How your dog can be your spiritual teacher – and how you can become a shaman
October 12, 2011
by michaelwilliamroach
Not to knock Eckart Tolle but your dog can be a far more profound spiritual teacher when you remember that one of the gifts that dogs give you is they bring you into the now because that is where they live. BUT are you noticing it? Next time you see someone taking their dog for a walk look to see how present that person is or isn’t. Most of the time it’s like the dog is awake taking this sleepwalker for a walk.
What you often see with spiritual teachers is they end up using the language of different spiritual traditions to express themselves. But are they actually expressing themselves, or parroting profound truths of others?
Years ago I trained in an Hawaiian Shamanic lineage, Huna Mua. And I had the profound good fortune of my teacher Phil Young being someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He enjoyed the incongruence of being a “middle class white guy” to use his phrase who had the extraordinary experience he was living (which is chronicled in the book A Promise Kept). And what I’ve realised more recently is that if you want to be able to make a difference in the world you need to learn how to become a shaman. BUT…
What this is NOT is copying what a shaman did in some indigenous culture. Unless you are going to live in that culture that is kind of pointless. It may seem to satisfy your longings to go back to a time where there weren’t the problems we have today with the poisoning of the environment and therefore the food we eat and how that then affects us. As well as all the financial difficulties and trouble the world has shared recently. The romanticised view of going back to the past unfortunately just isn’t true. I apologise if I’m spoiling your illusions. But that’s part of the problem we share today, so many people living in delusion where they think only of themselves disconnected from the reality of the people around them. Many people love the idea of the Native American culture, or rather how they think it was. And don’t realise in their naivety that they just wouldn’t have survived. That is what the job of the shaman was all about, helping their tribe, their culture not just survive but thrive.
This is what a modern day shaman does. They help not just their tribe but their culture thrive.
Remember you can’t do this if you JUST want your tribe to survive. The boundary of your tribe is the boundaries of planet earth. The mess you make washes up on the shore the other side of the world, just as their mess washes up on yours.
Another way of saying this is most people live in the world of ‘OR’. The choice is this OR that, if we’re successful someone else has to lose out. If you learn to live in the world of ‘AND’ you realise if we’re going to be successful we also have to make everyone else successful as well. There is no choice. You build ecology into your decision making process. This is one of the things the MythoSelf process does, it teaches you an embodied ethical decision making process. So you think ecologically.
The secret to getting other people to change is that you can’t make them. But if you become a leader worth following and embody the change that you want to see then people will happily change to follow the example of what works.
How many dogs do you see taking their ‘owners’ for a walk? Most of them, yes? Listen to your dog.
