The spiritual honeymoon is grand, but fleeting
When we first come to spirituality, it can feel exhilarating and joyful. It’s life in amazing technicolour.
I’ve noticed a pattern both in my own spiritual awakenings/conversions and that of my friends.
There’s the awakening-romance period, where every day brings new and exciting perspectives, teachings and discoveries. Oh my goodness it’s grand! Filled with inspiration and motivation! Every day is one big exclamation mark!! But that level of activity is hard to sustain over any real period of time (think: a year or two). Eventually, inevitably, it wanes. The energy runs out or perhaps the money. Something happens that trips us up, and perhaps we lose a bit of confidence.
Next comes the disillusionment – when we discover that our new community, belief system or teachers are, in fact, not perfect, and they tumble off the pedestal. The pendulum swings in the opposite direction.
This phase may be enough to put some people off entirely and for them to abandon their beliefs, but just as often, it’s a time of realistic recalibration. With a bit of knowledge behind us, we can now approach our new way of life with awareness, temperance and a more focused sense of direction.
I’ve always felt that this is when the real relationship begins, and the real work of that relationship.
The real work of the shamanic path
Because you see, at least with Shamanism, our relationship with the land and the Spirits works both ways. As co-creators with the Spirits, we can’t simply sit in our living rooms, shake a rattle and assume that’s enough. If only.
But with sober intention, the relationships we build and discoveries we make at this point – whether they be about the world around us or the world within us – are deeper, more profound and they take time to develop and understand.
Learning to embrace time
Time.
Our great nemesis.
Why must everything take so.much.time?
Nobody has ever accused me of being patient, you see.
But I am learning. My father informs me that I am simply mellowing with age, but I know there is so much to it, and to be honest, it inspires a self-pitying sigh every time I think about it.
Kim’s moment of self-pity
- Why do the Spirits always take so long to share their purpose?
Why do I have to wait?
Why do I always have to surrender?
Why can’t they just understand that I have a life and a job and get with the programme?
I completed a few weeks of jury duty a few days ago, and as we adjourned the day before we began our deliberations, the judge informed us that we had to be called to the courtroom so we could be immediately be released from said courtroom to deliberate. We cocked our heads as though to collectively say, ‘really?’
He shrugged. “I know, but it’s the process; it’s just the way we do things.”
It’s just the way the Spirits do things
There are times in Shamanism when knowledge or directions of some kind are shared with us. This can be through revelation, perhaps through journeying or a dream, or through pure intuition.
It can be hard to follow through on these types of directions when we have no idea as to why they are being asked of us. But I want to encourage y’all to do it. Listen. Heed the direction. Beyond assessing if it’s safe, healthy, etc., assess no more. Just do it. Trust.
Understand that it can take weeks, months and even years for the meaning of things to finally unfold for us. Beyond having to give up a lifetime of riches and the people you love thinking you’ve gone round the bend, this is probably the most frustrating part of shamanism.
Or maybe it’s the best part?
Finding our way back to tree-time
When was the last time you had an invitation to slow down? To pause and look around you? How about the last time you took an hour or two from work or away from the kids and wandered through a forest?
I recommend that, from time to time, we calibrate our inner clocks to tree-time.
Tree time is slow. So slow. A tree turns its leaves into the sun so slowly that we don’t track the moment until it’s complete. The tree stands tall in the middle of that glade. Bending with the wind. Opening to the sun. Exhaling in the starlight. Under the ground, a tree is constant. Connecting and communicating through intricate mycelium networks, and sharing water and glucose with its community.
Life unfolds season by season. Change is slow, yet growth is profound and undeniable.
The tree you sit under today is not the tree you sat under five years ago.
The idea that growth and revelation would happen to a tree overnight is silly, yet we expect this of ourselves all the time. And often, we assume that spirituality ends and the Spirits go away when that joyous time of awakening ends. But this too is silly, if we really think about it.
We can’t truly understand the meaning of our Spiritual experiences and how they impact our healing and growth unless we stay the path. Quietly or loudly doesn’t matter, walk that road however feels right for you, but the important part is to keep walking, even if for a very long time, and even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The Great Mugwort Mother
In late summer of 2025, I was told by my Spirits to gather mugwort. At the time, I was not seeing clients, and as I was deep in my counselling studies. I had zero intention of seeing clients.
But I’ve been on this path long enough to know when it’s time to listen. I gathered quite a bit of mugwort that year, dried it in bunches, and stored it in big vases in my healing room.
I felt a bit guilty, truth be told. I mean, why take it from the land if it’s not to be used?
At this point in time, I was starting to understand a bit more about my role in Ayrshire’s spiritual community as a medicine grower. I was three years into growing sweetgrass, and had recently given a good 20 braids or so to a shamanic-practitioner friend to distribute amongst her shamanic practitioner friends. I was also growing white cedar and sharing that with women in my circle who struggled with grief. But mugwort, I had never worked with it, didn’t really understand why I had so much of it sat in vases in my flat, but found the patience to simply not to think about it. ‘All will be made clear in time’ and so on and so forth.
When the pieces come together
Yesterday, I did my third shamanic journey circle at NODA in Irvine.
Normally I do a lot of planning for these, but due to the whole jury situation, this time around there was zero time. So the day before, I asked the Spirits: What do you want me to do in this circle?
One of the messages I received: Hand out the mugwort.
That prompted another journey to the Great Mugwort Mother (the mother of all mugwort – all plants and animals have a spiritual mother who holds the wisdom of their creation)
She outlined the instructions she wanted me to give to the participants and the teachings I had to share.
Then, during the circle, when we were in the middle of the second semi-guided shamanic journey, guess who showed up? The Great Mugwort Mother. Tall and slender, a cloak of feathery leaves, glowing silver under the starlight of a new-moon sky.
“Of course,” I thought to myself as I drummed and narrated. “This makes so much sense. She has been planning this since last year.”
And the experience was profound. One participant heard her singing before I spoke to her presence. She had visited another participant in the first journey, albeit without the connection yet being made. A third saw her approach again before I mentioned her.
Nothing is an accident
Each circle has a story behind it – I facilitate, but it’s the Spirits who do the work and that includes planning it. I knew that this medicine wanted to come forward in some way, she had been calling me for some time, and I had now lived with that spirit for 15 months. Moreover, my jury duty situation meant that I had no time to plan; no time to attempt to structure or control the circle, giving her an easier opportunity to step forward.
And nothing is an accident. Even the people in that circle last night were there for a reason, the mugwort had called them in some way, and was the medicine that was needed (just as cedar was needed in the circle before).
I’m glad I listened. Even if I didn’t understand why. And even if it took 15 months to work out.
Shamanic time is different than our own. A minute is a decade, a hundred years is a flash of light.
But, if you have the endurance to stay the course, the patience to embrace tree-time and enough trust to surrender your expectations, you’ll do just fine on your shamanic path and all will be revealed.
