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I believe that we are all born with a powerful shamanic spirit. Like the rest of the natural world that we are so deeply related to, we are given many wonderful shamanic gifts from our divine source. I accepted many years ago that I am on Earth in part to assist and guide others in connecting to their shaman within, particularly now as we are moving into the Aquarian age and everyone can open to their inner shaman.

According to many of the great spiritual traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, and some indigenous teaching — everything already exists and, in a manner of speaking, has already happened on some imaginal plane of existence; everything already is. I refer to this as Isis, or is is. It’s not going to happen; it’s not that it will happen someday.

Our Powerful Shamanic Nature

However, because of our innate need to focus on times and events sequentially in order to have a “human experience,” we are created and designed to see the past, present, and future in a linear space-time continuum. They are reference points that we have collectively created so that we can exist in a spatial reality where our life lessons are learned and synchronistic occurrences congregate to give us clues about the truth of our powerful shamanic natures.

I know that I frequently see things that help me make decisions about the future. People call it precognition or intuition. If I’m driving down a road and become a little lost, then come to a fork and wonder which way to go, I will often receive a strong intuitive sense about which turn to take. Later on I might hear that there was a major accident on the road I chose not to take. Or I might meet someone or come across something that affects my life in a meaningful way, and I have a sense about it at that time.

That’s really not only seeing into the future, but trusting the future, because there’s no way to rationally know, at that present moment, what is what. In the past, magicians, wizards, priestesses, oracles, and high priests were often advisors whose gifts of prophecy helped rulers make decisions about how to most effectively lead their people into their collective future.

Embracing Your Inner Shaman

One of my main reoccurring visions over the years has directed me to embrace my inner shaman and to become an opener of the way so that others can consciously travel between the worlds and learn not only from the past but also from the future. Visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein could easily draw upon this ability. Barbara Marx Hubbard, a well-known teacher of spiritual evolution, refers to this energy as the imaginal cells. She has greatly popularized the notion even though Deepak Chopra has been given credit for coining the phrase, drawing upon scientific findings and research to do so.

The imaginal cells are the very valuable part of us that already have an existence in another realm. They are the seeds of the future that are downloading into our human energy fields and into our human levels of consciousness. You might think of it as software that is now being downloaded into form. This is a very powerful concept because it shows us how miracles happen; it shows us how we can bring everything together into one dimension and one realm.

Many forward-thinking people on the planet right now believe that we must take this step to ward off the extinction of the human race and the extinction of life as we know it. Time is speeding up, and the planet and its inhabitants are crying out for the changes that must be made, not only to survive but to make the evolutionary leap that is ours to make in the grand scheme of the universe.

Walking in Shamanic Awareness

To embody shamanic consciousness in everyday life is to fully appreciate and learn from everything around us: the elders, the children, the animals, and all of nature. We look to the heavens and the Great Star Nations, and we also look deeply into our own soul’s wisdom to access all we have learned from our journey through time and space and beyond.

Walking in shamanic awareness in the Aquarian age is not necessarily about knowing the “correct” order for calling in the four directions or the “exact” number of stones to be placed in the medicine wheel, or the “right” way to behave in a particular ritual or ceremony. Awakening the shaman within is much more about learning how to heal oneself by knowing oneself.

We all contain shades of light and dark, and what we come to learn as we do our shamanic work is that we do not judge these nuanced aspects of ourselves. They are neither good nor bad, they just are: the light, the dark, no difference.

What Does a Visionary Shaman Look Like?

The visionary shaman is not only interested in advancing the evolution of powerful spiritual traditions by respectfully honoring what has been, but also in standing on those teachings as foundations while continuing to dream the dream forward in an upward spiral of spiritual wisdom. It is time to ask ourselves what the twenty-first century visionary shaman looks like and to take a long hard look in the mirror while we are listening for the answer to our question.

Instead of seeing ourselves as either accidental creations or as children of God, I now have the clear vision that we are divine and need to see ourselves in this different light. When we learn to accept our multidimensionality and multiuniversality, we become responsible for our creations in the world of time and space.

In so doing, we actually become co-creators with God, living out our destiny as universal humans and actively co-creating the future with the Great Mystery. At this point, no matter where we find ourselves in this vast universe, at least we will know that we are and always have been home.

This article was adapted from the book:

Visionary Shamanism: Activating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Energy Field
by Linda Star Wolf & Anne Dillon. 

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bear & Company, an imprint of Inner Traditions, Inc. ©2011. www.innertraditions.com

Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.

About the Author

Linda Star Wolf has been a visionary teacher and shamanic guide for more than 35 years. She is the creator of the Shamanic Breathwork Process as well as the Shamanic Ministers Global Network and the Wise Wolf Councils. A spiritual granddaughter of Seneca Wolf Clan Grandmother Twylah Nitsch, Star Wolf is the author of Shamanic Breathwork and co-author of Visionary Shamanism, Shamanic Egyptian Astrology, Shamanic Mysteries of Egypt, and The Anubis Oracle. Visit her website at www.shamanicbreathwork.org.

Anne Dillon is an editor, Reiki practitioner, and student of the alternative healing arts.

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