 The Chair that Rocked On Its Own
by Adam Bosler A couple I met at a barbecue told me a story of a rocking-chair in their front room that rocked on its own. They also heard strange footsteps at night, in their hallway. There were other unsettling occurrences in their physical environment that couldn’t be explained. These things always happened in the middle of the night, they told me. I talked to them a little about psychopomp work, just enough so they understood what I could offer. A few weeks later, the wife of the couple contacted me, and asked if I could meet with her family to discuss how I might be able to help them. They were getting kind of scared, she said. I arranged an in-person meeting at their home. Before going there, I did some “powering up” with the compassionate spirits I work with, using my drum and rattle and a candle, in a dark room. I asked the spirits to help me be filled with peace and love. I asked that my heart remain open to whatever I found or felt when I visited this family’s home. This is typical for how I prepare to meet with a client. The married couple, along with their teenage son, met with me at their house, for about half an hour. I learned that they also had an elderly matriarch living in their home who spoke only Spanish. The son went and got his grandmother, and brought her out to meet me. We very cordially shook hands and smiled at each other, but then she returned to the backroom, down the hall, where (they said) she spent most of her time. The rocking chair sitting in the front room, where the family meeting occurred, did not rock on its own while I was sitting there in their house, most likely because this was daytime. I explained to the family what psychopomp work is. Not a lot of explanation, just enough so they understood what it is I could offer them. I could tell from their facial expressions that just having an explanation, and someone there saying it’s possible to help the stuck spirits move on and find somewhere they will be happier — this was a great comfort to the family. They eventually told me that they believed the rocking chair was being moved by a grandfather who had passed away in recent years. I again emphasized that psychopomp work is done from a place of compassion, to try to help the “stuck soul parts” of someone find a place outside of the physical world where they will be happier and more at peace. The family agreed that this is what they wanted. They said, yes, please, any stuck soul that is attached to this rocking chair, please help them find a place of peace and happiness. I agreed to go home that evening, and do the work of assessing what’s going on at their residence. I told them I needed a few days to do this work, and that I would get in touch with them after the work was finished. Later that night, around 1:00 AM, from the comfort of my own home (after another round of powering up with my helping spirits), I did the middle-world journey and began circling around their house. I immediately became aware of about a dozen human-form spirits milling about in their front yard. It looked like a party, or a barbecue, of some kind. I floated over and asked one of the friendlier-looking beings what they all were doing there. He said they were relatives of the grandmother who lived in the house. They were having a “family reunion” he told me. “We’re here to help her, whenever she’s ready to move on from here.” I thanked him for communicating with me, then proceeded to travel into the house, toward the rocking chair. Sitting there, in the chair, which was now rocking gently back and forth, was a tiny baby girl, young enough to be pre-linguistic. Somehow, this baby and I were able to communicate telepathically. Inside the house, there was no party going on. There was silence and darkness. This baby was the only spirit around. I told her I was there to see if she needed any help, and she immediately communicated to me that she wanted to find her Aunt. The little girl was lonely, and she didn’t know how to leave that room and find the Aunt she wanted to be with. One of my helping spirits who I rely on for this kind of work showed me immediately that the girl’s Aunt (her soul) was currently living in one of the layers of the Upper World. I saw the image of where she was, and recognized it from my FSS training to do psychopomp work. I described to the girl where her Aunt was, and it was immediately clear to me that she was filled with an exuberant YES! Take me there! That’s where I want to go! I reached my hand out, asked the child to grab ahold of me, and I did the work, the way I was taught. Once I returned to that room, I exited the house, waved goodbye to the spirits who were partying in the front yard, and returned to my body laying on the floor at my own home. A few days later, I met with the mother and father of the family. (The son, a busy college student, had decided not to meet with us this time). The first thing I told them was “Well, it wasn’t a grandfather rocking the chair… It was a tiny little baby girl…” Both of their faces turned white, like the blood had dropped out of their system, or they had seen a ghost. They looked at each other, then back at me. I could see tears beginning to well up in the eyes of the wife. She proceeded to tell me that when they had first moved into that house, she had suffered a miscarriage. They had lost the girl they were expecting, before they ever had their son. When I described how the child told me she wanted to be with her Aunt, the couple again looked at each other, then back at me. The wife explained to me that her sister (who had since passed away) used to come over and help her throughout her pregnancy. The couple were both crying, tears of release. I could see the grief and sadness they were letting go of. My heart was filled with compassion for their suffering. Tears flowed freely from my own eyes. When it seemed appropriate, I proceeded to tell them about the spirits outside who were “having a family reunion.” Because I had studied the Near-Death Experience, I knew this was quite common, to have spirits of deceased loved ones show up to meet a person, and help them transition and cross over. I told the couple, I thought it was these spirits who were walking in their hallway at night. But I could tell that my explanations didn’t really have a lot of impact on the two of them. I had switched into a mode of “talking from my rational mind and book-knowledge,” and I knew almost immediately that this was not helping. I eventually felt my voice tapering off, slowly coming to a stop, even as my mouth continued to regurgitate all the logical, rational reasons I would’ve seen spirits in their front yard. One thing I learned from doing this work had to do with “not talking too much” about things I may have witnessed in the journey, but which are somewhat irrelevant to the healing work that has been requested. I didn’t need to tell them about the party in their front yard. I also learned that shamanic training is not always enough, on its own, to have real credibility with people. There was a look of doubt and disbelief in their eyes when I started talking about deceased ancestors coming to meet with their elderly mother. Later, at home, through some personal journeywork to ask my helping spirits what I needed to learn from this healing session, I was shown that it would be helpful for me, as someone who was offering psychopomp work, if I would volunteer in a hospice. Eventually, I spent three years as a volunteer who cooked food for patients, and helped feed them. I also did weekly home visits to bed-bound patients who couldn't be left alone, so their family members could leave for a few hours to go get some errands done. At the main facility, a 10-bed, 24-hour care unit, I interacted with many medical professionals. I learned that Western-trained scientific-minded professionals who spend lots of time around people getting very close to death are often well-aware that patients will begin having conversations with the spirits of deceased loved ones. Many of the hospice nurses I reported to and assisted told me this was a well-known phenomenon in their line of work. The hospice volunteer program was shut down when the pandemic started. I found my time as a volunteer to be very beneficial for my shamanic practice. I now have stories I can tell, from my own actual experiences. I know about death and dying from first-hand observations, not just from all the years I spent studying books, or going through training to do shamanic work. I did not find it nearly as emotionally taxing to be around dying people as you might think. But then again, my initiations in shamanism, and other experiences throughout my lifetime, have shown me that the soul never dies. It only leaves the physical body, at a certain point, on our continuing journey toward wholeness. As a fully initiated and trained shamanic healer, I am often asked about the work I do. What is "shamanic healing"? What does a healing session look like?
Here's an excerpt from my personal journal, from quite a few years ago. This narrative gives a pretty good idea of how I personally go about offering shamanic healing to people in my community who reach out and ask for help. During training to do this work, I made agreements with my shamanism instructors to not teach the healing methods to others. I feel I have omitted enough details about how the technique is done, to satisfy this request from the master-shamans I have been blessed to learn from. The following written narrative, with a few minor editorial changes, was published in the December 2020 edition (Issue 33) of Shamanism Annual: The Journal of The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, under the title "Drum Healing Ceremony." ____________________________________________ Called to This Healing Work by Adam Bosler Another consequence of being the public host of the “Glendora Shamanic Drum Circle” is that occasionally someone I have never met will contact me through email, asking about shamanism. “Shelly” described herself as very interested in the drum circle, but wheelchair-bound in a way that made it impossible for her to attend. Over the next several weeks, we ended up sending a few emails back and forth, and getting to know each other a little bit better. It became apparent to me that Shelly is an elderly person living in an assisted-living facility about an hour’s drive from where I live. ******* We have been emailing for a few weeks now. Not a lot. Just enough to get to know each other a little bit. At one point in the email conversation, Shelly asks if I would be willing to do some journeywork on her behalf. She is suffering from tumors on her spine which are very painful, she tells me. I agree to go to my helping spirits and ask them to do something to help alleviate her suffering. One of the specific things I am shown in the journey is me, at Shelly’s residence, performing a technique, a Drum Healing Ceremony, which I was taught in my three-year advanced shamanism training program. I send an email, telling her I need to call her on the phone and talk about the results of the journeywork. She emails back: she has a caretaker who comes on Tuesday afternoons, and can get the phone for her, so that would be the best time to call. ******* During our phone call, Shelly seems surprised, in a positive way, when I tell her I was directed to make a “house call” and perform a Drum Healing Ceremony for her. I tell her this is, of course, entirely up to her, and in no way am I trying to pressure her into a visit. But if she is interested, I would be willing to come to her place to do the ceremony. She asks how much I usually charge for something like that, and I tell her I'll charge a small fee to cover my gasoline there and back. We set up a day for me to go to her place. This will be one of the first times I have worked with a client “out of the blue” who does not know me, is not a friend, or has not already been attending the shamanic drum circle for a few months. As part of my agreement to come to her house, I have emailed her a consent form and liability release — which I was taught how to create and use in the FSS Shamanism Practicum workshop — with instructions to sign it and return it to me by mail. My main concern is that Shelly understands that I am not promising a medical cure, and she should continue with whatever medical advice she has been given by her doctors. Something in me gets the feeling that Shelly is the kind of person who wants to choose alternative healing instead of Western medicine. I explain to her over the phone how shamanic healing works best in conjunction with Western healing. We want the best of both worlds, not one or the other. Before the scheduled day arrives for me to go to Shelly’s house, the signed release form shows up in my mailbox. It is a great feeling of release for me, to have this kind of official legal kind of form to discuss and share with a client. It adds a level of professionalism to my shamanic healing that helps me let go of worries, and focus on the healing methods. ******* The facility is a 600-unit assisted-living complex. The elevator drops me off at the end of a long, empty corridor lined with numbered doors. I find Shelly’s door, knock. A Hispanic woman in her thirties opens the door, smiles. I am invited in. One step over the threshold, and I am now standing squarely in the center of the “living room.” The kitchen is a simple counter against one wall of this same room. A sink. An electric cooktop. An old, beat-up vacuum cleaner is sitting out and plugged in. The apartment is obviously being cleaned up for the guest’s arrival. I have the distinct sense that my visit is causing extra work for the caretaker. She is cordial, but aloof and distrustful. The caretaker leads me five steps across the room, introduces me to Shelly, then quickly turns back to her chores in the kitchen area. Shelly reclines at one end of the room, on a small couch. It looks painful, awkward the way her spine is twisted and propped up with pillows. Shelly and I have seen each other’s photos on Facebook, but this is our first face-to-face meeting. She is easily 80 years old. I think to myself: her online photos of herself must be several decades old. She is frail, feeble. Her legs look atrophied to the point of being useless. I have brought a yoga mat and a drum bag. I am still looking around for a place to set my things, when Shelly calls out to the caretaker: “Perhaps it would be better if we did the session in the bedroom.” She is helped, practically carried, to the bed, which is ten feet away through a small doorway. The bedroom door is left open, and the caretaker goes back to stirring a pot on the stove and chopping vegetables, just around the corner, obviously listening to Shelly and me. The bedroom is so small, there isn’t even enough room to roll out my yoga mat, which I normally sit on during shamanic ceremonies. So instead, I sit cross-legged on the floor, the only space available, a foot away from her bed, facing Shelly from the side. I can barely open the drum bag I’ve brought, because the space I’m sitting in is so cramped. She begins to tell me, again, about the tumors on her spine, which she has described to me over the phone in past conversations. She has trouble walking, she tells me. She has to use the wheelchair pretty much full-time, she says. I know all these things in my conscious mind, based on our previous conversations, but now to witness her state of being first-hand — she is much more incapacitated than I had imagined. She seems to have to strain just to speak. She has a small window in one corner of her bedroom that looks out at the Southern California sunshine. On the window's ledge I soon notice a small bird pacing back and forth. Shelly has told me before of Musketeer, in one of our phone conversations. So I was not surprised to see her pet cockatiel, but I did not expect the bird to be cage-free. Shelly appears to be smiling and staring out the window, but I quickly realize she is gazing lovingly at her bird-friend Musketeer. “He doesn’t know what to think of you yet. Usually he’s over here right by my side.” I am reminded of a gift I have brought for Shelly, a peacock feather that was molted and dropped right in my driveway just a few days ago. In the town I live in, we have wild peacocks that roam up and down the streets, I tell her. “This is from a female. They’re gray, and about the size of a chicken. I believe Mother Nature knew I was coming to visit you — a bird lover — and she gave this feather to me, to give to you.” She smiles and takes the feather gently in her hands. She strokes the feather as if she is petting a cherished animal. My eyes are still adjusting to the light when I begin to see the bird droppings on the floor around me. The thought dawns upon me that this disheveled bedroom is in fact Musketeer’s cage. While the front room and kitchenette were fairly straightened up upon my arrival, it does not appear that this bedroom has been cleaned recently. There is a smell of urine. Several unopened bags of fresh Depends undergarments sit at the ready, on a shelf near the foot of the bed. Shelly points to the phone on a small bedside table, and I picture our previous phone conversations, her laying here in this bedroom-cage and smiling at her roommate Musketeer. As I am setting out a candle and getting ready to “open sacred space” by calling in Compassionate Spirits and rattling, I look over and see two cockroaches crawling up the wall near the nightstand. Something inside my heart is breaking for this woman. As I rattle and call for help in healing her, tears begin to flow from my eyes. I am soon chanting a prayer of hope and health. Anyone with even an ounce of compassion in their heart would see the sad and lonely situation this woman lives daily. My prayers and rattling and calling in the Spirits have caused a wave of calm to ripple throughout the entire residence. The caretaker just outside the door has stopped banging the spoon against the pan, has stopped chopping vegetables. There is a reverence for the ceremony that can be palpably felt. I look over and see tears flowing down Shelly’s cheeks. Even her bird, Musketeer, has stopped prancing around and has settled down comfortably onto the window ledge. Everyone is waiting for some kind of miracle. With my eyes still open, but blurry with tears of compassion, I begin looking inward, to the place where my guides and helpers usually meet me. I feel that old, familiar feeling of merging with something bigger than myself, something more important than my personal opinions about how the elderly should be treated and cared for. The sadness and the squalor are slipping from my consciousness. A glowing light, a beam of pure healing intention, begins to grow in my inner awareness. I am receiving something from outside of myself, and yet at the same time, am merging with it, so that my physical body can perform the Drum Healing Ceremony. I pick up the drum and begin playing it near Shelly’s frail body. I am being directed how loud to play, where to hold the drum, the proximity to her body. I am following a kind of inner intuition that is difficult to describe in words. The sound coming from the drum fills her small apartment with a booming resonance. The walls of her bedroom are shaking with the sound of the drum. I ask if it’s too loud, and Shelly smiles, tells me joyfully, “Not at all!” She looks deeply happy in a way I have not seen on her face until this very moment in the afternoon. ******* I call Shelly about a week later to see how she is doing. She tells me that she initially got very sick for three days right after I left. She could hardly eat. Something had shifted inside her body, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Then, on the fourth day after the Drum Healing Ceremony, her pain went completely away. “It’s a miracle” she tells me. “I have felt pain because of those tumors for so long. But now it’s just gone!” We talk for a bit longer, but I am hardly listening. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have the distinct sense that “my job here is done.” When I hang up the phone, I go directly into my meditation room, sit in front of my shamanic altar, and begin sending prayers of thanks and gratitude to the helpers who did the healing for Shelly that afternoon, and the following three days. I light some incense. I shake my rattle. I am in awe of the miracles I have witnessed. This experience, which I wrote about in one of my journals years ago, has left a profound and permanent positive change in my life.
by Adam Bosler Jessica sits across the circle from me. Twenty-five of us initiates have gathered for the second time this year. We have been invited by the teacher to perform a kind of ritualized healing dance, a practice we were taught six months ago in this same sacred circle. Before starting, we have called in the presence of the compassionate spirits we are learning to work with. The instructor has asked us to try to control and contain the power that wells up inside of us when we work with the helping spirits in this way. Jessica sits across the circle from me. The room is darkened, and people all around are starting to feel the power rising, as we continue calling compassionate spirits into the room, using the methods we have been taught. There are subtle shifts in people’s physical bodies. Something ancient and intense is starting to enter the room. Jessica sits across the circle from me. I see her shaking, quivering. She looks as if she is being taken over by a force she cannot control. She signals by shaking her rattle, and the teacher and the assistant-singers quickly make their way over to her. They are helping her up from her seated position on the floor. She can barely stand. She begins sobbing, wailing, overflowing with a sorrow that wells up from deep inside. Everyone in the room is transfixed. We are witnessing something intensely powerful and profound. The teacher and the helpers are practically dragging Jessica, pulling her to move forward. The circle is watching a broken woman, almost unable to function. She is having trouble staying within the protocol for this practice. She is on the edge of losing control, of complete breakdown. She inches her way forward on her quest to make it all the way around the circle. My eyes are flowing with tears. No one sees this, because everyone is watching this helpless woman, who appears to be tormented with immense, unexplainable grief. Her entire being is filled with sorrow. She falls to the ground, crawling, wailing like a person who has just learned of their soulmate’s unexpected death. The teacher and the helpers struggle to get her to make her way around the circle. She is still forty feet away from me when I feel it, in my heart, and I know exactly what is happening: Jessica is heading straight to where I am sitting. ******* I am no longer in the circle learning the healing dance ritual. I am at a graveyard. My disembodied soul sits atop my own grave. Jessica has been transformed into Sarah, my wife. My soulmate, the love of my life. Because of my drinking, I have died an early death. This is not the first time in her life Sarah has been struck down with unendurable grief, but it is the worst she has ever felt it. In spirit form, I am able to share in her misery. The separation of beings in the physical world no longer protects me from feeling her unimaginable suffering, this shredding of her soul Sarah feels because of me — because I wouldn’t stop my self-destructive behaviors. I have caused this ruin, this sorrow, this immense pain. Jessica is in front of me. She falls to her knees, wailing, weeping. She reaches out to caress my face, but I am two inches too far away. She cannot reach me, and I can do nothing to comfort her. I sit nodding my head up and down. Yes, I tell the spirit that now inhabits Jessica's body. Yes, I know exactly what you are trying to show me. Yes, this is all my fault. I can see it all so clearly now. There are things I need to change in my life, patterns of behavior I have allowed to develop that are leading me and my loved ones down this path of unremitting sorrow and grief. Sarah is screaming, fighting. She has crumbled to the floor in front of me. She attempts to rise, making a fist, and pounds her fury into my chest. Why, God? Why did you take him from me? She cannot, will not, accept what has happened. I am dead, and she is alone, and now I must witness her grieving over my sudden and unexpected end. I do not rest in peace. I sit in silence atop my own grave, awaiting the moment Sarah’s bereaved soul, newly widowed, arrives to pour her sorrows onto me, for all eternity. ******* The teacher and the assistants eventually lift Jessica again to her feet, and she is nearly dragged away, to complete her walk around the circle. I am left with a hollow hole in my heart, where a cancer has been removed. I feel a scar that will stay with me for the rest of my life, a deep and ever-present reminder of the sadness I had been creating with certain behaviors and patterns in my life. Recently, I was talking with a good friend of mine who was describing to me some very deep, transformative experiences they've been going through. I told them it sounded similar to something that happened to me a long, long time ago, before I started seeking community and connection in various shamanism circles.
I knew that at one point, I had written about my experiences in one of my typewritten journals. I told my friend that I would go back through some old boxes of writing and try to find those stark, white pieces of paper, imprinted with my indelible truths I had hammered onto those pages. I don't remember what year I wrote down this true story. I don't even feel like I am 100% this person anymore. I've changed so much, since that time in my life. Still a story worth reading, though. Glad I wrote it down. And the lesson at the end of the whole ordeal is a powerful teaching I still reflect on now and then. __________________________________________________ Move the Death-Ray by Adam Bosler For many, many years I was visited in my dreams by a pair of spirits. They always came together. One was very thin and lanky, more than seven feet tall. When we were indoors, he had to crouch down to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. The other spirit was small and short. She often stood closer to me, and helped to explain the things that the two spirits were trying to show me. There is a strange time-bending effect in the dreamworld, where a person can live for many years, can have multiple lifetimes of experience, in a single night. This had been happening to me for quite some time. After a single night of dreaming, I might wake in the morning with memories of a seven-year journey through a mysterious “other world” that included hundreds of visits from the two spirits. My process was to sit at a manual typewriter every morning, to write down all the lessons these spirits seemed to be trying to teach me. The pages piled up. Over months, then years, I began binding these typed pages into notebooks, which I then stacked in boxes in the corner of my writing room. I was spending so much time, so much energy in the dreamworld, that it became difficult to get out of bed in the morning. But eventually, once my wife was off to work, and the house was quiet and cool in the early part of the day, I would make my way over to the typewriter and begin documenting another night of time-bending lessons from the spirits. This pattern was somewhat sustainable because my wife and I had chosen a life without children. She was a grounded person with two feet firmly in the reality of the physical world. She was dedicated to her career, and to the stability of our household. My job was to get up in the morning and cook breakfast, to pack her a lunch, to send her on her way, out into the hostile world to make a living and bring home a paycheck. I stayed back, doing laundry, the dishes, shopping, cooking, cleaning. But as my soul was gradually turning further toward the dreamworld realities, I found it increasingly difficult to function during the waking hours, when the sun was in the sky. My true work in this world was happening at night, as my wife lay sleeping next to me in our bed. There were many times when I would wake in the morning, before any alarms went off, to find myself weeping, sobbing. After a few minutes I would open my eyes, thankful that I had returned from a decade in solitude, or from a lifetime of hard lessons. The spirits were compassionate, but no part of me was being spared. I was being asked to face the darkest of my demons, and to figure out how I could make real and lasting changes. During the daylight hours, I had signed up for some master’s degree classes in "consciousness studies,” to learn about and explore the nature of the human perceptual system. Perhaps the experts who had come before me could help me understand what was happening to me. Any outside observer would say I was going through some kind of mental breakdown. And yet, inside, in the parts of my soul that were sensing the most honest and real aspects of our universe, something was telling me to continue, telling me that this exploration of the dreamworld and the messages from the spirits, that all of this was the work I was supposed to continue with. My 10-year career as a high school English teacher had already slipped through my fingers. I no longer had the energy to get up early and plan lessons for other people’s teenagers. I was still struggling to figure out my own truths. I could no longer put in the time it took, just to show up at my classroom every day to teach. I no longer had the energy or the motivation to motivate others to find their truths, their voices, their insights. It was a solo journey I was being called to undertake. And so, at the end of the school year, I resigned. I stopped consuming fiction. My voracious reading habits were turned away from the novels and short stories I had been obsessed with in my earlier life. Now, I spent hours and hours every day studying and writing papers for my “consciousness” classes. I spent my waking hours filling my mind with the theories and discoveries of many of the “giants” of the intellectual search for meaning. I participated in online seminars where I could interact with Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, Richard Tarnas. Through my studies, I was introduced to the phenomenon of the Near-Death Experience, and I spent another two years devouring anything I could find about that subject. I studied spiritual awareness systems throughout human history from different cultures around the world, many who never communicated with each other. I began to see a pattern emerging. The sages of the past, the saints, the enlightened ones who had gone off into the wilderness, who had followed that strange voice to the farthest reaches of the known universe, and beyond... They were all telling the same story. And these two spirits who for so long had guided me in my dreams, they were voices in that same choir. It was all the same lessons, over and over again, all for the benefit of the dumb ape (me) who was sleeping his life away, refusing to fully participate in the alleviation of the suffering in the world around him. I had retreated and receded from the world around me. I was no longer a high school teacher. It had been years now. I was a “house husband.” My daily responsibilities were simple domestic chores, rote patterns I performed easily and automatically from muscle memory. I stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing dishes, but my mind was in another world. I was reviewing, remembering, memorizing, re-playing the dreamworld events and teachings. Part of me felt guilty that I wasn’t able to contribute more. I knew in my heart, this wasn’t just some ego-trip I was on. I felt deeply inside that the things I was being shown were going to help me to one day become an effective healer of others. I held firmly to my belief that all of this would some day make sense, that all the work I was doing in the dreamworld would eventually help me become the compassionate helper of others I felt myself called to be. But I was painfully aware of how much work I still had left to do on myself, before I would be ready to return to my tribe with anything of value. The nights became increasingly weird. I began to have two separate conscious layers existing in my mind, at the same time. One layer, one “consciousness” was asleep and dreaming. I felt my body reclining horizontally on my bed. I knew I was in a dream somewhere, but now the two spirits were no longer meeting me there. The other layer of my consciousness sat up in bed. I looked over and saw myself laying and dreaming. I had this second layer of awareness now, an aspect of myself who was sitting on the edge of my bed. I felt the electric fan blowing a cool breeze across my skin. I gradually became aware of the two spirits huddled together quietly in the dark corner of my bedroom. A chill came over me, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with sensitivity. Never before had the spirits come out of the dreamworld and into my physical space. And then, like a jolt of electricity, the spirit informed me that, No, I was wrong! They had been sitting there in the corner of my bedroom all along, they said -- and I knew this to be true. Finally, I was starting to wake up, they told me. Finally, I was starting to perceive the truth. I glanced over at the spirits sitting together on the floor and zang! another bolt of electricity: they were not two spirits. They were, in fact, ONE BEING. They were an entity who had been split apart a long time ago, even before their own birth. But now they had found each other, and now they functioned as one entity, as one spirit. What did they want? Why were they here? The darkness of my bedroom at night made it difficult to see the spirit’s facial expression, but something in me sensed that they were laughing at me. Their communication was almost a kind of telepathy, but I could also hear their words in my ears. There was a mocking tone, a sneer of ridicule on the spirit’s breath. They nodded toward the nightstand next to my bed: “What the fuck is that?” And I felt my fingers moving to slide open the drawer. It was a handgun, a loaded revolver I always kept next to me as I slept. “You keep claiming you want to be a healer, right? Well, what kind of a healer sleeps with a death-ray sitting right next to themself?” They were chuckling privately to themselves again, but nothing was funny. I felt the sarcastic snickering between two old friends: “Get a load of this guy...” “No, no. You don’t understand,” I pleaded with them. “I live in a very violent world. This is normal in the world I come from. A lot of people sleep with a gun next to their bed. It’s normal where I come from.” “We’ll say it again: What kind of a healer sleeps with a deathray within arm’s reach?” “Where I come from, people are insane. There’s these crazy people out there who might come crawling through my window at any time. I have to protect my wife, sleeping here in the bed next to me.” I looked over at my beautiful wife, sound asleep, so peaceful, so tranquil. I took a deep breath, let sink in this pause in the conversation. A few minutes of silence passed. There was this moment of deep and tender sadness as the spirits sat watching me gaze over at the woman I loved more than life itself. The moment passed, and the spirits toughened up. “You know what, we’re not even going to continue working with you until you move that deathray into another room. It needs to be tucked away somewhere out of reach, high up on a shelf, in another room, far away from this place where you sleep.” And then, jarringly direct, a thought arose simultaneously in the mind of the two spirits, and in my own mind. “We’re still not convinced you aren’t suicidal.” “No! I would never do that,” I protested. “This isn’t about me! I’m serious! There’s crazy people out there who will break in here and rape my wife! They’ll try to kill us! Normal people around here have guns, to protect themselves! I’m not suicidal!” The spirit was not convinced, and just sat there shaking their head in disbelief. Again they directed their questions at me: “So, what’s really going on here? If it gets too bad one night, you’re just gonna reach over and take yourself out? Haven’t you been listening all these years, all these lessons about your diet, your health, your addictions. The way you live is suicidal. We’re trying to help you, but you just keep resisting us. We’re just not sure why it is you keep refusing to see the true answers to all these questions. And so we just keep asking, why is it you feel the need to sleep with a gun by the side of your bed?” Another moment of deep silence passed in the dark. “Well, all we can say is, if you want us to continue coming here and working with you, you’re gonna have to move the deathray into a different room.” I was so damn stubborn back then. I remember feeling this small remaining sliver of my petulant willpower still protesting this final ultimatum from the spirit. I remember sitting, stewing in silence. There must be some way I could explain it to them -- using some kind of imagery that they could understand -- how we have these violent, insane people who roam the streets breaking into people’s houses when we’re sleeping at night – to rape us, to steal from us, to kill us. “Don’t you get it?” The spirit let loose its final stinging jolt of truth for the evening’s lesson: “It’s the crazy ones coming through your window -- those are the ones you’re gonna have to heal... -- NOW GET UP and MOVE THAT DEATH-RAY into another room!” Here is an experience I had many years ago, during a three-year training program in shamanic healing that I participated in.  by Adam Bosler In the circle, when we were asked to think of a powerful healer from the past , I knew instantly which healer I wanted to visit and ask permission to work with. I have felt a deep connection to this person since I was a very small child. I had spent many years studying this healer's life and methods. This healer continues to be a compassionate spirit I regularly go to for advice and teachings. At that point in my training, I had spent about 6 years using the core shamanism methods to try to deepen my life-long connection with this particular healer. ******* When I journey, I often feel like I am sitting in the dark. Using the core shamanism method of repetitive drumming, the visions that come to me are often faint glimpses against a background of utter darkness. As the drumming continues, and I repeat my question or request, like a mantra, suddenly a flicker of an image will flash through my awareness. It feels like something is sent to me telepathically. Spirits seem to communicate with me in these very quick and fleeting bursts that are filled with meaning for me, based on my own personal history and experiences. It feels as if my thoughts and memories are being used as a kind of very basic language or communication system. I asked the healer to show me where I can meet him. An image of an ancient Egyptian pyramid was sent to me. I recognized it immediately from previous journeywork I had done over the past couple of years. It was a pyramid I had been to many times before, but only to see the outside of the structure. This time, the healer directed me to enter the pyramid through an opening in one side of it. I felt myself moving down a long corridor, as I travelled along this narrow stone hallway, deeper into the center of the pyramid. I felt the distinct message from the healer, telling me: “Any time you need me, I can be found inside this pyramid, down this long corridor.” The very instant I understood that part of the message, I found myself back in the darkness. I went back to simply repeating/chanting my intention for the journey: “Please show me where it is I can meet up with you… Please show me where I can meet up with you…” The healer took me to a place I had read about in a Bible story. It is a community well, where people would gather to get their daily water. In the biblical narrative, this is a place where the healer saved a woman’s life, when some men from the town were about to throw rocks at her and stone her to death for the crime of adultery. In the story, the healer asked the men to look into their own hearts, and if any of them were completely blameless and free from imperfection, then cast the first stone. When the woman looked up, she saw that the men had all left, and the healer then told her that he was not there to accuse her of anything. She rose to her feet, got her water, and went on her way. I had the distinct feeling that the healer was letting me know that he could also be found anywhere people stood up for the rights of the oppressed. I would find the healer whenever I stood between the angry mob and the person they were going after. The very second I understood this point, as if to reinforce what the teacher was trying to communicate to me, I felt one of my recent memories being activated, or triggered. The teacher flipped through the filing cabinet of my own life experiences, pulled a file and threw it, open, on the desk of my consciousness. A scene began to play in my mind — of the time recently when I had participated in the Resist March in Los Angeles, to stand up for LGBTQ rights. There was a moment during the five-mile march when we came around the corner to be met by a crowd of right-wing Christian evangelicals shouting angrily at us, and waving signs with slogans like “Homosexuality is a sin” [and other slogans I do not care to repeat]. As we turned the corner where these bigots had gathered, we marchers responded by booing and yelling over the top of the mean-spirited “Christians.” We were louder than them, and we drowned out their hateful bigotry. And we just marched right past them, our throng of people standing up for “loving acceptance of all people.” My teacher, the healer, was with us that day as we quickly left behind the hate-filled ones we had encountered on our path. This memory of the Resist March, I knew, had been brought up by the healer, as a way of reinforcing this idea: he can be found anywhere people stand up publicly for the rights of the oppressed. Another plunge into darkness. I am still on the journey to ask the healer: “Where do I find you? Where is the place where you and I can meet?” I am now shown a trail where I regularly go hiking. On this trail, there is an abandoned concrete circle that sits high up in the foothills, overlooking the valley where I live. I get the distinct impression that the healer is telling me, “When you hike up into the hills, to sit and meditate, and you look out over the city from up above it all, that is where you can meet me. That is where I can be found.” I was being shown a way to power-up my relationship with the healer, by more regularly visiting these places in the hills I had been hiking to for 40+ years. Feeling that I had received a thorough answer, I then asked my second question: How did the healer actually perform his healings? What was the method he used? He answered by showing me his way of powering-up his hands, wrists, and forearms by calling on “the power of the universe.” He explained that it was compassion for those who are suffering that made it work. He reminded me how he spent a lot of his time, when he lived in the Middle World, hanging out with people who were suffering in some way. The healer showed me that the healing he gave was often delivered to people using his hands. He powered-up his hands, then laid them on the shoulders or the forearms of the person who needed healing. I was struck by how simple the technique was. The healer showed me that he could feel a very particular buzzing sensation in his hands, when they were properly powered-up by the “spirit of the universe.” [That was the phrase he used.] The healer reminded me again that it was compassion and understanding for others, especially for those who are suffering, that made the technique work. "Psychopomp" is a Greek word that is often translated as "usher of souls" or "soul conductor." Though the words to describe this work vary, cross-culturally it is one of the jobs a shaman typically might be called to do, by a grieving family in the community she serves. An ethical shamanic practitioner with proper training will only do this work with permission from, and at the request of, the relatives of the person who has died.
I didn't know any of that, at the time this experience happened to me. I wrote this true story almost 20 years ago -- long before I began seeking professional training to become an effective shamanic practitioner. I was still pretty much living in a cave, spiritually -- not at all public about the crazy spirit-world realities (such as the experience I describe in this narrative) which I had been experiencing since the time I was a small child. When I wrote this story, I was a hard-drinking construction worker. My work buddy and I were "camping" at the job site, as we remodeled a vacant home that was an hour and a half drive from the suburbs where we both lived. My buddy Hollandaise knew the owners of the house, and we got permission to stay there for three and four days at a time, so we could avoid three hours of L.A. traffic back and forth every morning and night. __________________________________________________ Midnight Psychopomp by Adam Bosler I wanted to sleep outside. I wanted this before I learned of the old woman who died in the house just a few short months ago. January is not the best time to sleep outside on your Thermarest, in your sleeping bag, under the bright Lagoona moon. Freezing cold, some might complain, but not I. Not with a hundred and fifty pounds of body-fat insulation wrapped around my torso. In the morning I am awakened by the echoing buzzing of the open highway, the only way in or out of this beach canyon. An observant person can notice, after a few days of watching the tiny toy traffic down below, can notice patterns, the same people heading off to the same dead-end jobs up north. “Gotta work somewhere,” they tell themself, as they crank the radio and mash down on the gas pedal. “Livin’ in Laguna ain’t free…” The sound of a single motorcycle rider reflects back and forth up the sloping sides of the majestic canyon; the rocks, the hills, reverberating like the cone of a trumpet. It is the rider Hollandaise pointed out to me last night, when we were sitting there shell-shocked from the day’s work, drunk, eating hamburgers outside on the deck. ******* We listen to the lone rider, racing home from work, mashing his throttle unnecessarily, according to us, up here in the know, at the top of the hill. We make faces at each other that communicate our disgust for this human being we have never met, but who obviously does not have the expert ridership skills that both Hollandaise and myself believe we possess. We are the Harley-Davidson experts. “Stupid fucker. Wasting gas.” “Why the hell would you do that to your bike?” Tomorrow’s work is a long way off in the future. For now, there are many beers left, and enough vodka for numerous heavy-handed drinks. ******* The third night it was FREEZING FUCKING COLD! Much too cold to even be outside, even for a 280-pound polar bear like myself. After many hours of horrible TV, after the glow of the indirect lighting system had been shut down for the night, after Hollandaise had curled his body around the warm, inhuman box of the flickering television, when there was nothing left to do but find a corner to crawl off to, nothing left to do but try to get some sleep, try to refuel for the next day, try to let my broken body have a few hours of rest… At that exact moment I find myself standing in an oddly lit, cavernous hallway. A table, too small for the space it occupies, huddles awkwardly at the far end of the hall. I am reminded of some hellish scene from Stephen King’s The Shining… some eerie, freaky twins begging me: “Come play with us, Bozley, Come play with us…” There is no corner, no forgotten nook in this vast residence that is not haunted, not imbued somehow with the life-energy of the woman who sealed herself inside this cliff-side home, up here above humanity, above the civilized world. Perched on the tiny table at the end of the hallway, a statue of a soaring eagle reveals this woman’s spirit animal, her guide. You could say the eagle is how she tried to picture herself, what she wanted to be, how she wanted to live, metaphorically. I do not always make the distinction between these “two worlds,” the physical and the metaphorical. For me, they often feel like “one world.” ******* Jesus, I am so tired. I have to get some sleep. I find myself drawn to the old woman’s art-studio room. There is one space open on the floor, and I just barely fit, wedged between several giant paintings of psychologically damaged clowns. There is a strange and ancient potbelly stove sitting unexplainably in the center of the room. In a certain light, one might confuse the wood-burning stove for a large witch’s cauldron. It sits next to a pile of rocks, a wind-break trying to be disguised as a fireplace mantle. From my perspective laying down here on the ground, I can see the eagle gliding, flying high above. The old woman is the eagle, and the eagle is the old woman. She is never coming home, she is never returning, she tells me. (This communication is all done telepathically.) She isn’t sure where to fly off to exactly, so she’s been circling and stretching her wings. And she’s not really sure if she’s ready to leave. She’s biding her time. I smile at her, tell her everything’s fine down here. I give her the reassurance she seems to want, the permission to fly off into the open sky. I send her a mental image of what the Other World looks like. I try to show her how much more immense the sky will be, how much more freedom she will have, to soar. Tentatively, with great caution, she changes the angle of her wings. I watch as she catches an upward jet-stream of warm air, and begins to slowly rise higher in the sky. I soon realize I am being pulled along with her, and it is specifically her attention directed down at me that is pulling me up. She is scared to go alone, and is somehow taking me with her. I motion with my neck, with a nod of my head, toward the expanse of sky and eternity that opens up above us. I try to get her to turn away from me, to focus on soaring. I feel my soul being unwound from my physical body. That old, familiar feeling. But this is not the time or place for astral travels. Not here, not in this witch’s castle. Not tonight. And yet, I have never been one to turn back when the Other World is within shouting distance. Far up above me, I hear the happy screech of the old-woman eagle as she begins to realize the vast expanse of her new life. I am drawn to her cries of freedom. I cannot turn away as the two of us continue soaring higher, farther. We are circling each other, rising up into the endless sky, flying out into the universe. I look down at my arms, which have somehow been transformed into feathery wings. My only thought is, “Wow, I’ve never been an eagle before…” Now I know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t just show her the postcards and expect her to find the place on her own. I gotta take her there. ******* In the morning I am still feeling somewhat removed from my surroundings. Hollandaise asks me how I slept. “Well, apart from the multiple out-of-body experiences…” That is the most explanation I can muster. Then he tells me, “You know, that room you slept in, it's where the old lady died. Her daughter found her body in there.” ******* We have a long day of very strenuous work ahead of us. I am not paid to spend all night guiding lost souls to the after-life. I’m paid to rip out drywall and two-by-fours with my bear claws, and my crowbar. |