There are certain life experiences and traumas that contemporary medicine says people can't or won't heal from. Shamanism suggests that people can't heal from these events using only contemporary medicine. In other words some wounds are taken in at the soul level. It takes soul medicine to heal them and shamanism offers us this medicine. The hard stuff happens for several reasons: too deep, too pervasive, or too frightening. When events are so intense, fast, or life threatening they cause soul l...
Oct 15, 2019•57 min
The suicide rate for first responders is reported to be 20% higher than the general population. Can we please stop acting like we don’t know why? Soul loss is real and devastating and always a part of violence, war, and life threatening emergencies. And people have known for 40,000 years how to deal with soul loss in simple and direct ways, given the right tool for the job. Why are we so afraid to acknowledge the reality of the soul and to deal directly with the need to tend it? Join host and sh...
Oct 08, 2019•1 hr
There are deeply unresolved ancestral patterns at play in the world today. They keep us from seeing reality accurately and the fullness of possibility. They are at the root of the anger and vitriol spread on social media in reaction to children who simply want what we all have taken for granted—literally: air to breath, water to drink, and solid earth to live on. “What if you could address that unresolved ancestral burden instead of passing it on to your children?” asks host and shaman, Christin...
Oct 01, 2019•1 hr
There is an art to creating a life you love, one that reflects your deepest values and a future that nourishes all. We all know how very important it is to embody a vision for the future and to be the change we want to see in the world. Our guest, author and shaman, Alida knows that you must have a system for holding a vision and inviting the universal powers to join you in creating a world that nourishes all. Each of us has the ability to manifest a life that is more joyful for us and transform...
Sep 24, 2019•1 hr
Where do we begin to heal our ancestral lines? What is the first step when we do not have traditions that guide us? How do we address the interface between empty-feeling old ways and a very real need to change the family’s status quo? “First we cultivate a healthy working relationship with our ancestors to create good, true, and beautiful helping spirits,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “only then will we be able to stop giving new life to the old answers of our unresolved relations. The...
Sep 17, 2019•1 hr
We all have ancestors. They are with us in our blood. We do not all have traditions that guide us in dealing with our ancestors. Some ancestors are true helping spirits. These ancestors bring us medicine, protection and belonging if we know how to let them. Some ancestors are deeply unwell, carrying the open wounds, personal and cultural, of history unreconciled. Nonetheless, they are both moving in our lives and, depending on how we choose to relate to them, they either bring us harm or bring u...
Sep 10, 2019•1 hr
Modern curanderismo has roots in indigenous Mesoamerican shamans and curanderos, specifically the ancient Yukatek Maya and Mexica (Aztec). This week author and practitioner, Erika Buenaflor, M.A., J.D., shares her work and research into this rich healing history and practice. Buenaflor shares the cores of these practices, explaining that they are “practical and incredibly effective shamanic cleanses to heal, purify, and revitalize people and spaces with herbs, flowers, eggs, feathers, fire, and ...
Sep 03, 2019•1 hr
There is a fundamental element of internal energy exchange at the root of every process that helps us to create lasting change. Lasting change is rare in a time with bypass is so common. There are many healing processes that create new versions of the old pattern, new insight without new engagement, or instant intensity that slowly wears off, leaving us where we started. “Lasting change is always accessible to us,” says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “if we are willing step into our inner wor...
Aug 27, 2019•1 hr
A bully victim pattern is surfacing publicly as we begin to confront the reality of internalized and unconscious patterns of marginalization. When we are unconscious of our own deeply internalized patterns of sexism or racism, for example, we often bully others unintentionally. Then, when our behavior is addressed openly we feel unjustly accused and collapse into victimization. However, if we are to heal personally and create social change, we must move out of this looping pattern. Join host and...
Aug 20, 2019•1 hr
The shamanic altered state of consciousness and being a “hollow bone” are not necessarily the same thing. All over the Internet contemporary practitioners are claiming that the altered state they enter to work with Spirit is, by definition, being a “hollow bone.” Becoming the Hollow Bone is an ancient practice in Zen Buddhism, shamanism, and many native peoples of North America. It takes years of dedicated and disciplined practice to create this inner state of consciousness and freedom. In contr...
Aug 13, 2019•1 hr
Today being “the wounded healer” has become the excuse for poor discernment in contemporary practitioners around boundaries, responsibility, and personal healing. In western thought the concept of the wounded healer began with Karl Jung who used the phrase to refer psychologically to the capacity “to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery with which, as though by enchantment, to bring forth Asclepius, the sun-like healer” and to assist healing. Howe...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr
Spiritual Warriorship is more than a metaphor that your therapist drags out every time you are challenged to take the actions necessary to change. Our attitudes and behaviors of self-denial and self-aggrandizement are challenging to change precisely because they have become habits of thought, feeling and memory. It is the internal realm of these habits within each of us that is the perpetual battleground of the spirit warrior and the insidious, enemy-within. Our everyday actions in the outer wor...
Jul 30, 2019•1 hr
"The shamanic path is not a path traditionally intended to achieve enlightenment,” explains Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. “It has been a path followed because people…wanted to help (others) through healing and alleviating their suffering. In following that path, gifts were then given them that were totally unexpected…This then changes them, and they are never the same again; they are indeed enlightened. But that was not the intention; it was just a result.” Shamanism is ...
Jul 23, 2019•55 min
Why would the spirits bother to teach us about love? Because love is all there is. Think you’ve heard that before? We don’t think so. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores Love as you’ve never heard it before. What is it love really? Why do you need it? Where do you find it? And, most importantly, how do we cultivate this most powerful essence energy in our lives? Let’s face facts: couples are not necessarily in love, love is fleeting, and love always seems to show up where it s...
Jul 16, 2019•1 hr
“Sex is meant to be a mainline to Spirit for anyone,” explains shaman and host, Christina Pratt. “Spirit is constantly teaching that being in right relationship with others requires a robust and healthy sex life—at least with your self.” Join us this week as we continue the summer “blockbuster” series by looking into what shamanism has to teach us about the big issues—death, life, love and sex. In some traditional cultures the shaman or the diviner has a literally sexual relationship with his/he...
Jul 09, 2019•1 hr
“The things we learn about life from working with the dead,” says shaman and host, Christina Pratt, “are timeless and priceless.” One of the shaman’s traditional roles is the psychopomp, or guide of souls. A psychopomp escorts the newly deceased souls to the afterlife, providing safe passage and often comfort or guidance in reconciling life and letting go. And on that journey the dead do tell tales... We are precisely who we have crafted ourselves to be with our lives. Nothing changes at death. ...
Jul 02, 2019•1 hr
What does it take to live a legendary life? A human is born to live a legendary life because we are all born of the Big Dream. In the creation stories of shamanic peoples the Great Timeless, Spaceless Mystery Void dreamt, for reasons no one knows or understands. But from that Big Dream came fire and ice, yin and yang. As they continued to dream, the world as we know it was manifest and those legendary dreamers took the form of Earth and Sky. When we are able to release our parents and the small ...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr
We have lost the true power of action in the habits, expectations, and excess fire of the Old World and its story. The Warrior warns that the spiritual ambition, economic aggression, and arrogance of the full range of positional people have stripped us of the understanding of what an expression of true yang energy looks and feels like. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the true power of action and how we can transform the aggression and control of our false self into the pre...
Jun 18, 2019•1 hr
When we focus on the element of fire we are focusing on the quality of the relationship we have with our own spirit. As a transformational force, fire is the healer who is showing us how to engage in the art of release and sacrifice. The fire helps us to free our hearts to love what truly matters to us and free our lives from the patterns of thinking, speaking, and acting that drain our hearts of their natural fullness for all life. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, for the new series, Work...
Jun 11, 2019•1 hr
When we co-create our lives with Spirit and our Shadow together, we end up following the path of crazy logic. If you can use your shamanic skills to stay on that track—without panic and doubt—you will begin to unfold your inner self in ways you never expected or believed possible. With the help of your Shadow you begin to see what you have denied in yourself and with the help of spirit used skillfully, you can welcome that aspect of your true self home. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, for...
Jun 04, 2019•1 hr
Effective shadow transformation requires a specialist who knows the terrain of the darkest reaches of the human heart. This specialist must be more than human, fiercely loving all that is vast, ugly, and twisted within us while remaining a centered, curious, and creative guide. The Specialist is the archetype of Crazy Woman. She has inspired many wondrous and powerful destroyer goddesses in humanity’s diverse religions. But like the Tao, the destroyer goddess who can be named is not the eternal ...
May 29, 2019•1 hr
What if our Shadow is actually trying to save us from a successful and safe but un-soul-satisfying life? What if our Shadow was actually trying, in it’s messed up, self-destructive, terribly resource wasteful and energy expensive way to get us to actually co-create a life that is true to us and our soul’s purpose? If this were so—and it is—then how do we co-create our lives with Spirit and our Shadow? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores how to use shamanic skills to use the sh...
May 21, 2019•1 hr
What is Shadow Work, really? Psychologically speaking the Shadow is an unconscious aspect of one’s personality that the conscious ego judges, fears or rejects to the degree that it does not identify the Shadow as part of the itself. Shadow work implies not only a shift of consciousness or insight, but also the transformation of the relationship that is dominated by judgment and fear. When people talk about doing shadow work they are largely talking about gaining insight through noticing shadow b...
May 14, 2019•1 hr
The fundamental assumption about shadow work that blinds us to its true nature is the idea that shadow work is a psychological or spiritual issue. It is neither; it is an issue of the heart. Once we understand that, contemporary assumptions unravel for anyone, and the transformational fun begins. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shared the commons beliefs that actually lead us away from the real work we can do. She explores what we can do when we have the right tool for the...
May 07, 2019•1 hr
If we are to write a truly new story for the people in the new world we must transform the communal shadow behaviors that shaped so much of the old world. In the old world story much of the authentic impulse to create change was lost in fruitless rebellion, following gurus, and playing the victim the old world stories require. “To remember the true power of right action,” explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, “we must bring our own inner warrior out of the shadow and cultivate discernment. ...
Apr 30, 2019•1 hr
Most of us are aware of the Shadow thanks to the genius of Karl Jung. However knowing and doing are two different things and, let’s face it, most of us don’t do actual Shadow transformations. We hope it’s taken care of in that one weekend workshop or that one year at the men’s gathering. Shamanic skills allow us to track the crazy logical twists and turns inherent in good Shadow transformations anywhere any time, explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt. They also allow us to transform these en...
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr
The right use of power requires that you are willing to do whatever it takes. The person of mature spirituality understands that this will mean drawing on discernment, flexibility, and adaptability. One must discern when to act with insight on the past and far-sighted perspective on the future or when to act with trust in invisible allies and intuition in the face of the Unknown. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores what it means to take right action in a world that has normali...
Apr 16, 2019•1 hr
The last part of the Cycle of Transformation involves using all the skills you have learned in the cycle to dismantle your False Self. The False Self is more than the ego or the personality you identify with. It is an entire ‘person’ you constructed as a child to make certain that you fit in, get along with people, survive physically, and do nothing that scares you. The False Self always moves us away from our authenticity. To truly manifest a life guided by our authenticity and purpose in servi...
Apr 09, 2019•1 hr
When we change patterns held by our ancestors, we become free to change those patterns within ourselves. Ancestral Healing empowers not only the healing of past and present wounds but also the embodiment our deepest gifts. No matter where your people are from originally, ancestral connection is rooted in your cultural history. When you restore the native wellbeing of your own bloodline lineage and receive the powerful blessing of their support, you become an active part of the true transformatio...
Apr 02, 2019•1 hr
Traditionally, our Ancestors are meant to be a primary source of blessing, wisdom, love and protection. However, when the dead aren’t tended well they hijack the living, their unresolved issues snowballing down the generations and becoming a source of disease and dysfunction. What if we could repair the dysfunction in our lineages and receive the full blessings we are meant to embody? What if with the wisdom of our ancestors we could vision and create a more beautiful world for our descendants? ...
Mar 26, 2019•1 hr
