Your Shaman Can’t Save You, Your Cats Can

Sitting with the shaman in the yoga shala.

There’s no shame in having our shamans, gurus and channellers on speed dial.

AI-spiritual bots have also joined the mission of saving humanity from their own deepest, darkest thoughts.

As the world shrinks and ancient wisdom becomes Instagrammable quotes with emotional background tracks, we experience unprecedented access to a very broad and deep range of healing modalities, as well as the therapists and practitioners who peddle them.

The wellness, mental health and spiritual coaching industries have worked hard to convince us of how damaged and in dire need of healing we are. Despite my increasing scepticism, I acknowledge that this is a critical chapter in our human evolution of consciousness. There is purpose, meaning and reason for why humanity must go through this phase.

Why we seek them out gurus on demand

We seek out teachers because our inner consciousness is awakened and we want to learn. Many of us are feeling our way through the dark halls of our childhood traumas and a lifetime of unhealthy relationships with our family, society and bodies. We seek out teachers and mentors to help us navigate through life’s sticky situations.

And of course, the wise teachers, gurus and shamans are blessings aplenty. They opened portals, channeled spirits and multi-dimensional past lives, administers cleansing rituals. From vedic astrology in the east to the indigenous ceremonies of the Americas, we can curate our personalised menu of medicine for the month. Our teachers have come in the forms of posthumous Sufi poets, yoga teachers, astrologers, writers, Youtube gurus and wellness retreats owners.

I’ve personally benefited deeply from the depth and breath of these wisdom for they all have a place in our multidimensional existence. They have helped me move past theoretical knowledge to embodied living. And this is also a big reason why I started Yogadelics. I don’t think people need more mystical explanations. What they need more of is embodied living, where our wisdom is reflected in the way we carry out the mundane everyday.

Help or a Crutch?

So, I have also noticed an emerging addiction to healing because these modalities can sometimes be perceived as the magic dose that cures all of our problems. We Whatsapp every single life problems to them, as if we have no personal agency to make conscious choices. We rely on them to validate our emotions and inability to make good choices in life. We seek them out for support in our moments of loneliness, vulnerabilities and fears.

These are all very understandable human reactions. Our modern life is causing such a spiritual drought in our lives, often resulting in many feeling disconnected from the meaning of life. These shamans, monks, spiritual gurus and teachers become wise guides who help us through difficult times by supplying us with contexts, possible causes of our pains. And for those few moments, these are salves that really soothe our parched souls.

Integration is a personal dedication and accountability

But these teachers are not meant to be our personal assistants to life. They are there to provide embodied tools and practices to help us navigate challenges, not to solve our poor choices with 3 rounds of flower baths or sage purification. If you’re speed-dialing or texting them every other week with a new personal crisis, it’s possible that you have not truly integrated the lessons, or that the relationship you have built with your teachers is not conducive for developing personal authority and independence.

Don’t get me wrong. It is fantastic to have mentors that you catch up with from time to time, especially for the regular dharma talks, philosophical discourse and deep reflective studies. Podcasts are also amazing resources for this purpose.

What I’d like to say is that even without the support of your teachers and mentors, you should still lead a sovereign life where you make hard choices, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. At the end of the day, your path is yours, not your teachers’.

Great teachers hold space for deep reflection and polarity, with the purpose that you will find your own unique way to walk your path (whatever that might be) with courage. They are not crutches or magic wands to help you ascend from life or completely bypass the messy experiences of life.

You are your own greatest healer

You are ultimately your own best teacher. As long as you undertake deep and sometimes uncomfortable self-enquiry and hold space for both your shadow and light aspects, you will grow, with or without a physical guru or teacher. And in many ways, this is the hardest and most important part of our journey, to take accountability for ourselves and committing to making decisions that are good for us.

And for myself, my greatest teachers are my cats.

Mooxie and Sasha show me what it means to detach with trust, to rest in the moment and not fret, to love without giving our personal agency away, to sit in chaos without reacting, to love unconditionally, to forgive easily and to be consistent.

If you find yourself to be over-reliant on your teacher/mentor/shaman, know that you have the agency to heal yourself, to make better (or different) choices, to live a full multi-dimensional existence.

Your deepest inner work happens in the mundane and not in the mystical, it’s in the kitchen when you prepare food, in the way you care for your body, in how you react to triggers and how you choose to carry yourself in your relationship and work.