3rd Eye Watch January 2015 (1 yr Anniversary Edition) | Page 25

is affecting the person caught in it." What is needed is a merger or
alignment of the two energies, "so the person and the mountain spirit
become one."Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring
about this alignment. Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this
situation so often in the United States because, "most of the fabric of
this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result
of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run
from the past, but you can't hide from it."The ancestral spirit of the
natural world comes visiting. "It's not so much what the spirit wants

Continued
He returned to the United States after four years because,
"he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had
been done, and he could then move on with his life." The
last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in gradua te
school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he
would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies,
much less get an advanced degree.
Dr. Somé sums up what Alex's mental illness was all about:
"He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and
his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying
attention to that." After seeing how well the shamanic
approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spirit
beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his
community in Africa.
Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem
must be found here, instead of having to go all the way
overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which
a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole
experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the
proper ritual to help people.

as it is what the person wants," he says. "The spirit sees in us a call
for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and
so the spirit is responding to that."That call, which we don't even
know we are making, reflects, "a strong longing for a profound
connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession
of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this
longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious
doesn't make any difference." They respond to either.
As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those
who are receiving the "mountain energy" are sent to a mountain area
of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They
bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a
companion; some even carry it around with them. "The presence of
the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,"
notes Dr. Somé. "They receive all kinds of information that they can
make use of, so it's like they get some tangible guidance from the
other world as to how to live their life."When it is the "river energy,"
those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river
spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as
with the mountain spirit. "People think something extraordinary
must be done in an extraordinary situation like this," he says. That's
not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone.

A Sacred Ritual Approach to Mental Illness
Longing for Spiritual Connection
A common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in "mental" disorders in
the West is,"a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in
stasis, that finally is coming out in the person." His job then is to
trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In
most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with
mountains or big rivers, he says.
In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the
phenomenon,"it's a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side
with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that

One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to
help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking.
"The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the
spiritual view, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to
live," Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing, and
Community. "To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized
world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people
that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it."
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