Jose ATID LEIIA STEVENS 217lend your hand to allow the universe to work through you.
The more power you are able to channel, the less you take
credit for.HOW TO GO FURTHER
Now that you have been exposed to time-tested shamanic
techniques that can enhance your living skills and increase
your personal power, you may wish to pursue shamanism
more seriously. For this, it will be helpful for you to find
teachers or guides with whom you can study or with whom
you can apprentice. We cannot tell you whom to approach
because this is a matter of personal discretion. However, you
have learned how to use your shamanic power to call the
appropriate teachers or guides to yourself, whether they be
the internal kind or the physical kind. Perhaps you will find
that your best teachers are the animal, plant, or spirit guides
whom you meet during your inner journeys. On the other
hand, you may find that you want to study with a physical
human being who can show you the ropes and help you in
your path as a healer.
Remember that there are all kinds of people out there
who may call themselves experts in shamanism and will
gladly tell you what to do. Many of the best shamans these
days, however, do not call themselves such and do not look
like traditional shamans. On the other hand, the guide that
suits you best might be a very traditional-looking shaman.
Therefore, you must look more than skin-deep to find the
right guide for you.
You may wish to travel to another country to study sha-
manism in an exotic and stimulating environment. Some-
times removing yourself from your everyday surroundings
can open the inner doors to your own powers quite rapidly.
You may, however, find it difficult to translate what you have
learned in a foreign context back to your own cultural set-
ting. The true test of your abilities comes when you are back
in your own environment with the typical stresses of your
everyday life.
Nor should you think that you can learn all about sha-
manism on a quickie two-week tour. Real learning takes dis-
cipline and practice over a long period of time. For example,
for the Lakota Sioux the formal training takes sixteen years.
Today, there are strong feelings from different camps
about who can and who cannot be a shaman. Some feel that
middle-class whites interested in shamanism have no right to
practice its ways because they have no tradition of it behind