Shamanic Tools
One of a kind rattles, crafts and artwork
Animism
We live in an animate world. Everything is alive with a vibratory dance of protons and electrons, the material constantly defining and redefining itself, engaging in a dance of constant movement and growth.
Our ancestors perceived the aliveness of the world around us and lived within cosmologies that understood this aliveness as being an all pervading consciousness. They venerated and revered the consciousness of the mountains, the lightning, the stones, the rivers, the plants, the animals and all of the beings who contribute the weaving of the web of life. They respected all of these beings by recognising their agency and free will and by not perceiving themselves as being other or separate from them. They lived in intimate relationship and full participation with them, modelling their traditions on the interplay between nature and the cosmos.
In a contemporary context, we have inherited a world view that is fundamentally anti-animist. This is an anthropocentric paradigm based on the principals of individualism, ascensionism and greed whose cultural offspring is corporate capitalism. Instead of recognising the agency and sentience of nature, the planet has become a resource to be plundered and mastered as opposed to revered and nurtured and celebrated.
The current paradigm is also fundamentally anti-magic. As it denies the agency of all beings big and small, it programs us to disregard and undermine our own agency, free will and natural gifts. Living so out of whack with our natural selves, we become participants in and victims of patterns of trauma that repeat themselves over generations. These patterns become stuck within our bodies and cause anxiety, depression, disease, chronic conditions and real life challenges in the form of struggles, ordeals and conflicts.
In other words, the stuck-ness means that something has become inanimate. The role of a shamanic healer is to go to the epicentre of this inanimacy and to breathe new life into it again, bringing aliveness to the body again and bringing us back online in all of the areas in which we are, consciously or unconsciously, inanimate. This process is known as alchemy.
Alchemy
The origin of the word comes from Ancient Greek and means something along the lines of “the process of transmutation by which to fuse or reunite with the original form.” It later became used as the term for the protoscience of base metal fusing which was the father of modern chemistry.
While people have taken the process of alchemy as a material invitation to seek to turn lead into gold, the primary goal was a mystical process known as the Magnum Opus or the Great Work. The Magnum Opus is the spiritual journey one goes on to fully remember who you are and to become wholly yourself. With respect to the alchemists and magicians of the past, it is not an invitation to master or control matter, but rather to take agency and become a fully sovereign and awakened soul.
Shamanic healing uses the principal of alchemy to bring light into the darkness, to reanimate what is stuck and to restore wholeness, all in alignment with the intelligence of nature and the cosmos. A healer must identify what has been exiled at the point of wounding and to perform a medicine ritual to return that missing piece within the wound.
The offerings on this site are all consciously curated, crafted and shared all with the intention of alchemising and reanimating your life, so that you can access the potency of who you are truly meant to be.
