibly averting a large-scale disaster that might hap-

pen to a big village. The fact is, what they foresee does

happen, but to a tiny village instead.

An entertainer had a recurring dream that she would

be up on stage before an audience and suddenly lose

control and laugh hysterically in front of everyone. Need-

less to say, this caused her considerable anxiety. She

tried to put the thought out of her mind, but the more she

avoided the dream, the more she would think of it. It

began to interfere with her work to the extent that she

was turning down jobs out of fear. Finally, she consulted a

counselor that had some training in shamanic practices.

The counselor heard her story and then suggested that

they stage the scene. This, of course, took some powers

of persuasion on the part of the counselor and several

meetings to work up to it. She set up the office like a

small stage at one end and lined up chairs as the audi-

ence at the other end. They rehearsed the scene as it

had occurred in the entertainer's dream. She would be

performing in front of the audience and suddenly would

loudly pretend to laugh hysterically at all the people (rep-

resented by dolls, teddy bears, and pillows). Soon they

both were laughing, and the entertainer felt more relaxed

and unafraid. Her dream stopped recurring, with no sub-

stitute symptoms.

Some behavior-modification techniques similar to this one
are actually based on age-old shamanic techniques. The rea-
sons given why the techniques work are different, however.
For the psychologist, the practice run relieves the client of
anxiety, permitting her to master the problem. For shamans,
the dream or fear is based on an actual probable event in the
future. By giving the tragedy a harmless day in the sun, sha-
mans control the future event and render the obstacles harm-
less.