Renee Baribeau (00:03):
Hello, it's Renee. Baribeau, The Practical Shaman Welcome to the Shaman's Cave.
Sandra Ingerman (00:07):
Hi everyone, I'm Sandra Inman and welcome to the Shaman's Cave. We're
Renee Baribeau (00:16):
Both waiting. That's funny.
Sandra Ingerman (00:23):
Do you want to go? We can go. Okay. So today we're going to talk about a very important topic around initiations. And this is a really important topic and Renee and I remember talking about it before because basically we all have been going through an initiation. And so from a shamanic point of view, initiations are come at every change of life. So when we're born, it's an initiation. When we're named, it's an initiation. In tribal cultures, when a child moves into puberty, it's an initiation. We have ways of doing it in the west, but very differently. Marriage, getting your driver's license, these are actually all initiations into another time of life. And so from a shamanic point of view, when you go through an initiation, first you have to let go of anything that's not true in your life. And so it's almost like you're challenged.
(01:50):
You're challenged to let go. And when you try to get physical help from others, it doesn't work. And when you try to get emotional help from others, it doesn't work. But the core of an initiation is to get your spirit to fire up and go, wow, I don't know how to get through this obstacle. I don't know how to get through this challenge. I don't know how to get through this illness. I don't know how to get through this mental state that I'm in right now. When spirit gets you through, that's an initiation. You let go of an old way of life and you're sculpted into a new being. And as initiations keep going on in your life, you keep getting sculpted and sculpted into who you were destined to be. And the pandemic that we've been in has been an initiation on a global level
Renee Baribeau (03:01):
So much. There's a lot to unpack with everything you just offered. And I want to just say thank you to the people on the Shamans Cave, our Facebook page who have requested this information. And also in the YouTube channel, we get a lot of comments and a lot of feedback. So if you're not a member of the Shamans Cave, and if you follow us on YouTube and we read the comments and we respond to the comments that we feel like come really from the heart, not always all the pictures or anything like that. So we want to thank you. And also in terms of initiations, there's always a give back of something that spirit always requires. I just also want to shout out to the people who have given back to us recently, a lot of donations in the last month. We must have spoke to you about that kind of I need, and I think in initiations for me, there's always been a give back.
(03:59):
There's always been something like you called it, something I had to let go of, and that's a form of a give back. The other one that people asked about was they were speaking specifically about dismemberment. And sometimes I think people take that idea way too literal. There's been times when after a shamanic initiation that my life was dismembered. Like all of a sudden within three weeks of calling upon the winds to do something, I lost my job. And that's a dismemberment of the financial sort and where do I go now? I ended up from there, I ended up having to look even deeper in my soul. I had to see where I was out of integrity with definitely the work I was doing. And I moved back to the desert and created the holistic healing network at that time. So yes, for a lot of you like, oh, you want these big initiations, but I love what you talked about sonder, about some of the littler ones that add up to prepare you for when that soul shocking dismemberment comes at you.
(05:13):
Like, oh my word. I was reading this article this morning about how we look for validation. Tell me your experience about it. It might validate mine. And we like to make nice experiences. Oh, we have nice power animals. But both Sandra and I can tell you about the not so nice ones. One time I did a past life regression and I walked into a cave. I was maed apart by a bear, but we like to talk about the ones where I got my horse and we took a nice ride. So it's not always talked about it. It's not always the most comfortable thing, and it's very sacred.
Sandra Ingerman (05:53):
And it's interesting. I want to go back to dismemberment because it is a practice that I teach in my workshops. And you can have different forms of dismemberment. You can actually ask for dismemberment where you ask the spirits to actually destroy your body. Again, it's in the unseen realms. It doesn't hurt, destroy your body, take you all the way down to bone or dirt or whatever. And in that sense of dismemberment, any illness in your body is left out. And then you're helping spirits. They lick your bones, they clean everything, they clean your muscles, they put you back together as a healthy person. So that is one form of dismemberment. Now, another form of dismemberment, same thing. Lose your body, go down a bone, sand, whatever an element dismembers you, a bear, dismembers you and another animal dismembers you. When in medicine for the earth, I talked about how wind, I did a guided meditation of wind dismembering people.
(07:17):
And so in that kind of initiation, what happens is you lose your ego, you lose your mental looping thoughts that keep us separate. And all of a sudden you're back in that those of you who are doing a lot of sacred medicines right now understand what I'm saying, back in that oneness place with the creator and source and everything is unbelievable. There's just oneness and bliss and light and love. And all of a sudden you realize that this is what life is about. And so you come back down and you're now changed. And in a shamanic culture, anybody who went through that kind of initiation became the shaman of the culture because when they came back after having such a numinous experience, they were given psychic gifts, healing gifts to heal the people. So it was a true initiation. Carl Young talked about how children have initiation dreams.
(08:35):
And again, from a shamanic point of view, dismemberment dreams, Carl Young was talking about dismemberment dreams. That's actually an initiation into a spiritual path. And so when I used to teach beginning workshops, these teach 40 workshops a year, I did that for over 10 years, loved it. And there's always going to be one person, one person, every workshop who comes up during a bathroom break and says, Sandra, can I just tell you it was such a wonderful experience, but I don't want to say it in front of the group. I got this bear came my first journey. I was just having people go to their power animals spare came ripped me apart and I've never felt better in my whole entire life. It was the most loving thing that ever happened to me. And I said, I always go, congratulations, you just had a shamanic initiation and every workshop, every workshop, but what you're saying is true. They come up to me privately, nobody would ever share in any workshop. They always came up to me privately. And then I would ask permission, can I talk about it with the group?
Renee Baribeau (10:00):
It's funny, even as the bear was ripping me apart that time, it was very loving.
Sandra Ingerman (10:05):
And
Renee Baribeau (10:05):
I've had the other kind too. You said that they're not painful. Mine was, maybe it wasn't so painful, but it was debilitating. After I had had this really big dismemberment, I was sitting in a lecture and all of a sudden I was taken on this journey while I don't know what they were doing in the rest of the room because it wasn't that type of, it was a lecture. And after I was put back together, my friends literally had to carry me out from the room. And I was put into bed where I stayed for many days and I kept trying to prove it didn't happen. Even we have to validate for ourself. I kept trying to lift the coffee table and it was like I had a hysterectomy in the vision. Actually, a black mass was removed from my ovaries, my womb, and then I was sewn back together with arrows. And it was really, but I kept trying to unlove it. And I think we do that a lot where if you hadn't validated that experience for the woman, she might've gone and said, oh, well that didn't really happen. Or we try to outthink these other experiences as there's some other thing. Instead of this happens in nature, this happens if you look out the yard, it's being dismembered right now. In the fall it happens. And
(11:28):
To be able to start to trust those experiences as your own and feel comfortable enough to share them or not. And I always suggest to my students, don't share it until you've integrated it a little bit into your beingness so that somebody else with their opinion doesn't bounce off your experience and say, because a lot of people say, oh, this is what it is, or blah, blah, blah, blah. I always request that people say, if this was my dismemberment experience, then this is how I would interpret it instead of telling other people how to interpret their own experience.
Sandra Ingerman (12:03):
Yeah, yeah. There's big lessons in that, really big lessons in that actually how I actually got ill was I was teaching a Zoom class for 1300 people and most of them were on Facebook. And I went through every day to look at the comments and everybody was giving people the wrong information.
(12:30):
I had to keep educating people, thousands of people every day. All these comments, you're giving the wrong information. We tend to disempower people and that shows the person who has not been through an initiation. And so going back to nature, like what Renee you just shared, I like to talk about the Grand Canyon because if you look at the beauty of the Grand Canyon, it's one of the great wonders of our world. The beauty of the Grand Canyon was a dismemberment of rock of the wind coming through the water, coming through and sculpting this amazing being. So how I like to describe initiations is even though they don't feel good and I don't feel well in my initiation, what they're doing is they're sculpting you into your true beauty. And so when you think about the pandemic, the pandemic through up into all of our lives, what's truth, and I'm not talking about political truth, medical truth, I'm talking about spiritual truth. Who am I as a spiritual being? And so when you go through that kind of shock, that kind of initiation, and we've seen it with the pandemic, people start coming to different values.
(14:11):
They start coming to different ways of wanting to live their life. And initiation says that way no longer works. There's a new way for you to step into. That's when initiation is for, but the universe is going to resculpt you. And the resculpting, I got to tell you, it's not always pleasant. And we saw that and we're seeing it now. We're seeing it with everything going on in the world right now. We're in a huge initiation asking us to step up to a higher consciousness, to embrace oneness and to embrace loving each other. And the initiation will go on until people get it or fall in the fire and can't walk through it because their spirit isn't strong enough. The key to a successful initiation is to make your spirit so strong it can walk through anything.
Renee Baribeau (15:18):
I love that. And there's a lot of parents probably listening, it's probably we skipped over a lot of our initiations, like the Jewish traditions, they still do their bar mitzvah, their bar mitzvahs, and the Hispanic community does the quinceaneras, which have kind of gotten a little bit away from their original purpose, but to really consider how are you honoring the initiations in your own family, like the initiations of the first day of school or the graduations. And I mean, those are major opportunities for you to add that element of initiation into your daily practices. And I know in your book of ceremony you talk about it, certainly in my new book, the Practical Shaman, there's going to be a lot of practical tools about how we get back to our nature. And also, this would probably be a great time, Sandra, to talk about the new course going to be teaching.
Sandra Ingerman (16:24):
So I am going to have a new book coming out on initiations, but I'm not talking about it yet because I'm presales. But I do have a new course and I am finally, since the pandemic started, I'm going back to in-person teaching in Santa Fe, and I'm very excited about it. And so I'm finally, because I have not supported teaching advanced Shamanic healing online, I believe it's very dangerous because a client can get hurt if people aren't properly trained. So I only teach advanced healing in person. And so starting next April, I'll have a one year training. It's two weeks one week, and then six months apart is the second week. And I'll be teaching all the medicine for the earth work extraction, psychopomp the first week and my full five day sow retrieval workshop the second week, and people who do stellar and send in stellar case studies after experience, not right after the workshop. We'll be able to be listed on my website, shamanic teachers.com. So I'm really excited about it and we're going to send out a dedicated email. So the way to find out about it is to get on my email list@sandraengerman.com.
(18:05):
We're going to send out a dedicated email, and I'm going to be teaching at the cheese center in Santa Fe, and we're limited on rooms. So I really am going for people who want to be a practitioner, not somebody who just wants to get a healing or take a workshop. So I'm very excited. So thank you everyone. Thank you Renee, for letting me talk about that.
Renee Baribeau (18:38):
Oh, absolutely. I honor that the work you do and the people who are trained by you, and we were talking earlier and there's people who are the real deal, and you are one of those people. And so I love you walk your talk and what does that mean for me is somebody who walks through an initiation eyes wide open. You don't run from things. And that what is the difference between the general population and spiritual leaders like us? We trained by example. For a long time there was the guru on the platform telling you about their initiation, which gave them the right to train to tell you about how great they were. And no, we teach by helping people through the hard lessons and the joyful lessons that we've learned along the path of this wonderful road of shamanic initiation. So I think that's a good place to end this call, but we could talk, but why don't you tell 'em how they can find us and who they can comment on their initiations.
Sandra Ingerman (20:02):
Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, we have our Facebook page, and if you would like to talk about your initiations, we would love to hear about them if you've integrated them and not asking questions, what does it mean? But this is what my challenge was and this is what I came through, and this is who I am now. So thank you, Renee. That was a beautiful ending, and we want to hear from you both on YouTube and on Facebook, and we love you.
Renee Baribeau (20:44):
Thank you everyone.