John Mabry on Shamanism and Spirituality

dot net slash join. If you look at the relative amount of stuff we understand next to the relative amount of stuff we don't understand, you know it ain't much Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is John Maybrie. John is one of these guests that has done so much and continues to do so much, that it's nearly impossible for me to go into all of it, but I'll say this. He is a United Church of Christ pastor as the director of Spiritual Direction program at the Chaplaincy Institute. He's the lead singer of not one, but two bands in the Bay Area, and he's the author of many novels

and books on theology, spirituality, and spiritual guidance. And today John and Eric will narrow all that down just a little bit and discuss his book Soul Journeys, Christian Spirituality and Shamanism as Pathways for wholeness and understanding. Hi, John, Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It is a pleasure for me to have

you on. We'll talk about all the ways that I know you here in a little bit and we will spend some time talking about your book, Soul Journeys, Christian Spirituality and shamanism as pathways for wholeness and understanding. But you've written I don't know how many other books that we might wander into. But before we do all that, we'll start, like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandfather who's tongue with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that

you do. So the meaning that feels the most powerful to me relates to my healing journey. So, about twenty years ago, I lived in a house that was infected with black mold, had black mold in the walls. And at the same time I was living there, I was experiencing some pretty extreme emotional trauma, going through a divorce, and the JUSTI position of those two things created this health crisis that I'm still dealing with. You know, even

after twenty years I got chronically ill. I was living a pretty healthy life, and yet I woke up every single morning feeling like I had the worst hangover ever. I experienced headaches, night sweats, I had this full body feeling of being poisoned. But the worst was that I suddenly developed reactions chemical and food allergies. So if I have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, or take any number of you know, like even an advil, I will have a hangover the last four to five days.

These aren't true allergies. My brain has just decided these things are poison and so it reacts to them with this this massive discharge of histamine that is is called a mass cell reaction. And the only way to fix it that I've been able to find, and that the doctor that I've been working with has been able to find, is through changing the brain through neuroplasticity and literally teaching

the brain to create pathways around the reactive pathways. And what I've come to realize is that my chemical sensitivities are all bound up with my anxiety and O c D. And I know you've dealt a lot with those things in this show, which is one of the things I really enjoy about it and find really helpful. I read the book Hardwiring Happiness, and that was just a watershed book for me, and it talks about how in our

evolutionary process, we are hardwired to be negative. So you know, our system reacts to any possible danger as if it's a really big deal, because that's how our ancestors survived. So negative thoughts and danger sticks to our brains like velcrow and good things positive stimuli that just kind of

slides off like teflon. So part of the healing journey for me, part of rewiring my brain this neural plasticity, was making a daily practice out of noticing the good and savoring it and then letting go and not dwelling on the negatives. So all of that to say, I hope I am feeding the wolf of positivity. I haven't conquered my food sensitivities just yet. Like I said, it's a daily practice. I hope raanging my brain for the better a little bit every day. And this is a

spiritual practice too, you know, it's a mindfulness practice. You know, when I noticed that my thoughts have gotten trapped into a negative spiral, it's a mindfulness to notice and to say leave it, just like I say to my dog,

and then reorient on something good. So one of the most helpful practices has been meditation, because you know, in meditation you're just kind of intensely watching your own thoughts and letting go of those that take you away and and being in that lovely, no suffering zone of the

present moment. Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm always amazed to hear people talk about the challenges in their life when you sort of look at their life from the outside and you are very impressed with it, And I look at your life from the outside and I'm sort of impressed by it. Now, full disclosure, people should know you and I have worked together in a couple of different capacities.

You were my supervisor as I went through spiritual director training, and I reachedly engaged you to be my actual spiritual director because I found those conversations so powerful. So that's a sort of disclosure about some of your and eyes relationship. But when I look at you, what I see is this person who is a writer of nonfiction books, a writer of fantasy and science fiction books, a pastor of churches, a spiritual director, a leader of a school for spiritual direction,

a musician. I look at it and I'm like, wow, you do so much. It amazes me that in the midst of that, which, of course, in the midst of it, life is still life and everyone has its challenges. Yeah, people say, you know, how do you do all this? And um, how do you have it all together? And I said, I don't, you know, I'm a mess. Everybody's a mess. And you know that's I think a lot of people who come to me in spiritual direction, um had this kind of feeling of inferiority about their lives,

you know, like I'm so messy. Well, everybody is, and that's you know. One of the great liberating things I think is that distance distorts. When you're at a distance from something, it looks very different than when you see

it up close. Yeah. One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Audio Shanti, said once, if you want a perfect spiritual teacher, find a dead one into that that's great, and that's been one of the things doing this show has been so interesting to me because what I just said about you has happened to me over and over and over again, which is I get people on the show that from the outside, a lot of us look at and admire, and we admire their work, and their work is powerful

and wonderful and life changing for so many people, and they are still just messy humans. Absolutely, It's the only kind there are. Absolutely. So I want to start with your latest book because I always find the thing that people put out most recently is often the thing they're most excited about, so I want to start there. It's called Soul Journeys, Christian Spirituality and Shamanism as Pathways for

wholeness and understanding. And when I saw that it was your latest book, I was a little bit surprised by it because you and I have talked a ton of times and shamanism has never come up, which again I'm not I'm not shocked that there's more in your closet. Um, well, that might be a term that's a little bit more loaded than I mean it to be, but more in

your cupboard. We'll say, there's more in your coboard, But talk to me about shamanism and how you were introduced to it and how it ties to your practice as a Christian because you are a Christian minister? Is that the right term? We would use your pastor? Up, sure, minister pastor? That's kind of interchangeable. Okay, Well, first of all, I want to I want to acknowledge that I had

two terrific co authors on this book. So Daniel Practeal is an Episcopal priest who does shamanic journey work, and Katrina Leathers is the dean of the chaplain's institute, the Interfaith Seminary where I teach, and her primary spiritual practices shamanism, and so we each wrote chapters for the book. Um, but a large part of the book is a conversation between the three of us about our experience with shamanism and at least for Daniel and I, how that experience

contrasts and compares with our spiritual experiences as Christians. So how I got introduced to shamanism was through my therapist who was studying to be a shraumatic practitioner, and I was going through some pretty major life discernments and she suggested that it might be helpful to take a shamantic journey, and I had never done anything of the sort, but you know, it was pretty desperate and was open to anything, and so she really kind of took me step by step,

and the experience was really really powerful. Shamanism provides a framework for imaginally engage ing the spiritual world. The journey of the shaman is to go into the other world, the spiritual world, in order to find medicine that will heal either a person or the tribe, or you know, whatever it is that's out of balance. And medicine isn't usually a physical substance like a you know, like a

drug or an herb. It's usually information, it's wisdom. To go to the other world to find the wisdom that is going to bring balance, restore health and harmony, and to bring that wisdom back into this world for healing and restoration. Explain a little bit about what a shamanic journey is, you know, just in sort of a couple of minutes summary of what a standard sort of practice of this would look like. Sure, well, first, the person who is going on the journey um would usually have

some assistance. So in some cultures that's through lucy genic plants, but most often is certainly in the practice of core shamanism is through drumming or rattling, so you've got some kind of persistent kind of beat going on that helps

a person enter into an altered state of consciousness. And once a person has you know, reached that state of person engages what you would call active imagination and chooses to go usually to one of three places, either the upper world, which is where one can meet enlightened beings people who have lived before, ancestors and so forth, and ask their advice and their opinion on things, or the

Middle world, which is kind of like our world. But let's just say the moral ambiguity of the entities that you find there isn't quite as ambiguous as it is here. There are dangerous beings that one should be wary of in the Middle world, So one doesn't usually go to the Middle World unless someone is going in order to specifically bring healing to someone or something in that world. But the other option is to go into the lower world. Lower world is a realm of earth and stone and mountain.

This is the place where one encounters power animals and can really seek out the deep wisdom of the earth yourself. So you on your first journey sort of assumed your power animal or right. I've also heard him referred to his spirit animals. You would find your spirit animal and it would be a dog. But that's not quite what happened. No, no, no, no. You know I I asked to meet my spirit animal, and I don't consider myself a cat person. But guess

who showed up. Panther showed up. And you know, power animals are generally thought of as the collective spirit of the entire species. So the spirit of Panther came to me. And he's a surly fellow, I have to tell you, not talkative, doesn't suffer fools, doesn't crack jokes. But I've really come to see him as my protector. So when I am feeling like I need protection, I've got a fetish of Panther and keep it in my pocket. And of course I can go and talk to him anytime

and ask for help when I am feeling threatened. I have met other power animals. Fox is a great healer, but I got a soft spot for Panther. You say that you asked the panther, why are you so surly? And he said life is hard? So true. So you and I as we've sort of gone through my training, my spiritual direction. But you know, I'm more of a than Buddhist, you're more of a Christian. We sort of talk about, you know, what we trust in. Trust has

been a big issue that's come up. And when I hear this, right where I go is Okay, I'm tapping into some realm of consciousness that exists and I'm not actually contact in a panther spirit. How would you phrase what's happening or would you simply just say, I don't know. It's a mystery, but I know that I have an experience that's powerful. Well, mystery certainly is a part of it,

and it's not something that I can explain. But it also feels like Panther has subjective reality, that he's not just a figment of my imagination, that he is an actual entity that I go into the journey state in order to talk to. And I think most people who do shamanic practice would agree with this. The imagination really gets short shrift in our culture. If something is imaginary,

people discount it, they equate it with fantasy. But I think one of the things that our ancestors knew that we kind of really need to rediscover is that the imagination is an organ of perception, you know, no, no different from the eye or the ear. It is a way that we perceive reality that is not ordinary reality. But the things that we perceived there are no less real. They may not be physically real, but certainly they have

spiritual reality. And it's you know, through the practice and the training of our imagination that we can become adept at contacting um these spiritual realities and conversing with them and forming relationships with them. You say in the book at one point that shamanism recognized is there's an ordinary, consensual reality which is socially agreed on. All of us would say this is reality, but there's another dimension of

reality which can be perceived. You also say that taking shamanism seriously teaches us that real things happen that are not physical. And I think that's a really interesting perspective. And I think, you know, reading the book sort of open my mind a little bit too, maybe letting go of having to come up with a rational reason why certain things occur. Well, you know, if you have to rationally understand everything, then you're not going to understand much.

You know. I think if you look at the relative amount of stuff we understand next to the relative amount of stuff we don't understand. You know, it ain't much. You know. Leaving some room for mystery I think is pretty vitally important. And that mystery is real. I mean, you know, this stuff we don't know is real. It's big. We just don't know what it is. So we can choose to ignore it and pretend that it doesn't have any veracity or import for us, or we can enter

into relationship with us somehow, you know. Shamanic practice is one way of entering into that relationship. Yeah, And I think it's interesting because I think the more that I, over the course of my years, moved into what we might consider a rational or materialistic mindset, I think the harder I made it to contact the mystery. Well, sure, because we discount it. You know, we reinforce this notion

that we've got. You know that really our culture pushes that, you know, only what can be measured and explained is real. You know, there's really no acknowledgment to that that vast area of mystery out there are things that we can't measure and explain, and so we we just ignore them, which I think really cuts us off from a lot of life, and certainly a lot of what we might call spiritual life. And you might see in fact, spiritual life as a way of acknowledging and being in relationship

with that massive mystery. Yeah, And I think that the challenge is and this is my own challenge, and I've had some experiences that have led me beyond that to a certain degree. Is that again, is that mystery becomes harder to contact, it becomes harder to believe. Right, It's this reinforcing cycle. I don't believe it, so I can't feel it. Since I can't feel it, it must not be there. Thus I believe it's not there, and onward. Right.

And I think that people of our generation and UH and those who come after us, you know, have such a an ingrained cynicism that belief comes really hard to us, so much so that I found that it's not a very useful word. The word that I think makes a lot more sense to me as trust. I knew it was going to come up. You know. You can ask me do I believe in God? And I would say I think believe is the wrong word. I trust that there is a God and I choose to trust that God.

Do I believe that there's a God? You know, Belief assumes a kind of knowledge that none of us have, but trusting is an act of will. Trusting is something we choose to do. So I don't know if there's a God or not, but I choose to trust and

that works. I interviewed a gentleman yesterday about a book he wrote about William James, and you know, William James wrote, among other things, an essay called the Will to Believe, and he talked about an idea that essentially was, like you just said, we make a decision and active will to believe, and then we judge that by the fruits of its results. So if I choose that I'm going to trust in God and I act that way, what

are the results that come from that? I don't know his work well enough to say whether he would say as a measure of the veracity of that claim, he may not say that. But the usefulness of that I think the biggest usefulness of it is the ability to acknowledge and enter into relationship with that mystery. Like we were talking about, so um, I'll tell you a story. For many years of my pastoring. I considered myself a Christian agnostic, basically that I was culturally a Christian and

certainly a Christian pastor by training and practice. But you know, did I really believe, you know, not so much. So it was a pretty surface faith. And then I was studying to be received into the United Church of Christ and we had to actually read Martin Luther, which I had never done before. And so I started reading Luther, and he blew me away. You know, you were thinking,

a medieval theologian doesn't sound that interesting. Well, Luther is like reading absolutely nobody else because he swears, he calls people's names, he he's over the top emotional. He is just a hell of a lot of fun to read. But what I got from reading his works was that he trusted in Jesus as a personal friend, that there was an intimacy there and a love there that I

hadn't ever actually experienced before. And as I continued to read Luther, I realized and when he said we are saved by faith, he wasn't talking about faith as in intellectual assent to a list of metaphysical propositions like the Nicene creed or something. You know, I think a lot of people in Christianities think that we're saved by believing the right things. But that's not what Luther was talking about. The word that he was using to mean faith again

is better translated trust. We are saved by trust. And the moment I got that, a light switch turned on I and I heard the voice of Jesus say, I don't really care what you believe. Can you trust me? Will you trust me? And I went, wow, Okay, I don't have to believe all this stuff. Can I trust him? Yeah?

I'm going to choose to do that. And instantly I entered into a kind of relationship that has continued to grow and has become very intimate and very dear, mostly because I believe that I could, you know, and I gave myself permission to, you know, every now and then I'll do a shamanic journey. But what I did is I took what I learned from doing shamantic journeys and I brought it back to my own faith. And I

do now what I call imaginal prayer. So every morning I get up, and if the sun hasn't come up yet, then I will meet Jesus in his carpenter's workshop, and if the sun is up, then I know he's down by the beach and I'll meet him there. But wherever it is, I meet him. You know, this is all active imagination, you know. I give him a big hug,

he calls me love. We sit down together. He asked me what's on my heart, and I just kind of pour out how I'm feeling, what I'm worried about, what I hope for, all of the things that I am kind of carrying around with me, and I just kind of lay it before him, and mostly he just listens. Often he has amazing things to say that I never in a million years would have come up with. But what I come away from that with every single morning is a feeling of being heard and loved and held.

And that is a really wonderful way to start every day. And that relationship doesn't get old, it just gets deeper and more. Dear. Charles Williams wrote about theology of romantic love, and it's it's very like that. I really love the the evangelical uh contemporary Christian music that some people call Jesus is my boyfriend music. But I love it because it really speaks to where my heart is and as

far as my relationship with Him. And you know, when I first started preaching that at church, it made a lot of people kind of uncomfortable because the only context they had for that kind of talk was that it sounded very evangelical. I'm about as progressive a pastor as you can find, but I think this is one thing that the evangelicals get right, is the personal relationship with God and for Christians, that comes to us through the

person of Jesus. Yeah, that sort of talk makes me a little uncomfortable because it's so different than my world view, and yet it does awaken a yearning. You know, I laugh when you brought up trust because from uranized very first conversation, it seems like whatever issue I have brought to you, even while what we were talking about was my guidance of other people, it always went back to this. It always came back to trust, and it came back

to what do I trust in? And that is an ongoing work in progress for me because what I have learned to trust in ore myself, which is a good thing to have some trust in, right, It's positive to have some trust in yourself. I began to have trust in spiritual principles like kindness and silence and love and you know, those sort of things. But a deeper level of trust is hard. And I don't know if i've

shared this story with you. I don't want to turn this into a spiritual direction session, but I feel like this this is an important topic, and I think it's probably important to a lot of listeners. When I got sober in a AT, I came into an a a in Columbus, Ohio, and God in higher power was very much defined sort of as God in Jesus, and it didn't resonate with me. I didn't really believe it, and yet I tried to do what you're describing, which was trust. I went, you know what, I have to do this.

I have to believe this. I have to believe in this. I have to trust in this. And you know what, It worked, and I got sober. But then my life fell apart in that my wife left me for another guy in a Our son was two years old, and I fell apart. And what I realized was that my spiritual belief or understanding was this sort of like, well, if I do good, good things will happen to me.

My trust was God will protect me. And when that didn't appear to happen, the whole thing sort of shattered and it set off a series of events that led me to eventually go back to a drinking It took several years, but that's where it all sort of led. So when I came back to a second time, I said, you know what, I felt like I had to construct a higher power structure of faith that felt really solid

to me. And so the idea of trust was, yes, I know I need to trust, but boy, I want to be really careful that what I'm trusting in has the power to support me in rough seas. And so it became this, I trust in myself, I trust that I can ask and receive help from other people. I trust that spiritual principles. But it became hard for it to go much beyond that. And that, I think is where my spiritual journey has sort of led me now, because it comes up over and over again, which is, Okay,

what do I trust in? And I think I I gravitated towards Buddhism because it made rational sense to me. Oh, yes, there's a lot of suffering in life, and now you know, I recognize what that's caused by here's what the cure is. Boom boom boom. Right. But that sort of led me deeper into awakening type ideas and which led to some actual awaken, strong mystical awakening experiences. And so I went, Okay, Wow, I've got this rational piece and I've got these mystical

experiences that are speaking to something deeper. How do I sort of put all that together? And I would say that's kind of where we are. So that was a long confessional um about trust because I do think that, as you've pointed out, and I think that as I've looked at lots of different problems that people face, this idea of what do we trust in? You know, in a a it's a higher power. In Buddhism, it's we

take refuge. Where do I take refuge? And I think taking refuge in something is really important and your sense is I trust and thus that makes things possible. I'm still a little bit more on the like I want to take refuge in a shelter that I've had a chance to check out, Like I'd like to go and do a little I'd like to go and get a little structural engineer to come in here. Can you check this shelter. Is it gonna hold up? But you got to kick the tires. Yeah, but that's not quite trust.

So anyway, I'm gonna stop talking now. Uh yeah, Well, you know that the the thing about that trust is it takes time to build, and it takes effort. It's spiritual practice. Yep. Um. I often talk about building up trust muscles that you know, it takes exercise, it takes practice. But you know, if we work on building up our trust muscles, then when you know, life pulls the rug out from under us, we have some support. Yep. And what's funny is in retrospect, I look back at that story I just told you,

and the support was there. The support was never not there. I had to change some beliefs about things, but but support was still available. Sure, I just didn't necessarily choose. Yeah, or maybe you didn't know how to come at it. You know, that's a better way. That's a better way to say it. You know, one of the great wisdom literature the Jewish tradition, is the Book of Job, in which you know, Job gets everything taken away from him and he still doesn't give up on God. And I

think one of the things that job shows us. That is that God makes a terrible superhero, but he makes a terrific traveling companion through hell. If you're going through a rough time, there's no better support. Now you're using the term God. You've used the term Jesus here, right, So those are terms that are very meaningful and important to you, and yet you're also talking about getting guidance and support from a panther. You are part of a

inner faith spiritual chaplaincy program. You chose to go to India and walk in the steps of Buddha. You've tran related the dowd a ching. So to say that you are progressive, you're absolutely right. Right. You may use some of the phrases that evangelical Christians have, and you may have some of the borrowed the personality that the personal relationship with Jesus there, but you certainly don't have any

of the closed mindedness there. What led you and what continues to lead you to seek this mystery or divine in other places? Well, I think what led me to seek it out was my experience of spiritual abuse growing up in fundamentalist Christianity. I had to leave the faith altogether in order to heal. But one of the things I really wanted to do was to find out how other people experienced God, how other people entered into relationship

with this mystery, and what that was like. And so I did my PhD in philosophy and religion, specifically in world religions, with special concentrations in Hinduism and Taoism. And it was incredibly healing and really, you know, revelatory, because every time I would find a new teaching or a

new practice. When I came back to my own Christian tradition, if I dug, I found that teaching and I found that practice, and it just made me realize that the version of Christianity that I had been given was really narrow and not at all representative of the great tradition that I come out of. And so I started to explore that great tradition, and that was healing. That was really life for me. I wouldn't consider myself very much a believer, but I was certainly an agnostic practitioner of

the faith. Whatever that means. It certainly meant something to me at the time. But it was really healing, and and I took away a lot of ideas and teachings from other traditions that have really really impacted my spiritual life. You know, for instance, in Hinduism, they believe there's only one God, but that God has a million faces, and to be a good Hindu, you just find that face that speaks to your soul more than the others and then serve that face with devotion. And that really has

become my theology. That's my approach. You know, there is this one great mystery in the universe, and that mystery has a million faces, and you find the face that resonates with your soul the most and then love that face. So for me, that faces Jesus, and for others you know, that mystery is pointed to by the Buddha, and for others that face is Krishna. And none of these faces are less than the other faces, but the relationships that they help facilitate are real and their life changing, and

they are transformative. So in my book The Christian Walks in the Footsteps of the Buddha, I talk about the Great Mystery being like a computer and Buddhism being like the user interface, the way you interact with the computer, the way you interact with the mystery. So likewise, Christianity is a user interface. It's a way of interacting with the mystery, a way of interacting with the with the computer there. And I think that's a good way of

looking at it. You know, I am a Christian and I love Jesus and I trust him for my salvation. We can talk about salvation another time. That's a whole another subject, and I think one that I could go on for quite a quite a bit about um, because we all need saving from something. I don't feel like my faith is better than other faiths. I don't feel

like my tradition is better than other traditions. But I love my faith more than other face and other traditions because it's mine and it's the same thing as my family. I don't think my family is better than other families, but I love my family because they're my family. And I love to go and eat dinner at other people's families. But you know what, I always love to come home, and just so, I love to go and worship in a you know, a sick gudwara. I love to go

and worship in a Hindu temple. But you know, it always feels good to come home and go to church because that's where my heart lives. You know, these Christian people, these are my people, This is my family. But it doesn't mean I don't love to visit, so you know, invite me over. Well. I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. I love that idea. There's one mystery with a thousand faces, you know, and that's one of the things that it's inspired me about

Hinduism also is that idea. You know, there's the Godhead and then there's all these ways it shows up, and I think we find the one that is most accessible to us or speaks to us most strongly at the time. And you know, I know that you are a person who has a great faith in art and creativity as a way in you know, as a face. You know.

So there's lots of them, there's lots of them. You and I are going to continue talking in the post show conversation where I am not going to be able to resist asking you about salvation because that's what we're going to talk about. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post show conversation, the great one that's about to happen, all the others that have occurred, as well as ad free episodes and all sorts of other benefits, not least

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