Allison Troxel
practiTioner
Ancient Echo
Shamanic Medicine
Restoring the primacy of the Human and Earth relationship
With a foundation of 60,000 years, shamanism is a spiritual tradition for awakening and transformation of self and all that surrounds. It is our ancestral legacy in which the Earth itself and all of Life is courteously experienced as abundant with remarkable possibilities and resources.
Shamans understand that what human civilization urgently needs, in this time of ecological crisis, is to re-open the psychic channels connecting us to our planetary home. Our cultural codes have failed but we may hear the ancient echo that is coming to us from instincts to create new stories of aliveness and new ways of being.
Shamanic practitioners use the phrase "helping spirits" to describe the sources of wisdom and help that suffuse the phenomenal world. Residing in the realms of dream and myth, imagination and vision, archetype and code, and Everywhere in Nature, these wild sacred forces restore the passion and belonging between the human and the cosmos.
A shaman, or one who sees-with-the-heart, has disciplined herself or himself to expand perception into the opaque world of spirit/consciousness for purposes of insight, guidance and healing on behalf of others. Cross-culturally the drum plays her part. Drumming is perhaps the oldest form of active meditation known to humanity. Through a method called sonic driving, shamans "ride" the sound of the drum at a beat resonating with the Earth, tuning consciousness to a frequency just below waking and just above sleep.
From this place, portals beckon, worlds open and the journey begins. With the help of the spirits we begin to tend to our broken conversation with our origins and restore our personal power.
“We come into being in and through the Earth. Simply put, we are Earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educator, our healer, our fulfillment. At its core, even our spirituality is Earth derived. The human and the Earth are totally implicated, each in the other. If there is no spirituality in the Earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves.”
Thomas Berry
"After having personally practiced shamanism, shamanic healing, and shamanic journeying for more than half a century, I can say that there is nothing I have encountered in reports of the spiritual experiences of saints, prophets, psychedelic drug experimenters, near death survivors, avatars and other mystics that is not commonly experienced when following classic journey methods using a drum."
— Michael Harner
