Money has the power to make change happen and to do wonderful things. It can buy wonderful things. Money can mean personal freedom. It does not add meaning or value to our lives. Only quality relationships can do that. It is hard to figure this out in America. (True freedom is a well-funded retirement and the chance to retire whenever we want. Start saving.).
I have searched for meaning for a while, never finding any quality answers. Working on college campuses, I have asked college students to define it. One 19 year old female told me that it was a struggle against mediocrity. I think that she was very wise. This blog represents my search for meaning and where it has led so far. I don’t have any answers but the journey is getting interesting.
Without meaning, we seek thrills and highs that are natural, artificial, risky or short lived. Riding a roller coaster is thrill seeking that we pay to enjoy. Engaging in an affair is a destructive form of thrill seeking that we should pay for dearly. Shopping beyond my spending limit has always been a form of a high for me for which I will be paying for a long time. Eating chocolate, junk food or sweets gives a sugar high. I like indulging in each one. (I’d be a chocoholic if I could afford Munson’s chocolate fulltime. I can’t.) Many of these behaviors are short-term distractions, which keep us from finding true meaning or planning for the future. I have shopped until I could not find the sweater I wanted in my clothing pile, and I did not get any happier. (Seeking highs and other forms of stimulation probably fuels the interest in the sensational in the news, the Internet and television.)
In my quest for meaning, distraction and mental stimulation, I have taken all kinds of interesting classes. I have taken painting, pottery, aerobics, sign language (can’t do it), Vietnamese (scared a small child when I tried to speak it), Italian, Italian cooking, German (in Germany, someone told me not to bother), jewelry making, psychic development (worst student in class), reiki, Irish history, any history and anything else that caught my fancy. I really want to take a class to make pastry and massage.
I took a yearlong course on light body or energy healing only to find out that I was actually studying shamanism. Being a lifelong graduate student, I was stunned and not necessarily pleased. I asked why the word, “shamanism” was not in the brochure as I had read it (once a geek, always a geek). I was told that it was implied.
Shamanism is not a word I fully understood then. It is not a term I would ever use to describe myself. I have not told family about it yet. I am in the psychic, shaman closet with co-workers, academic friends, most friends and acquaintances. Doing reiki is a little out there for many people, so talking about shamanism seems foolish. This is a spiritual test for me.
Smart people do not believe in psychics, fairies or anything that can’t be touched, verified or quantified. Crazy people do. In a statistics class, I once asked if two tarot card readers turned over 8 of 10 of the same cards, wouldn’t that be an inter-rater reliability of .80 or 80%? I was told that good graduate students do not believe in psychics or card players.
How could I have backed into a course on shamanism? Why did this happen? How does Shamanism really work? I have more questions than answers. In truth, the weekend workshops featured the Medicine Wheel of the Q’ero of Peru and they were fascinating. My teacher led us on meditations where we met spiritual figures, our ancestors and ourselves in the future. These meditations were way more fascinating than anything I have ever read, seen on TV or in movies. They were also more useful; my Italian grandfather told me to get rid of all the stuff (“all that shit”) I have in storage that I am paying to store.
Since then, when I meet people and they tell me about a health problem, I see pictures. I assume I see what the problem looks like in the spiritual realm. What do the pictures mean? What am I supposed to do with the information? Should I offer to help? Can I help?
Would you risk looking crazy to help another?
How do problems in the spiritual realm manifest in the physical realm? I am only a student of shamanism, can I really make a difference?
In 2003, I saw a deer that my dog did not notice. The deer turned to look at me from what looked like ten feet away. He was my call to a spiritual path. This is my journey.
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