Many in shamanic practice seek to deepen their relationship with their own ancestral lines and, in this, to reconnect with the shamanic roots in their own bloodline. Contemporary people seek an authentic practice in a time of broken lineages, appropriation, and deep histories of abuse, dominance and pain. Shaman teacher/healer, speaker, artist and author, Evelyn Rysdyk, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her new book, The Norse Shaman: Ancient Spiritual Practices of the Northern Tradition and...
Nov 15, 2016•1 hr
What actions are required to unite a nation divided? If we are not insane (and one wonders these days) then we must innovate and take new actions if we are to create a different outcome. Shamanic skills give us the ability to engage spirit in creating different actions through direct revelation and asking for help. But will we have the courage to explore what is needed with a whole-heart and commitment to a greater, shared truth. And will we have the courage to take those actions? Join host and ...
Nov 08, 2016•1 hr
Now that the ugly racist, sexist, violent, ignorant underbelly of America is exposed for the world to see, will we learn to heal the wounds of our culture? Will we simply move on to ogle the next bloody accident of our culture, get distracted by the next shiny thing, or martyr ourselves on the sad cruelty of our world? Why would we be such cowards when the world is full of beauty and blessings? This ugly underbelly is a blessing in disguise, a gift, a calling to the human you are dreaming yourse...
Nov 01, 2016•1 hr
True visionaries are a dime a dozen. Humanity is full of great ideas. What we find in short supply are those people who will actually manifest a new vision. These are people who have the capacity to stay out of fantasy thinking, hold two divergent thoughts simultaneously and tirelessly, and work on all parts of the project indefatigably. Vision is easily distorted by doubt, perceiving reality as a limitation, and denying the truth because you simply don’t like it. Join host and shaman, Christina...
Oct 25, 2016•1 hr
Leading is a thankless job, whether you lead a community garden or a nation. People criticize, blame, and project their unacknowledged flawed selves onto leaders without hesitation and regardless of fact or fiction. People project their unlived dreams and desires on to leaders so that they do not have to take full responsibility for the life they are unwilling to create for themselves. The contemporary dynamic between the leader and those led is deeply steep in shadow and misuse of power. If we ...
Oct 18, 2016•1 hr
Timespirits exist in the shared field and can motivate the actions of individuals in the collective. The more unaware you are of your self and the timespirits that exist in your field the more easily you become possessed and motivated by them. Some timespirits are in the forefront like the forced roles of racism while others are in the background like the unknown path of diversity. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the influence of timespirits in shamanic practice. Conscious...
Oct 11, 2016•1 hr
What are the tangible ways we can engage shamanic skills to approach both systemic racism and our own internalized racism? They begin when we engage the Visionary to access the power of shared dreaming and the Ancestral Helping Spirits to learn from those who have gone before us. Those who colonized North America dreamed of religious freedom, but hypocritically took action, perpetrating genocide and slavery, to ensure freedom only for themselves. Today we live in that hypocrisy, not in that drea...
Oct 04, 2016•1 hr
Can contemporary American’s transform their consciousness—and unconsciousness— in their engagement with systemic racism? Shamanic practice offers tangible ways we can approach the transformation of our own internalized racism. When we choose to engage powerfully and skillfully on our selves in this moment we become the people who can then transform the system itself. Join host Christina Pratt and her guest Langston Kahn as they continue their exploration of how we can effectively engage the doub...
Sep 27, 2016•1 hr
The poison arrow of racism is a double wound. It is the arrow—the direct injustice inherent in the act that harms the heart and mind. It is the poison—the insidious, creeping awareness that the larger system condones the injustice, righteously maintaining a double standard that has no basis in scientific or spiritual truth. Does shamanism offer contemporary American consciousness a possibility of true transformation? Join host Christina Pratt and her guest Langston Kahn as they explore the doubl...
Sep 20, 2016•1 hr
The collusive, fearful, racist underbelly of the American culture has been exposed by the hate-filled rhetoric, violence, and lies of the current presidential race. The avoidance of social issues condoned by the 1980’s politics of political correctness have done precisely what avoidance does, allow that which we are avoiding to grow unchecked. In this same timeframe shamanism has blossomed into contemporary American consciousness offering a possibility of transformation. Join host Christina Prat...
Sep 13, 2016•1 hr
Blessings are the way to give life to that which you value, to give it strength and help it to survive and to thrive. Through blessings we can give life and protection to what is new and uncertain. They are a way to give strength to that which doesn’t have strength yet, like a new story for a new world, and to give it time to take shape and build resonance. Blessings can be a formal, complex ritual process or a simple act of love, like calling on the spirits of the family totem to protect a chil...
Aug 30, 2016•1 hr
Faith does not require religion and is often stronger without it. Faith is the power to stand in the Unknown with uncertainty and discomfort and take a new step forward anyway… and then another… and then another. It is the power to do what hasn’t been done and what feels impossible. We must cultivate the capacity for faith, barrels of it, or we will not be able to be the change that we seek. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, this week as she explores faith and the need to cultivate faith th...
Aug 23, 2016•1 hr
Gratitude is a choice to see beyond the surface of instant gratification. Gratitude is not a luxury for people who get what they want, but a requirement for anyone who wants the help of spirit with the impossible. When we are without gratitude we are without perspective. The visionary capacity of the heart slips into doubt, we fixate on what is not working, and blame others for our problems. When we orient in gratitude, we are forced out of an attitude of entitlement and blame. Only then can we ...
Aug 16, 2016•1 hr
To bring our mature courageous hearts into action in the world we must be resilient. But resiliency is the first casualty in a culture that avoids discomfort through mood altering prescription drugs, escaping through recreational drugs, and learning skills to clear the discomfort away, without ever asking why. The root of resiliency is in the courage to heal the deeps wounds of your past, to risk stepping through fear into a new way of life, and to engage in the mundane daily practices that cult...
Jul 26, 2016•1 hr
The highly skilled wounded child arises when an adult learns an assortment of excellent skills to move out of the pain caused today by their unreconciled childhood without healing the wounds of that childhood along the path of that journey. The highly skilled wounded child tends to over-react and under-react regularly and then take responsibility for using their skillset to clear the painful reaction without investigating why they over or under reacted in the first place. They learn to clearly c...
Jul 19, 2016•1 hr
Discernment, the ability to accurately tell one thing from another, is a necessary quality of wisdom, along with objectivity and clarity. Cultivating discernment is critical for living an emotionally and energetically healthy life. It is even more essential when we engage in the invisible worlds as we do in shamanic practice. Until we learn to discern we will not be interpreting energies, messages, or experiences accurately. “At the most basic level discernment requires differentiation of self f...
Jul 12, 2016•1 hr
Living with chronic illness is a challenge, a challenge more and more people are being required to navigate daily in an already busy life. How can we use our shamanic practice most effectively and efficiently to respond to chronic illness, whether our own, a client’s, or with a loved one? How do we cultivate good energy hygiene or even go for a walk daily when chronic pain is robbing us of the energy we do have? What is reasonable to expect or responsible to promise from shamanic healing as a re...
Jun 28, 2016•1 hr
A mythical beast is a beast that we believe never existed in physical form, like dragons, the basilisk, and the phoenix in the Harry Potter novels. But never is a long time. If they never existed, then why do similar mythical beasts appear in different stories the mythology of peoples who never spoke or met? Whether you believe they were real or are imaginary, mythical beasts are very special helping spirits to work with in shamanic altered states. “You need to pay attention,” explains host and ...
Jun 21, 2016•1 hr
Elemental Spirits are often ignored as we reach for helping spirits in the vast range of land spirits, from the smallest garden sprite to the great mountain spirits and all the many manifestations between. And yet the spirits of the elements are constant teachers of balance and flow, the two fundamental energetic principles for physical health and mental well-being. Join us this week as geomancer, Daniel Abney, joins host and shaman, Christina Pratt, to explore our health and its relationship wi...
Jun 14, 2016•1 hr
“Nature communicates through energy, not words. It communicates with us through signs, symbols, omens, and feelings,” explains our guest Ana Larramendi of thehollowbone.com. Ana joins host, Christina Pratt, this week to share her wisdom and experience in communicating with the vast range of spirits of the land, from the smallest garden sprite to the great apu spirits of the volcanic mountains of the ring of fire. Ana cautions that our human tendency to approach all experience from an anthropocen...
Jun 07, 2016•1 hr
Deities have a long history of engaging as helping spirits with people in shamanic altered states. What does it mean when a deity enters your journey scape? How do we navigate cultivating right relationship with a being who has a living tradition and long history with humans, expects certain protocol we may not know or understand, and has their own agency? And how do we know the difference between big, intense energies like deities and archetypes and why should we bother with them? Join host and...
May 31, 2016•1 hr
Why would I want a working relationship with my ancestors when I can’t stand my own relations? Fair question when so much addiction, depression, social pressure, and sexual dysfunction gets handed down generation to generation. What we fail to understand is that our break with our Ancestral Helping Spirits is in large part why we experience such illness and abuse of power in our family lines. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we cultivate a strong working relati...
May 24, 2016•1 hr
Direct communication with our helping spirits is one of the greatest gifts in the reintroduction of shamanism into contemporary life. Yet in this age of social media and everyday twitter fights, people have all but lost the art of honorable, sincere, and heart-felt communication. Your helping spirits can’t hear your whining, don’t care how many people are following you, and see dishonor in the entitlement you take for granted. How do we cultivate a strong working relationship with our helping sp...
May 17, 2016•1 hr
Contemporary shamanic practice looks different depending on the tradition, cosmology, or beliefs that guide your practice. The variations in authentic shamanic practice are a rich and complex field of good work being done today. At the same time there is a line for most practitioners when their early experimentation and uncertain dabbling became a way of living that they could not back out of. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she responds to multiple questions from listeners about what ...
May 10, 2016•1 hr
We need initiation into adulthood desperately, as individuals and as a culture. At this time the lack of initiation is at the root of much of what ails people on this planet, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Initiation is a bit of a mystery for children raised on tales of knights who slay the Dragon and are given the princess as a prize, a tale that further perpetuates the patterns of abuse of power in the Old Story that so deeply characterize any male-dominated, mentally-fixated culture. ...
May 03, 2016•1 hr
Initiation is not graduation. Initiation is not the formal certification of the successful completion of a course of shamanic training, nor is it the ritual or ceremony that celebrates that completion publically. Initiation is a function; it is the enduring transformation of the collective energy of a person into a state of being that did not previously exist. Thus one can experience an initiation process without being initiated. One can experience change and transform without being initiated. J...
Apr 26, 2016•1 hr
Right relationship with the elements allows their energy to flow into our lives, creating well-being by balancing our own excesses and deficiencies. Learning to work effectively with the elements through shrines, songs, ritual, and ceremony allows these essential energies to nourish the essence of our own souls. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores what it means to enter into right relationship with the elements, creative ways cultivate relationship that fit into our c...
Apr 19, 2016•1 hr
The outer world reflects our inner world. Pollution reflects the ways we pollute our bodies, bloody conflicts reflect our inner struggle in immature, self-centered times, and our waste of the earth’s resources reflects the many ways we waste the energy and essence of our lives in feeling lost and addicted. Yet the answers for who we are and how to live well are right here, waiting for us to learn again to pay attention. The Earth is the great teacher of our True Nature with its flowing harmony o...
Apr 12, 2016•1 hr
It is particularly important today —given the vast changes moving in the earth and across environments— that we learn again to work with the Spirits of the Land. We have passed the possibility of going back and must now go forward. Will we go forward with consciousness and skill or continue consuming, deaf, dumb, and blind to our affect on the world around us? Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, revisits “Working with the Spirits of the Land” in the context of learning about t...
Apr 05, 2016•1 hr
What can we do to address climate change and other big challenges to the balance of life on earth? We can do a lot when we remember that our shamanic skills allow us to engage effectively in issues that feel overwhelming and out of our reach. Whether our shamanic skills are just budding and basic or advanced and in full bloom, we can bring our shamanic skills to bear on a larger scale to address the needs right now on earth. This week, shaman and earth healer, Ana Larramendi, joins host, Christi...
Mar 29, 2016•1 hr
