Hi Mary,

I was wondering what your thoughts might be regarding how to deal with the unsettling feeling of having one foot in the ordinary world and one in the spiritual realm. Anytime I undertake spiritual work with real depth (as in doing spiritual work in a ritual setting or psychopomp), I begin to feel very uneasy and unbalanced. I begin to reach for the compulsions that I use for numbing, I have a hard time dealing with living people and I become withdrawn and quiet. 

How can someone deal with this unsettling feeling? I have a feeling your answer will be to build personal power and work on cleansing the energy body, but what kinds of things can one do when they feel like this? I’m not sure if others experience this but I bet at least some people have. 🙂

• Mary

Hello fellow Mary 🙂

My basic answer is always grounding in the body and working on personal power, which you already know.

I will add that power in shamanic work must be built in an embodied way. Meaning through the physical form, so that power emanates through you. This is the hollow bone concept, in which power flows, opening up our own channels and body in greater and greater ways so that power can emanate through us to another the more we do this work.

I mention this (although this is another blog altogether) because if shamanic work is done in a disembodied and disconnected way, it can make people quite sick, leading to all sorts of nervous system issues, fatigue, and even more serious issues with the brain, heart, and health (this is much different than the shamanic process of learning through experiencing varying physical and psychological issues to get to understand them from the inside out for the purposes of growth and ultimately being of service to our community).

But in a deeper way, the answer here has everything to do with discomfort, and becoming comfortable with discomfort.

Let me describe it like this…

I work from home, and although I go run errands, go to visit friends and family, go to the gym, and so forth, I am very used to my terrain, my sort of bubble.

Similarly with the energy body we are used to our typical sensations: our mood, our awareness (or lack of awareness) of our energy body, our energy levels (I mean more fatigue or energized than spiritual power here), our health or lack of health, and so forth.

We are also aware of where our energy body (our aura) basically ends. Consider these your energetic boundaries, the differentiation between self and other. Put more simply, picture a bubble or egg sort of shape around you. This can wax and wane, depending on energy level, mood, and where you are (if you feel safe your energy body will typically expand, for example).

It can also be impacted by trauma and emotional difficulties. For example, our energetic boundaries may not be very solid, they may be collapsed or partially collapsed, or they may be so tightly fitted around us that anything beyond the very small reality we know is reacted to as danger or fear.

The reason that I mention all of this is because truly venturing into the Other greatly shifts our sense of “normal”: what is possible not only energetically but also physically and psychologically.

It brings in magic into a magic-less world. It sharpens and attunes our senses to notice more of our reality than what we are told is present before us. 

It destroys the notion that we are an individual. We are continually intersecting with other energies– they inform us, they intersect with us. Other people, the land, our ancestors, our family, our society, the world at large, and even greater and stranger energies all inform us and flow through us. 

The stories of our lives and of the world make up who we are, and these narratives make up so much of who we believe that we are and what is possible and probable in our lives here.

Most of us are not aware of this whatsoever. We feel as if we are alone, and we suffer mightily under that delusion.

Shamanic work, the authentic journeying and accessing of energies and lands that are “more than human” utterly destroys the delusion that we are living in one solid reality, one place, and the myth of rugged individualism that shapes the Western psyche.

The Other ultimately awakens us, expands us, and breaks through layers and layers of psychological, mythic, spiritual, and ideological conditioning until we can access our power and be able to intersect with helping powers outside of ourselves.

The problem with this, as you wrote, Mary, is that it does take some time to get used to. Uneasiness, dizziness, the reaching for numbing foods and behaviors is all very typical for people who access the Other, and upon that precipice of real change, experience fear.

And rightfully so, that fear. It is one thing to sit at the edge of a shore. It is another to dip your toe in, or wade ankle deep. It is quite another altogether to plunge into its depths, understanding that what lies beyond our fear are all new versions and experiences and dimensions of reality altogether. Up can be down, East can be West, and what we consider our daily waking reality is but one of many, many realities that can be accessed.

So there are two “cures” for this.

The first is one that is more mentally focused. It is to understand what is going on. You are plunging to some degree into the Other, and out of fear and habit you are reaching for things that will bring your energy body back down to size, so to speak.

A funny anecdote that some people will probably dislike a great deal, but in one of my first ceremonies when I was quite young with a very skilled shaman he took one look at me after and told me to get a hamburger from McDonald’s. I no longer eat fast food, but his point is still very salient. I needed to get grounded, and quickly, and meat and grease and carbs will do that.

I will also mention that this work does require a great deal of energy, even if you are quite connected. So being ravenous after doing spiritual work is actually fairly typical.

But if you are willing to sit with those uneasy feelings I do think that you can find a balance between allowing expansion, something new and unfamiliar to be okay, and in feeling a sense of safety and familiarity.

I will also mention that working with the Other, and that hollow bone, brings up our own psychological issues. Picture yourself as a series of pipes that power (flow) goes through. Most of our pipes are quite gunky, filled with emotions and unprocessed traumas and resentments and inner children and ancestral stuff and who our parents and society tells us to be and existential issues around self worth and if we want to be here and who we are and all of the stories that compose who we tell ourselves we are and need to be to be approved of.

Interfacing with power, with our own and with the Other (and both simultaneously, as at some point there is no division), will increase flow through those pipes, bringing our own issues to the forefront. 

This is both the difficulty and wonder of doing serious shamanic and/or magical workings. Tending to what comes up, letting it flow and booking with some type of practitioner to process it, is enormously helpful.

The second answer is more energetic. It does require grounding (always helpful). But really most of us have a very small notion of what reality is. It is that daily routine, what surrounds us daily, and we are blind to much beyond our own pain and our immediate, materialist surroundings.

Put in a simpler way, I live in the United States and in my daily routine I am not very aware of what is going on in Greece. It is not a part of my bubble, my daily lived reality.

But shamanic work changes that. It expands your awareness of what you are intersecting with. The bubble grows larger, and it requires you to accept that, and to find a new center amidst this expansion.

Part of this is to have a good mental conceptualization of what is going on when you do this work (hopefully this blog will help!) but really a lot of it has to do with dismantling the myth of greater society and the world that materialist reality is the only thing we are interfacing with.

This centering amongst many worlds, amidst a larger and ever-increasing bubble (the more you do this work) will eventually becoming comforting, rather than unsettling. It will introduce greater sanity, instead of delusion.

It is sort of like lying on a beautiful plain, looking up at the stars at night, aware of the great expanse of space, and how no matter how much you have seen or discovered you will only ever experience a small corner of that. There is a beauty in that insignificance, no matter how much our wounds attempt to fight against it.

This process is a very spiritual one, one that needs to be experienced individually and in a way that makes sense for your individual mythos, and while the experience of being unsettled is always in some regards there when exploring new terrain, when letting more power flow through, when re-centering amongst an increasing conceptualization of self, it very much can be done.

And a more interesting life, a more magical understanding of reality awaits.

Mary Mueller Shutan is a spiritual teacher, practitioner, and author of several books, including The Shamanic Workbook series, Managing Psychic Abilities, and Shadow Work for the Soul

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