Respecting land

Access

I talk a lot about how people are part of nature, how distancing ourselves from the natural world is detrimental to our mental health and how finding connection with more-than-humans could be the way to solve the problems of our world.

Yet, while this remains true, it depends on people’s ability to access nature easily and that’s not the case for many people, beyond the parks and gardens of towns and cities. In England, people only have access to a miniscule 8% of the land.

I have spent many years working in ecotherapy, with both adults and children, and I have seen the tremendous benefits to people of spending time in nature, both for their mental health and in creating a love of and desire to protect nature. However, the challenges of finding land for people to access in these projects has been a defining feature of my work.

During lockdown, I was fortunate to live in the countryside in a beautiful location. Despite this privilege, local walks were largely restricted to country roads with a few pathways alongside fields of sheep. All the local woods were private, there were “no entry” signs everywhere and many footpaths were overgrown or blocked.

I am grateful to the ramblers who have been campaigning for many decades to create and maintain the network of public footpaths in this country. But our system of land ownership continues to benefit the few rather than the many, where less than 1% of the population of England own more than half the land and prevent the public from accessing it.

 Since lockdown, I have been thinking a lot about this lack of access, about the benefits to people of spending time in nature and about the ecological crisis which continues to increase, with little hope of change within the current political climate.

Like many others I have felt a lot of grief around ecocide, where the populations of birds continue to decrease each year, while farmers and gardeners continue to spray pesticides on their crops and woodlands and hedges continue to be grubbed out. England is one of the most ecologically depleted lands in the world.

Over the last few years, something has been growing inside me, a knowing that I need to do something, to speak and contribute to the wider work being done to help bring change into our world. I am, therefore, about to embark on PhD research into land justice.

Woodland for Sale

I had a lightbulb moment with the sale of a local wood. During lockdown, the only place I could possibly gain sanctuary in nature was a woodland a short drive away. Whilst privately owned, there was public access throughout and I went there a lot. It was a truly beautiful place. I got to know the trees and plants, the birds and animals who lived there. I got to know the land and felt safe there.

One day, the gate was blocked up and there was a “no entry” sign along with a big sign saying “Woodlands for sale”. Further investigation showed this was a company logo… the woodland for sale was the wood I had come to love and, to rub salt into the wound, the company intended to break up the wood into small chunks and sell it on, piece by piece.

There was a local campaign to save the wood but nothing much changed. It had been owned by a farmer who decided to sell it, as surplus land, and the price Woodland for Sale had paid was above the market value for it. Nonetheless the company were to make extraordinary profits, selling each small parcel of land within the woodland separately.

I spent a while looking into this and talking to lots of people about it. The marketing strategy of the company is to appeal to people who want their own slice of wilderness, those who support ecology and ecotherapy. And as each small parcel of the larger woodland is sold, there are restrictions written into the legal documents, to maintain the woodland and safeguard the more-than-humans.

Yet, the company divided up the woodland and built fences. Through this process, it showed scant regard for the more-than-humans who lived there and for the public, whose access had now been prevented. Indeed, the company were making money from land and from people’s need to spend more time in nature. It was a sick irony.

Lessons from the land

About a year later I spent 4 days and nights on Dartmoor, alone and fasting. While there were other people having their own individual experiences relatively nearby, I saw no human during the 4 days and nights and did have many visions… which I am still integrating.

There were two lessons from my time on the land during those 4 days and nights that impacted me strongly. One, it was clear that I needed to leave the place of beauty, yet restriction, where I lived. My soul needed to have access to wild places. Over the following year both Dartmoor and the sea were calling and we made the move to Devon soon after.

The other lesson was that access to nature, though vital, is a privilege which we humans often take for granted, paradoxically, given our lack of it. While we tend to respect and adhere to “no entry” signs, where we can walk, we do, irrespective of the more-than-humans who might prefer we didn’t.

When I spent the 4 days and nights on Dartmoor, I largely settled on a little area of woodland, with a beautiful stream running through it and moor either side. I got to know the land, and the beings who lived there. Enough to know that I was making an impact.

I arrived with a rucksack loaded with a tarp and hammock, sleeping bag, clothes, water… to be fair I didn’t bring much but it was enough of modernity to make me feel dis-connected from my surroundings. As the hours passed, I felt the impact of the rope pulling on the trees, where I had attached my hammock. I had disturbed birds by coming into their territory and making camp.

I felt the desire to do away with everything I had brought with me and live amongst the more-than-humans as they did. The more time passed, the clearer that became. What right had I to come to this place? When I asked permission of the more-than-humans to make camp there, had I actually listened to the answer? Had I invaded their space?

I spent a lot of time in ceremony during my 4 days and nights. Trying to make amends for my awkward invasion, asking the spirits of the land to help me live a more connected life.

One of the messages that came during that time, is of the importance of boundaries, of listening, of walking away when there is a clear “no”. We live in a world where land is viewed as an economic resource, that anyone who can afford to buy it can do as they like with it, ignoring the rights of the more-than-humans who live there.

In other places and other times, this was unthinkable. We all have ancestors who understood that there were places that humans couldn’t go to. Places of spirit, and places where other beings dwelled in safety from humans. The location of my vision quest happened to be a sacred place, a place of the Fae. Indeed, this was what had attracted me but it is foolhardy to assume I could go wherever I chose. There is always consequence.

I was lucky to survive my vision quest, after a lengthy experience with the Fae that I may not have returned from. It taught me to respect the land in ways deeper than I had ever thought to do so and I have learned much from this experience.

Mission and purpose

I left the vision quest with a clear mission and purpose – to try and help the world more than I had ever been able to do. To step up and speak. I was gifted a name by spirit and given the task of speaking up for the more-than-human realm, bringing the gifts of my life experiences and knowledge to help.

I have spent the last few years feeling into what this might look like. I have found many answers; to advocate animism and a deep respect for more-than-humans, to speak out about the problems in our world. But the path has taken me to this new project – to speak up and challenge land ownership and the assumed rights to do as we please on the land and in the world. To fight for land justice.

Land justice

The specific nature of land ownership in England today and the dynamics of wealth and power that derive from it, come from a history of land seizure and the forced displacement of people, both within the land of England itself and overseas.

The islands of Britain have a long history of people invading and settling. While we often focus on the violence of the Vikings or the control of the Romans, it was the Norman invasion that had the biggest impact on Britain and their descendants continue to hold much of the wealth and power today, stolen from the ordinary people who had lived here for generations.

The British Empire was built on slavery and land theft. Headed by the Normans and their European family, they created a culture where morality was based on justifying inequality, with horrific impact.

One by one, whole countries of people were displaced and consumed by the British Empire, growing fat from the wealth of stolen land and people. Including Ireland, North America, Jamaica, Barbados, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Australia and New Zealand… too many to list here in full.

Despite the ending of the British colonial project, the ownership and control of land around the world today remains unequal, often continuing to be owned by the very oppressors who stole the land in the first place. As political power is often skewed towards those who maintain control of land, the global power structures remain problematic.

Nothing much has changed in Britain either, where ordinary people are being continually squeezed, locked into an increasing housing and financial crisis whilst the elite buy up more land for their shooting estates while getting their tax bills slashed.

The link is land, and the unequal power and financial structures associated with owning the land. Land continues to be seen as an economic resource, despite dwindling resources and despite the ecological crisis. This needs to be challenged.

Custodianship

Some environmentalists view humans as a virus and campaign for areas of land to be free of human presence. Often the views of Garrett Hardin, who wrote “the tragedy of the commons” in the late 1960s are used to support this view. Hardin’s argument was that if left to their own devices, people will always over consume and are innately self-serving.

There are many issues with Hardin’s views, the subsequent impact on the global environmental movement and its impact on people who live on the land. Put simply it assumes that all people behave the same way, which denies the existence of cultural difference, particularly cultures who engage with the more-than-human realms very differently from the self-serving neoliberal world.

I do not believe that humans need to isolate themselves from our more-than-human kin or see ourselves as separate and innately damaging.

We can trace the development of the view that the Earth can be owned and used as an economic resource. We can trace the development of capitalism and neoliberalism. This way of being isn’t inevitable or the only way.

There are many peoples on the Earth who live differently or try to live differently to the predominant culture and economy. A few hundred years ago all our ancestors lived differently. We know their ways, how they lived more sustainably with our more-than-human kin and the Earth’s resources, practicing true custodianship of the land.

We have spent millennia working with the more-than-human realm for mutual benefit. Where humans have had a role to play within nature, having a strong sense of responsibility to the more-than-human world, living among them with boundaries and respect. In these cultures, land isn’t and wasn’t owned and privatised, nor used as a resource solely for human benefit.

Access to land

It is vital that people have access to nature – to roam in the wild places, to forage and make camp, to get to know the more-than-human realms and feel their own place, as animal, in the land. We need this. The current mental health crisis won’t be solved unless more people have this access, so they can truly feel at home in their bodies and on this Earth.

Equally the current environmental crisis won’t be solved until most people feel deep connection for the more-than-human world, knowing that we cannot survive as a species without it. We cannot continue to own and treat land, our living mother, as property and all the more-than-humans we share the planet with as our slaves.

It’s not about a separation between humans and nature. Humans are not intrinsically bad; we have just lost our way. Or, perhaps more accurately, the philosophy within which most of the world lives is doomed to destroy us all.

It’s about the political and economic structure of our world. About the philosophy of property, ownership and entitlement to roam and take whatever we want. It’s about the philosophy of colonialism and the ever-expanding frontier.

Until we face our history and face the problems at the core of how we live, we cannot hope to change. Yet we must. The answer is to learn how to live in respect with our more-than-human cousins, to understand and minimise our impact, to understand our entitlement and challenge it. To learn some of the old ways of our ancestors, and find our way back to respecting the land.

© Samara Lewis, April 2025

Tracking our Senses

The art of tracking is usually associated with stalking and hunting animals and is a foundational skill of our ancient ancestors, in times before animals were domesticated and farmed. Whilst it remains useful for us to learn the marks and signs that animals leave in the land as they go about their daily lives, one of the key skills of the tracker is sensory awareness, which is a skill that has relevance for everyone in the modern world.

 Ancestral Skills

There is a long history within Western thought of viewing humans as being separate from the rest of the natural world. To our hunter-gatherer ancestors this would seem ridiculous. That we are part of nature is evident from our physiology and behaviour as animals, from our dependence on the air we breathe, the plants we eat, the water that we drink.

For between 95-99.5% of human existence, depending on where on the planet you live, we have been hunter-gatherers. Farming is a very recent development. While we take it for granted today that we can obtain whatever food we want, from wherever in the world, this isn’t how we have evolved on the planet and it’s not sustainable for our future ability to live.

For most of our existence, we humans have lived amongst the animals, plants, fish, invertebrates and fungi – all those beings who make up the fabric of the Earth, as kin. We have depended on each other, not just for our survival but to enable each other to thrive. Studies on hunter-gatherers have shown that it requires an average of 3-5 hours a day to forage and hunt food, leaving the rest of the time for socialising, creating, dreaming and resting. Compare that to the average working day of a modern human.

To be a tracker

To live as a hunter-gatherer is to be a tracker. It’s more than knowing the signs and tracks of the beings you wish to hunt, it’s about a deep awareness and understanding of the environment in which you live; the weather, the seasons, the movement and changing behaviour of the beings that live in the land with you.

To be a tracker is about knowing and trusting your senses. It’s about knowing your body and the signals s/he makes to tell you about your relationship with your environment. To be a tracker necessitates learning how your body communicates, and this is something that many modern people struggle with.

Concrete jungle

Whilst most people today don’t live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or live surrounded by animal predators, learning the art of tracking remains relevant for life in a town or city, largely due to the benefit of developing sensory awareness.

Many years ago, in my late teens, I lived a street life in a large conurbation. It was a difficult time but my survival depended on developing skills which are central to who we are as a species; a deep understanding of our physical and psychic senses. I could walk on a street in a rough part of town in the early hours and feel confident of my safety. This wasn’t because of street kudos or psychic power. It was just because I knew how to avoid walking into a dangerous situation and how to disappear if one appeared unexpectedly.

These are skills we all have, though we are not taught to remember them nowadays. It’s about being intuitively aware of your body and the signals s/he gives you about your environment.

Being in your body

Unfortunately, many people struggle to feel their body and live partially dissociated from them, meaning they struggle to feel emotions and even physical sensations within their bodies. This is largely due to unprocessed, unhealed trauma that they have experienced in their body, which then becomes stuck and triggered every time a similar sensation appears in their body. To avoid the pain of the trigger, people subconsciously distance themselves from feeling the physical sensations, leading to a general numbness in their bodies. In my work as a shamanic healer, I see this a lot.

Learning how to track and stalk your feelings and physical sensations is one of the key ways of healing trauma. It is also one of the key skills we need to develop to keep ourselves safe. I learned this on the streets but it’s something our ancient ancestors also knew and lived, because it enables us to live in deep awareness of all that is happening around and within us and to enable that deep connection with others. This is what life is about.

Psychic senses

The senses I am referring to are both the physical senses and the psychic senses, the latter of which tend to be neglected. The reasons for this are complicated and revolve around our modern perception of spiritualism, witchcraft and magic. These terms have become demonised in our culture, with the wounds of the witch trials deep within our ancestral psyche. They have also become belittled with scientific rationalism defying the existence of psychic senses and spirit at all.

As a child, my psychic senses were strong, yet I learned to numb them as I grew up. Despite the validation of my family, I quickly learned that the wider culture did not accept what I saw and felt so easily and I became terrified that I would be locked up as “mad”. I am grateful that the world we live in now has become more tolerant and that I can practice as a “shaman”, though I still find hostility and incredulity commonplace.

Psychic senses enable us to be aware of our own spirit bodies and that of the beings around us, of the emotions and sometimes the thoughts of others around us and of possibilities in the future. These are all skills we all have, though nowadays it may take time to remember and trust them. When you learn to develop these skills, you can live much more intuitively, adapting your behaviour to fit the environment where you find yourself, or leaving when needed.

When added to a deep awareness of our physical senses, psychic senses enable us to live as nature intended us to live – as whole beings fully embedded within our environment.

Developing sensory awareness

Learning how to feel and listen to your body is the best way to start developing sensory awareness. How are your emotions linked to physical sensations and how do these change with different experiences during the day?

I often suggest people start by tuning into their belly, as this can be a good indicator of how we are generally feeling. Feeling nausea or sickness when you walk into a room, for instance, can tell us much about how we might be feeling in that situation. Similarly, if you struggle to feel anything in your belly, this could tell you that something is stuck.

Bringing your awareness to different physical sensations in your body, and what emotions are connected with these senses, is a form of tracking yourself. Try this in different situations – visiting friends and family, walking in a wood or a busy street, going to the shops.

The key to the practice is being aware of what is going on in your body – your physical sensations and emotions. Which means you need to practice mindfulness or, getting out of your head and into your body. This takes time and practice but we all need to start somewhere.

The more you bring your awareness into your body, the deeper connection you will create with your senses, both physical and psychic. Once you start feeling the messages your body has to tell you about how you might be feeling walking into different environments, you can start to explore what your senses are telling you about these environments.

In many ways this is all about developing your intuition, alongside a heightened awareness of what you can see and hear and smell and so on. Really bringing your attention into the present moment, turning off your screen or pushing beyond your thoughts, giving yourself permission to really feel what is going on in your body. These are the keys to understanding both yourself and your environment.

Developing sensory awareness is about tracking your sensory experience of life. Learning to work with the practice enables you to stalk your own feelings and triggers and how they impact others. Take it gently at first and learn to trust what your body says - it never lies.

Don’t forget, the reason we are all here is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived. The art of trusting what they experienced through their senses was the key to their survival, something we would do well to remember today.

© Samara Lewis, April 2025

Soul Retrieval & Integration

Soul retrieval is a powerful healing technique and the core element of my shamanic healing practice, though what it’s all about is not widely understood. In discussing it, we need to dive into some of the core aspects of shamanism and the spiritual perspective which underpins it.

What is a soul?

Our soul is usually thought of as the spiritual element of our bodies, or our life essence, consciousness or spirit.

Often assumed to be a singular being, our soul is composed of many different parts; all the differing and sometimes conflicting parts of our personality can be different soul parts.

Our personality is the key to our soul, as are our feelings, our thoughts and memories as well as our ancestral and past life heritage.

Different shamanic cultures have varying thoughts on how many soul parts there are. In my experience there are many and the number is not specific.

What is spirit?

All of us, humans and all the beings on the Earth, are made up of both spirit and physical. We could consider our souls to be our spirits, though in practice they are grounded in our physical bodies and it isn’t always easy to access our spirit selves.

All beings are connected within the web of life, part of the Earth, and we all have a place within the whole. The inter-relation of all things, this wider connection of consciousness of all of who we are – is fundamental to shamanism.

While many spiritual disciplines are focused on the spirit realm as something to aspire to attain, shamanism is a bit different in the recognition that the physical realm is where everything happens.

All physical life is created by spirit and each of us was a spirit prior to being born. Everything that spirit creates is all about the physical realm. The physical is the prize, as it were.

The goal of spirit is to make the physical, our life on Earth, the best it can possibly be, which can be hard for us to understand when our world is so difficult.

Yet we are spirit beings and connecting with our spirits does enable us to have greater awareness of the inter-relation of all beings and, with that, a greater depth of knowledge and understanding.

Life after death

We cannot live without our soul and when we die, our soul leaves our body completely.

Shamans and spirit healers can help us to die or pass on in peace, understanding that we will simply pass on to the next realm.  

Once we die, there are different places where we might go but ultimately, we go to a place where all spirit joins up together to become one big oneness… this is commonly called the “source” and is where we all come from and return to.

Many people have some knowledge of this through near death experiences, when they see their physical body as being separate from themselves – so that their consciousness and personality have completely left their body. This is the beginning process of what happens to us when we die.

What is soul loss?

We really are quite remarkable creatures and, while life can bring trauma and pain, spirit has created a strategy to help us cope. While our body’s sympathetic nervous system (or fight or flight response) is well studied, less is known or understood about the link with soul loss.

Our souls are basically elastic and can easily come in and out of our body; if a part of your soul leaves your body to help you to cope with something, then usually the soul part will return when it is safe to do so.

It’s an ancient strategy to help us survive the experience of trauma - leaving the body can be the most intelligent way to escape or numb the pain.

However sometimes, parts of our souls can sever off completely. This is often because the personality aspect of the soul part feels that it is not safe to return. These aspects of ourselves return to the spirit realm and we are lost without them.

Impact of soul loss

Every aspect of our personality is a part of our soul, including our inner child and adult, the conditioned parts of ourselves, our differing emotions and the skills and knowledge we have learned.

When a part of our soul severs off completely, it can present consequences that are challenging and make life difficult.

We might lose memories or find we are unable to feel emotion about memories we have. We may lose sight of the reason why we were interested in something and give up completely, or fall out of love with life, feeling disinterested and depressed.

While it’s possible to live and function with soul loss, if parts of us aren’t there, then we don’t have all the components needed to live properly, so we often end up living half-lives wondering what has gone wrong. Indeed many people consider this to be a part of growing up – which is incredibly sad.

Causes of soul loss

Ultimately its trauma that causes soul loss, but this can happen for many reasons: illness, accident, a challenging relationship or life experience.

Interestingly though, most soul loss occurs in childhood and this is not always due to abuse but to do with the power that adults often have over children and their life choices, which can have negative consequences. What children can experience as frightening may not be what the adults around them understand as such at the time.

Whilst soul loss is a natural process, it can have immense negative consequences. People often describe experiencing a “hole” which they feel compelled to try and fill. Addictive behaviours are very common in people who are experiencing soul loss.

When our ancestors lived in societies where soul loss was understood, soul retrievals could happen soon after soul loss occurred, as people would know how to read the signs. Nowadays though, people can live their entire lives with partial soul loss and suffer the consequences.

Soul retrieval & Integration

A soul retrieval is the shamanic practice of finding and bringing a soul part back home to a person and helping them to integrate and heal. Whilst the process of soul retrieval itself is very important, the hard work is about integration and this all happens later and takes time.

Integration is about acceptance – of the past, of our lives, of who we have become. The process of integration creates a deeper awareness of and gratitude for our physical bodies, to enable our soul parts to merge and ground.

When we integrate our soul parts then, we become whole and start to live a more embodied life, which means it’s all about valuing the physical realm and the present moment. We're more able to feel and experience and be.

We may feel more acutely aware of life and many people say they feel awake and energised for the first time in a long time. We may find clarity around decisions in life that we previously found challenging, we may rediscover aspects of ourselves, including memories, and we may find a renewed sense of respect and self-love which might bring profound changes in our life choices or directions.

For many people integration happens gently but profound change may occur in the months following a soul retrieval as the soul part fully merges and finds a voice within the whole. Sometimes life gets re-evaluated and changes come as a consequence. Often this is known beforehand but it’s the soul retrieval that gives us the strength to make the changes.

For integration to happen successfully, many people benefit from ongoing support to help them recognise and accept the soul part that has come home. It’s a process and sometimes involves ongoing dialogue with the soul parts to help them merge and integrate.

Soul retrieval and soul integration is an incredibly profound and life-changing experience. Having personally experienced both soul loss and later soul retrieval, I have been through the process myself and understand, therefore, both the value of the practice and what is needed to help the soul parts to integrate. For many people, having a soul retrieval is both a healing process and the beginning of a spiritual journey. I am happy to be your guide and help you to start this journey into self and wholeness.

© Samara Lewis, December 2024

Defining Animism

What is Animism?

We humans are creatures of the Earth. We are kin with all the other animals, birds, plants, trees and fungi, insects, reptiles and fish, the rocks and mountains, all the water of the Earth and the air we breathe.

Animism is the awareness of life in all the beings on the Earth, including the land herself. As all beings have life, they can be communicated with, worked with and honoured. We are all interconnected in the web of life. But its more than that.

Animism is the awareness that all beings have a soul or spirit – including ourselves.

It is the practice of living with this deep awareness of our connection with all other beings and the practice of communication, both physically and spiritually, that comes from this awareness.

Spirit connection

Our society is largely devoid of a spiritual component, particularly anything which recognises that we have a spirit, never-mind recognising that a tree or a river has a soul.

Spirit connection is central to animism but often ignored when people talk about it. Yet its why many traditional animist cultures have shamans – those who travel through the spirit realms to bring healing back to the people.

For all the recent popularity of the term “animism” and indeed the practice of shamanism, it remains considered to be something that other people do – people in other parts of the world living in very different cultures to our own. Yet that isn’t true.

Spiritual appropriation

These days many people are seeking to gain experience and understanding of the sacred. Whilst this is positive, this desire is taking them all over the world to buy and appropriate the spiritual practices of other people, particularly indigenous people and those with less power and money than themselves. This is a big problem in Britain.

There is clearly a need to return to who we are, as spirit beings, to remember and relearn our own practices. The answer is not, however, in spiritual or cultural appropriation.

Indigenous people around the world today live on the edge of the final frontiers, where the battles to preserve our wilderness are being fought. Their communities retain much knowledge of how to live in right relationship with their more-than-human kin, despite overwhelming adversity from others (us and our ancestors).

We would do well to listen to indigenous people and support their causes. The frontier battles are taking place partly because the dominant global paradigm sees the natural world as something separate to ourselves, something to be plundered as a resource.

This is the result of centuries of disconnect from our more-than-human kin. We need to change this perception so that we can all live in right relationship with each other and share our beautiful planet, yet we are leaving indigenous people and those without power or resources to fight for us all.

In reclaiming animism and spirit connection, the best we can do is to respect and support indigenous people around the world today, learning from them when they choose to share elements of their culture but finding our own way, based on our own land-based spiritual traditions.

Reclaiming Spirit Connection

For too long our culture has rejected the existence of spirit as being real. Those who practiced any kind of psychic / spirit-healing/ animist practice, in Britain as elsewhere, have been shunned/ dismissed/ demonised and ridiculed for centuries. This needs to change.

In British prehistory, the indigenous people were animists. Later, throughout the frequent movement of peoples within the land, there remained those who were able to connect with spirit. This ability is part of who we are as a species. We need to find new words to describe these practices and remove the prejudices and power dynamics from them.

There are layers upon layers of interconnected issues concerned with both the perceived human separation from nature and the demonisation of spirit connection. They flow through history and have impacted the creation of the present world. From the treatment of women and animals, the impact of Christianity, power and politics and the foundation and legacy of colonialism, with all its horror.

Animism is at the heart of who we are as a species and it’s at the heart of the history of our world.

It is now thought that animism was central to human belief and practice since we emerged as a species and for many thousands of years later, all over the world. All our ancestors were animists.

We need to come home to who we really are, to heal the hurt of the centuries of disconnect and all the trauma that has come from this.

Practicing Animism

The word Animism describes something that JUST IS. It’s remarkable only because it has turned something so basic and universal into something complex and theoretical.

The ability to practice animism is simply about bringing awareness to that which is already there – your spirit and that of all other beings.

It’s about getting out of your mind and coming into your animal self, your wise intuitive self which feels connection with other beings and with the web-of-life. It’s about being present, embodied and aware.

Practicing Animism is about accessing that part of you that feels wonder, the creative part of you that is curious and follows your nose. The part of you that was there before society told you to “grow up”.

It’s about reclaiming our animal self and learning to connect with our spirit self, as one integrated being. It’s about learning to communicate and live together with our other-than-human and spirit kin from a place of deep respect and connection.

Though it may take us a while to find our way back to living an animist way of life, it’s possible, simply because it’s who we are. The way most of us live today causes us to be depressed, dissociated and disconnected, even from ourselves.

We desire to come home and live in right relationship with our more-than-human kin. We desire to remember our spiritual essence and our connection with all beings within the web-of-life.

What we could be

Way back, all our ancestors lived sustainably on the Earth, in right relationship with other beings.

They had ties to the land and to each other and knew how to look after the spirits of the land, the animals, the birds and the fish. They knew which areas of the land were sacred and those to be avoided. They knew how to work with ancestral spirits and how to read signs and omens from the spirit realm.

They were intuitive and, above all, they listened and respected the web-of-life and the unseen realms. How do we know this? Because we survived for many thousands of years barely making an impact on the Earth - we thrived.

These memories are still there, embedded in our DNA. To access these memories is possible, when you learn the old ways.

Learning or remembering the practice of animism is about reclaiming our animal self and learning to connect with our spirit self, as one integrated being. It’s about learning to communicate and live together with our other-than-human and spirit kin from a place of deep connection.

It’s about connecting with the spirits of the trees, the plants and the animals, the land and sea we share our planet with. It’s about forming relationships with other beings & bringing awareness to the deeper spiritual aspects of life.

The skills remain accessible; like old hands going over ancient tools, we know what to do and with practice it comes back. When it does, it is with a deep knowing and understanding and a longing to return to what was once so lived and known.

© Samara Lewis, July 2024

Why practicing Animism could change the world

Wordy roots

The English language is limiting, as perhaps all written languages are. So many words tell us more about the cultural context of the time they were created, with their assumptions and prejudices, than something tangible today.

The word animism is a classic example, couched in colonial power and patriarchy. While it has become a modern buzzword, describing someone who lives in harmony and respect with the natural world, understanding its roots gives us the power to rebirth and reclaim the word from its dark past.

The word animism comes from the Latin word anima meaning spirit/ breath/ life or, the belief that everything has a spirit and life, including water spirits, mountain spirits, tree spirits and so on.

It was created in the late 19th century by the anthropologist Edward Tylor, to describe a widespread practice within groups of indigenous people that he, and his colleagues, were observing at that time.

Dark history

As a study of people, initially the focus of anthropology was on observing and seeking to understand people that had only recently been “discovered” by colonists, often those living in small-scale societies, and in ways which seemed alien to the anthropologists themselves.

Anthropologists, and the wider colonial society from which they came from, considered these people to be “other” and, importantly, they placed a value upon them which was considered to be less than themselves.

This was a time when indigenous people were put on display in museums – living people for white settlers to view. Studied and classified by anthropologists. The reports that anthropologists produced from their fieldwork read like a zoological study of animals.

Unfortunately, these reports were often used to justify the subsequent acts of violence and displacement of people under colonialism. Behind the overt racism were theories around nature and culture which continue to dominate our modern world.

Nature/ Culture

The theories and cultural understanding that framed the discipline of anthropology at the time that the word animism was created is important to understand.

Anthropology is not a science and a person’s cultural background will influence how they perceive another to be, particularly someone who lives in a profoundly different way.

In the late 19th century, the cultural background of Tylor and other Victorian anthropologists was grounded in prejudicial theories regarding race, theories which conveniently justified the onslaught of colonial violence occurring at that time.

This was a time when nature was considered to be less than culture, that being the desired and optimum state of being, of a certain type of human.

Indeed, it was generally thought that the most optimum evolutionary development for humans was for us to grow increasingly further away from a natural state. Beings regarded as nature were thought not to have feelings or even consciousness.

What was perceived as nature included not only the world of trees, plants, animals, fish and so on but also women, those people with disabilities and all people of colour.

In practice these theories, which became normalised within Western culture at that time, enabled the justification of violence against all those considered to be nature.

The nature- culture dualism is bound up in colonialism, in the oppression of all people considered “other”, in racism, misogynism, prejudice and patriarchy.

Animism as insult

The people that anthropologists studied and documented in the late 19th century were undeniably different to them. They looked different and wore different clothes (if at all) and prioritised a very different way of being.

Living at a time when the slavery of African people had only just been abolished and racism was the cultural norm, the anthropologists considered the people they encountered to be unequal to themselves.

Crucially, they witnessed and documented these people as having formed kinship relationships with beings who they considered to be part of the natural world, such as animals, trees and rivers. These relationships were based on respect and reciprocity with no value judgement or hierarchy.

Which further entrenched the anthropologist’s view of these people being related to animals, with all the prejudice that entailed.

Everywhere the anthropologists went, they discovered people who lived in the same way and this became a useful classification term in understanding a people, those who could be ignored, dismissed and packaged as animal. Justifying colonial land grabbing and violence.

This is what animism means. It was a derogatory term used to take power away from people who lived differently to white people, those who lived on land that white settlers wanted for their own.

Words have Power

Throughout history there have been countless examples of a word used here and there, in specific ways, often falsely, to destroy a person and take their power away from them. The word witch is a good example.

Words have power and when choosing our words, especially words which come to describe who we are or who we want to be, it’s good to be mindful of the energy that lies behind them. Often this relates to their original meaning and how they have been used before.

The word animism has a dark history and does, even today, continue to be used by some as an insult – a dangerous one. It’s a colonial term, one which was used to justify horrific violence, genocide and the displacement of entire collectives of people.

The word is also wrapped up in our dominant culture’s continued perception of nature as being other or less than ourselves. Indeed, our whole economy is based upon the enslavement of the more-than-human beings of our planet.

Nature/ Economy

The view that nature’s only worth is its financial gain is leading to the destruction of our planet. We are reducing the natural world to embers. And us along with it.

Our leaders seem incapable of understanding that this way, this economic path, leads to our destruction. Behind every political strategy to achieve economic growth are assumptions around ecological use and abuse.

The stock market is based on buying and selling natural resources, mining every last element of the Earth and repackaging it to sell in our relentless lust for consumer goods.

When will it stop? We are now living in an age of the political justification of war for the control of natural resources. As war increases and genocide ignored, where will we all end up?

If we understood that all beings have feelings, have consciousness and spirit, that we are all inter-connected and hurting one being hurts ourselves, if we were to understand this as a species, really, deeply understand this, would things change?

The nature - culture dualism is a false divide which is killing us. If we were to widely understand that it’s a cultural creation, that the natural way of being human is to form relationships with our more-than-human kin, born of respect and reciprocity, it would be hard to blindly walk into our collective destruction as we are currently doing.

The path forward is animism. It’s the only way and, crucially, it’s always been there.

Reclaiming Animism

Animism has become a buzzword, with many people claiming, “I’m an animist”. Many indigenous people have also reclaimed the word.

Whilst the word itself essentially others a way of being which we all inherently have within our grasp, our society has become so entrenched in the nature – culture divide that reclaiming the word animism has become necessary, even essential.

Whilst we are simply nature, we are animal and there is no separation, for centuries this hasn’t been widely understood.

Our human story is about disconnection from who we are, as animal. This is creating many problems in our world – from stress, depression, anxiety and loneliness.

We are beginning to understand that if we don’t challenge, change and heal our separation from nature, we will lose everything. Climate change, species extinction, deforestation and the vast plastic pollution in our seas, all derive from this separation.

Re-learning the ancient practice of animism is about learning to live with our more-than-human kin from a place of deep connection. It’s about connecting with ourselves as both animal and spirit and about forming relationships with other beings as both physical and spirit. 

We are meant to live in community, close to the woods and the sea, creating our lives from working wood and stone, tending the plants and the animals. The more we step away from our instincts, the more we separate ourselves from our other-than-human kin, the more alienated we feel from ourselves.

This is where we belong, where we feel most safe and connected, where we can root down and find peace.

Research is clearly showing the benefits of spending time in nature; walking, sitting, watching. Yet increasingly it’s becoming clear we need more than that, we need to live within nature; immersed in doing, in being useful and productive, having a beneficial place, a role in working with nature in practical, simple, ways.

We are a keystone species, one which has evolved to have an impact on other creatures and beings around us. It is a great responsibility and one which we have largely forgotten or dismissed. We have lost so much, both in terms of species and biodiversity loss and our own disconnection from what is ultimately part of our soul.

We are not separate from nature - we are nature.

The practice of becoming animists once again could be the most powerful catalyst for positive change on our planet.

© Samara Lewis, February 2024

We Were Once Indigenous

Indigenous people are those who are the original or First Peoples to live within an area. Commonly known as those who live in remote parts of the world or in lands that have been colonised, its less widely known that there were once indigenous people living in Britain too. Over the course of human history, people have travelled, migrated and invaded extensively and this has created the incredibly diverse gene pool of the modern world. Yet for all of us, wherever our distant ancestors once lived, they were indigenous. As the Black Lives Matter movement is firmly within the public eye, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it feels appropriate to discuss prevailing attitudes towards indigenous people and how they continue to be marginalised and persecuted throughout the world today. Although it might seem strange to claim we were once all indigenous, it is important to bring awareness of our shared history. We are all one people, with many faces and many cultural differences, but we are one people nonetheless. 

Viewing the “Other”

The history of indigenous people everywhere involves migrating or invading people forcibly taking power and land away from them and forcing them to live differently. Each case is different but what appears to be true for all is an embedded racism from the people ruling over and the people living side by side with them. Indigenous peoples are the most marginalised people of the world, regularly losing their rights to others, often within the public eye. For instance, as the Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro permits the ferocious logging of the Amazon rainforest, he is also permitting the persecution of indigenous people living within the forest, driven by Bolsanaro’s explicit racism. Indigenous people in Brazil are at the frontline of a world raging against itself. As they fight to protect both their communities and the forests, indigenous people in Brazil are fighting a battle to protect our species and our planet.

To make parallels between us and indigenous people may seem strange. However I would suggest that view derives from centuries of polarising perceptions of “us” and the “other”; we have been conditioned to view other people along a hierarchical structure of value and worth, whether that be according to gender, class or ethnicity. Whilst we, as people, are all incredibly different, instead of valuing and respecting that difference we have learnt over time to fear it and we have become hostile towards each-other, placing value on some people over others. This conditioning is so deep, the racism towards others is so deep that fascism has become acceptable at times as a ruling ideology; the idea that violence towards the “other” should be acceptable.

 Unless we, as a society and as a people, properly and completely deal with our inherent racism towards others, we will never be rid of fascism. Fascism can be turned towards any people at any time as its root is fear and hostility towards others. Anyone can be an “other”. In order to properly deal with our inherent racism as a people we need to understand our history and our ancestry, we need to understand our cultural conditioning. Only with a proper understanding of who we are can we begin to grieve what we have become and begin the process of healing the huge wound we as a people have. For racism and fascism are symptoms of this wound. The wound that has come because we forgot that we were once indigenous.

 History of Trauma

In order to understand cultural conditioning and the long history of trauma that may run within a person’s ancestral line, I turn now to the history of England, in order to illustrate what the ancestors of a person with English ancestry might have lived through. This is not because this story is in any way unique or different to other countries in the world or better or worse than other stories. It’s simply because I live in England and this story is what I see reflected around me every day. Whilst ancestral heritage is of course a mixture for many people in England, the story is not about ethnicity. Instead it offers an illustration of the kinds of ancestral memory which can linger in the DNA of a person with English descent. Some people may only have elements of this history within their family line and not others and yet they would have similar stories from other places also embedded within their ancestry. This is because, unfortunately, the history of trauma can be seen throughout the history of the world.

The history of England is a history of violence and trauma, colonisation and subjugation. My contention is that this history is deeply embedded within the ancestral memory or the DNA of a person whose family might have lived through elements of this history. It’s not so outlandish a statement. There have been many recent scientific studies which have found evidence of genetic changes within the descendants of people who have suffered trauma. As the scientific community begin to understand the impact of this, it is something that many people have been aware of for some time. It’s something I regularly see and work with in my shamanic practice. Our ancestral history is hard-wired within our physical make up and trauma is a big component of this as our collective history is so incredibly violent. All of us have ancestors who experienced trauma, some fairly recently and some thousands of years ago. Some of our ancestors inflicted trauma upon others. So lets look at the history of England in brief to illustrate what I mean.

The earliest ancestor to have walked on the land of England after it became an island was in the Mesolthic, about 6100BC, which is 8,000 years ago. At this time people would have lived in a world of deep connection to the land and to their communities of inter-connected tribes, living as hunters and fishers and gatherers on a seasonal round throughout the land. There would have been shamans and elders who passed down their knowledge and wisdom to the young around the fires in the evenings. These were people who learned to live around wolves and lynx and bears and they lived well, as food was plentiful in the vast forests that covered the land and in the oceans all around. As time passed, around 6,000 years ago, there were invasions of people who had tamed animals and plants, who cleared land and built settlements. During this time, of the Neolithic, the culture changed dramatically and you can see and feel the tension and despair within the hunter-gatherer communities, from the archaeological remains they left behind, as their land was taken away from them and they were no longer able to live as they had. Everywhere they travelled these new farmers were taking over, bringing with them a new religion which people were converting to, like a wave that had travelled across Western Europe. England was one of the last outposts of the Mesolithic way of life in Western Europe and there were few places for the people to travel to and nowhere easily, so they assimilated, slowly and with resistance, into the culture which had taken over the land.

It took time for the Mesolithic culture to end but once it did, soon after people began to accept the rhythms of the new way of life, there were yet more invasions, around 2300BC. The invasions were perhaps brutal in their impact on the people of England; recent evidence shows that 90% of the genetic pool in England was replaced by incoming people from Europe during the Bronze Age. These people brought a new way of life, a new culture and belief system. Their society was hierarchical, people were settling into villages and the old egalitarian way of life was long forgotten as some people began to gain wealth at the expense of others. Around 800BC, almost 3,000 years ago, there were yet more people who came and settled into the land of England, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Perhaps they too invaded or perhaps they were welcome. It’s hard to tell and much debated archaeologically. What’s clear is by this time the natural resources of England were well known and sought after in continental Europe. Over time successive waves of settlers clamoured over these resources and the power to control their trade. By the Iron Age warfare had become a way of life as a people who had become used to fighting for what they believed in became warriors, a world where the greatest warrior was accorded the highest status. At the same time the old religion had developed into the Druid religion, accordingly also stratified and holding much power. In the Iron Age people lived in highly defended hill forts where raiding for cattle or for people to be sold as slaves was common. This way of life only ended, brutally, with yet another invasion, this time from the Roman Empire. Although they only conquered some of the tribes in the UK their brutality is still felt in the cultural memory of the people of Britain.

 After the Romans left England, the tribes tried to come together once more before the new religion of Christianity enslaved the people, with the force and brutality of yet another invasion, as through Christianity the Roman Empire continued to hold its force. At the same time there were waves of invasions of Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Vikings. Each invasion was brutal with unbelievable violence inflicted on men, women and children, young and old. Then finally there was the Norman invasion in 1066, just under 1000 years ago. As people adjusted to successive waves of invaders taking power and control and fighting amongst themselves for Kingship, the Normans won the ultimate battle for leadership over the lands of England. Those who live in England today live with the legacy of the Norman invasion; the royal family, many of the upper classes and many who sit in parliament are their direct descendants. The Norman invasion was the final invasion in this land. Since this time, life in England has been highly stratified with injustice and inequality a facet of everyday life. The history of war and invasion continued after 1066, with the invasion of other countries by the British; firstly Ireland and continuing throughout the world. With the building of the British Empire directly corresponding to the history of colonialism and slavery, modern day England was built on the lives of the oppressed throughout the world and within the land of England. Oppression IS the English way. However much we seek to deny it, that is our history.

Ancestral Healing

An average English person has a lot of trauma in their ancestral DNA even if their ancestors experienced only a small portion of the violence that occurred on English soil. As one person tried to heal their personal family’s trauma, there was yet another invasion and more violence. The problem with English history is that the invasions were relentless, people never really had the time to heal. With each new invasion, the trauma turned to anger and frequently manifested throughout the ages as violence towards others. This violence became acceptable within society, either directly or indirectly as people ignored its presence for instance in Victorian factories or in the slave ports of Bristol or Liverpool. Trauma is hard to shake off unless it is faced and healed. The Victorian upper classes knew this when they sent their children away to boarding schools, where they often experienced horrific punishments for stepping out of line and where they developed the English reserve, or the inability to care. These people went on to become generals in the colonial wars of the time. Wars of absolute cold brutality and horrific violence towards other people as the British conquered other countries with all the violence that they had once experienced themselves. Trauma and violence is deeply embedded within the English DNA.

At the heart of a person with British DNA however is a thread which goes all the way back to the Mesolithic, to a people who were hunters and fishers and gatherers, who were shamans and lived in relative peace compared to later people. These people were indigenous people, like the people around the world today who continue to be persecuted and marginalised and forced into assimilation into the cultures surrounding them. What indigenous peoples around the world today are experiencing, we have all experienced through our ancestral lineage as we all come from indigenous people. Whatever mix of ancestry we have, our roots go back to the First People living on the land. It is time to acknowledge our roots. It is time to acknowledge the deep pain and trauma we have been through, time to grieve and accept and start the long process of healing, as a culture and as a people. If we can heal our own trauma, perhaps we can stop inflicting trauma on others, however inadvertently.

It is not possible to turn back the clock and go back to a life we once lived perhaps thousands of years ago. But we can recognise the journey taken by our ancestors. Each of us most likely has ancestors from many different countries around the world. Perhaps, through this recognition, we can start to appreciate difference and recognise it within ourselves and our family. For many of us, our ancestors undoubtedly inflicted trauma upon others and experienced trauma themselves. We have a shared history and we need to heal in order to bring peace to our peoples. Many of us are the living embodiment of ancestral trauma; the trauma our ancestors inflicted upon each other. This history of trauma has created the modern world, where fear and violence are one side of the same coin which is traded everywhere throughout the world.

 Re-claiming our past

We were once indigenous. We once had ties to the land and to each other and we knew how to live sustainably on the Earth. We knew how to look after ourselves and each other, we knew how to look after the spirits of the land, the animals, the birds and the fish. We made many mistakes and we learnt, through these mistakes, how to leave an area after it had been hunted too much or over fished. We learned how to prevent forest fires and how to regenerate an area of plants. We knew which plants treated human illness and we learned the best places to forage and the places to avoid. We knew how to work with the land. We knew which areas were sacred and those to be avoided. We knew how to survive and thrive. These memories are still there, embedded in our DNA. To access these memories is possible, when you learn how to fish or forage or how to connect with spirit. These skills are old skills and therefore accessible to all; like old hands going over ancient tools, our hands know what to do. We may be rusty but with practice it comes back and, when it comes, it does so with a deep knowing and understanding and a longing to return to what was once so lived and known. It is possible to connect to our own indigeny.

 Indigenous people today

Throughout the world today the remaining indigenous people tend to be those who live on the margins, on the land that was less appealing to invading people in the past. Today the land they live on has become appealing to a new generation of invading people; to the companies prospecting for oil and gas and timber and mines. Indigenous people today are, of course, part of the modern world and there are few, if any, intact cultures left as people adapt to a globalised world. However in many places, indigenous cultural traditions hold on, traditions which revolve around living in a sustainable way on the planet, both ecologically and socially. It is really important not to romanticise indigenous people, whatever we may feel about how they have been treated. We are all human, we are all one. However, in the spirit of connection, I like to see many indigenous elders as planetary wisdom keepers, as the knowledge many groups retain around how to live sustainably on the planet is precious to us as a species.

Many indigenous people have their own traumatic history, a history of abuse from colonialism, a history which is recent and yet no less brutal for that. Their children and young people are growing up on the frontlines, between a way of life that is sustainable and ancient to a way of life based on economic materialism, separatism and destruction. To retain the old way of life is to embark on a fight and one which is, in many cases, impossible to win as land and resources have been taken away. What power do indigenous people have to continue their ancient traditions should they wish to do so? As the elders of communities die and take their knowledge and wisdom with them, some may choose to leave their communities and forge a different way through life. When they do that, it is possible that we all lose out. For in the old way lies the keys to our future, to a life living sustainably on the planet. If we cannot learn to live sustainably on the planet our species will die out, alongside many others besides us. Its already happening, this 6th extinction. But there is another way.

 A better future

By working with indigenous people today, giving them autonomy to decide their own fate free of white influence, by empowering communities to inspire the young to follow the lead of their elders, by giving them political power within a global stage, to enable them to teach us how to live sustainably on the planet, to enable us to remember our shared roots and humanity, we might just come together again, come together with a new way to live on this beautiful planet we call home. It is a dream perhaps but, as the world has changed so much in 2020, with the economic wheel of life finally stopping, I have renewed hope.

© Samara Lewis, June 2020

Lockdown – diving into feminine mysteries

There’s a shyness I feel in putting to words how I feel as a woman; almost a shame, a sense of unworthiness. I wonder where this comes from. Still, I feel the strength of my ancestors behind me; all the women who worked and loved and cared for their families, with such dignity and strength. I feel them behind me, they have my back. There’s a timeless wisdom to the femininity I feel strongly within me now and it wants to come out, it wants to express itself with creativity, in the stillness of our time. So here goes..

It’s always been there, this mystery of the feminine; a quiet and deep knowledge unfurling slowly and gently backstage within my consciousness as life passes. It catches me by surprise at times, expressing itself through my words before I blink. All the rich experience of life; felt, loved, scarred, grieved, processed and accepted. The acceptance has grown into a beautiful towering Oak whose canopy is wide and strong, with roots which plunge deep into the Earth. The Oak of acceptance is my strength, the wisdom both to speak and be silent, to give and to retreat, to love and to pull away. This is the knowledge of the mystery within me, a mystery which is deeply feminine.

I felt an embryonic awareness of this feminine wisdom within my soul as a child. I tasted it and yearned to learn deeply, hunting for its expression within the women around me. As I grew and experienced the deep societal conditioning of our time, I lost this instinctual awareness. It was replaced with shame; of who I was and what I felt. Life was lived in the fast lane, with burning rubber churning up clouds of smoke and dust. We were taught to do and conquer and achieve. The innocent joy I felt in the silence, in the woods, in the creative centre of my soul, was side-lined, relegated to the irrelevant. Like the headmaster who forced me to quit art to focus on maths. Creativity no longer held importance. The stillness to dream and feel, the adventures in the woods and the inner knowing of my destiny was eradicated, made worthless by a world who told me I was wrong.

Girls in the 80s were taught to aspire high to achieve glittering careers, to work extra hard, to be like men. Women wore trouser suits and tried to break through the glass ceiling. We had Thatcher and were taught that she embodied feminism. We were drilled that Thatcher was the epitome of our aspirations. All the while she tore society to shreds, smashed homes and families to pieces, advocating a cynical self-serving idealism. That wasn’t feminism. Our leader was a psychopath who used and abused our blood and sweat to further her desire to rape the Earth. Afterwards we collapsed in a heap, scarred with abuse.

We lost our voice, our softness, our joy. The deep well of mystery within the inner psyche of women, the intuitive awareness and understanding of creation and love, our instincts to dive deeply in stillness and be, deep within connection, these mysteries had almost drowned. Yet the inner call of our psyche knew the way forward, knew how to navigate through the rough sea and find our way home. In the hardness of our world, all we needed to do was trust. To find comfort in our intuition, within our deep inner knowing. To find the wisdom of our ancestors. It wasn’t an easy path.

In the stillness of our soul is our deepest wisdom, reaching all the way back to the first woman. We can feel it during our monthly bleed, when we embody our wild physicality. Society teaches us to tame this raw power, to medicate and hide it. Yet what we feel when we bleed is a powerful celebration of our bodies, of our physical connection to the Earth. When we bleed we feel our fertility, our power and our potential. In the depths of our past we would separate from our communities and writhe and dance and bleed on the Earth with our sisters, in ceremony, in honour of the deeper mysteries of creation.

Women everywhere need space and silence. We need time to dive deeply and feel our souls. We all have different roles to play in our world, as leaders, artists, teachers, healers, mothers, scientists and sometimes all of these and more. Deep within our soul we share a connection, to all women everywhere and throughout all time. If we are running a country or a business, looking after children or juggling many different roles all at once, women everywhere feel that thread within them; we feel the call of the wild woman, our ancestor, our true nature.

 This time of lockdown is an expression of feminine power. It is uncomfortable, it makes you dive deeply into your own inner psyche and uncover and tend wounds you did not wish to acknowledge. It makes you stalk your behaviour with others and in the world, makes you follow every step you take, encouraging you to check in with that reaction and feel before you respond. It makes you slow down, sleep longer, and feel. It enables you to reflect upon your life and remember what you didn’t have time for, those things that felt less important. Like visiting your grandparents or a sick friend. It brings up regrets, it forces you to confront your shadow. There is no turning away from it now. It reaches out its long, dark fingers and claws its way into your soul, ripping out the heart of what you need to see, dripping with blood and smelling of rotten meat. You need to ingest this dark matter, feel it and see it and learn to accept it. Through acceptance comes growth and strength. This process has a distinctly feminine feel to it and we can all tap into it and work with it during this time, as every being has the capacity to embody the feminine.

 As we come through this phenomenal change within our modern lives, we remember the lives of our ancestors, the women who survived through plagues, through the births and deaths of multiple children, through catastrophic wars, through poverty and hunger, through rape and terrible trauma and abuse. We can feel and connect with all the women in the world today, we can feel and taste their spirit. We are interwoven through a similar experience of life, as we bleed, as we birth, as we feel and scream and cry. Today around the world there are leaders who truly embody the feminine spirit, who are worthy role models. The world is changing and within the fires of the human soul locked away from the do-ing of the economic wheel, both women and men are finding their strength and finding their way again. A new world is possible, we can dream it and create it into being. For the first time in a very long time, the wisdom of the feminine is perhaps the key to a new reality.

© Samara Lewis, May 2020

Remembering our ancient Shamanic traditions

Remembering our ancient Shamanic traditions

The shamanism that I practice today is supported by relationships that I have developed over time with spirits who were part of the old, more indigenous, shamanic tradition in Britain. Though I have had different teachers with influences from other traditions, my practice is embedded in the old ways; the shamanic practices of these isles within prehistory.

My journey

The pathway I took to shamanism began with connecting with nature spirits and earthbound spirits as a child. Many members of my family carried the “gift” of spirit connection and some were involved in the modern spiritualist movement, which helped me to ground and understand my experiences. I think many children are aware of spirit but, as they get older, their perception drifts into shadow, as our world dismisses the very existence of spirit and ridicules or demonises those who practice spirit connection.

During my late teens I became involved in spiritualism, learning clairvoyancy. However I have always connected with nature spirits and my path led me away from connecting with the human spirits that spiritualism focused on, drawing me into Wicca and Druidism.

I grew up in Dorset which has many ancient monuments from prehistory. At these sites I connected with ancestral spirits who spoke to me of traditions that seemed to be lost within modern Britain and I longed to find out more.

I went off to University in my early twenties to study archaeology and prehistory and whilst there I also studied anthropology (which is the study of people) and shamanism. I studied the practice of shamanism within indigenous communities in the modern world and I studied the development of shamanism within prehistoric Britain. All the while I continued to practice at psychic fairs reading tarot and practicing clairvoyancy and was regularly communicating with spirits, particularly those at prehistoric sites.

Over time I came to understand that the practices of the spirits I met from prehistoric Britain were part of a wider shamanic culture. The more I discovered, the more I could see that what had been lost in this land was akin to the shamanic, animistic cultures that were and are almost universal within groups of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

The more research I did, I began to create threads linking the old shamanic traditions of the land of Britain with the animist cultures throughout the world and, through this, uncovered an older, more universal way of being human - as being animist is who we are.

A lost tradition

When modern indigenous people say that we have lost our way and have forgotten who we are, they are not just referring to our disconnection from nature but also from our shamanic culture. Some element of shamanic practice can be seen cross culturally across the world both in the modern day and in the past. We had a shamanic culture in the past and it was alive and well in Mesolithic Britain.

Through millennia of oppression; from successive invasions, cultural obliteration by the Romans, indoctrination of Christianity and the horror of the witchcraft persecution, all of this oppression led to the eradication of our native shamanic traditions. When a child was born during these times with the ability to walk between the worlds and communicate with spirit, the elders were not there to train them; they had been killed, their wisdom had been lost. In these ways, many of the traditions in this land were lost. Yet there have always been people born with a natural shamanic ability and somehow, remarkably, some traditions have persisted.

A revival

In modern Britain, spiritualist teachings have roots far back in history; they are not just the product of a 19th century revival. There is a thread of connection, a tiny filament of a thread, that has passed through the last few hundred years and that is quite remarkable given the level of effort made to eradicate these traditions. Spiritualism, herbalism and even some folklore and customs are the remnants of our indigenous shamanic culture.

In the early 20th century when the existence of shamanism in indigenous cultures became properly understood and when people became interested in exploring it, it became obvious that our own traditions lacked a huge amount of knowledge by comparison. This led to an exploration and development of a Western Shamanic tradition in the mid 20th century which relied heavily upon researching traditions in different cultures.

I feel that, beyond establishing kinship and connection with indigenous groups today, we don’t need to learn the specific traditions of other shamanic peoples. Indeed, they would prefer that we didn’t. Their traditions relate to the land where they live, as all shamanic traditions do. We need to devise our own traditions, specific to our own land.

What indigenous people can teach us, however, is the practice of how to honour and respect nature, of feeling and taking our own place within the eco-system of the Earth, of how to walk on the land in a fully connected way.

We have walked far from our path as caretakers of the Earth and indigenous people today really do live on the final frontier between those who look after the nature and those who seek to destroy it. It is imperative we learn from and support indigenous groups to continue to defend the land.

Animism

Animism is a word devised by early anthropologists to describe indigenous groups’ perception and practice of nature connection. Originally derisive the word has, in recent times, been reclaimed in a positive light. It concerns the awareness that all beings have a spirit and that we are all connected within both the physical and the spiritual web-of-life. It is a crucial part of shamanism and the missing piece in understanding our lost shamanic traditions.

Research into the people who lived in Mesolithic Britain shows that they lived much like modern indigenous groups do today – they tended the land in respectful and sustainable ways and they honoured the land with ceremony. They were animists. When we connect with their spirits, we can connect with their practices, with their deep connection with the land and with the spiritual beings in the land that they honoured.

Practicing shamanism and animism

The shamanism and animism that I practice and teach stems from spirit connection, via merging the practices I have developed of connecting with spirit in the land, spiritualist techniques and shamanic journeying.

Shamanic journeying is a relatively recent development but it stems from much older traditions of diving into the spirit realms, which all spiritualists and shamans do and have done for millennia.

The spirit world is vast and real. It is both beautiful and frightening and all in between. Though few people are called to work as shamans, some of the practices of journeying and spirit connection generally are really helpful to learn for most people. Not only to support a personal healing journey but to shift awareness from a perspective of being separate to knowledge and experience of our deep connection with all of life.

A personal mission

I have a mission to teach spirit connection, particularly that of connecting with our own spirit selves and that of the nature beings we live amongst.

Not only important for people’s individual spiritual development, it creates a connection with our ancestors and provides a link to our past, helping us to reconnect with all beings in the world and to the source of all life.

I see this as being crucial in a time when the modern world is on a self-destruct path, being oblivious of our connection with all beings and that the impact of materialism is not only environmental destruction but the destruction of ourselves.

Indigenous Shamanism

As indigenous elders say, people in the modern world have lost the way. Yet the way was lost an age ago and it is time for us all to step up now and relearn the traditions of old before it is too late.

To this end, I regularly work with the ancestral spirits of this land of Britain and continue to learn from them. As I pass on to others all that I learn, I hope the knowledge will pass on to others and, like ripples in a pond, a revival of our indigenous shamanic traditions will create waves, that people will regain the way and life will change for the better. That is my mission and I invite you to dive into this journey with me.

© Samara Lewis, January 2020