Who Are the Spirits and Allies in Your Life? by Jan Engels-Smith
Have you ever felt, at one time or another in your life, that you have had some sort of interaction with the spirit realm or something that is unseen? Ever wonder who they were?
Cross-culturally there is a common belief in spiritual help that can be witnessed as an intervention from a non-physical realm into the physical realm, which transcends, changes, or heals. What we are working with in shamanism are the non-physical beings, your helping allies. We are working with the Spirits and spirits can take many different forms. There are absolutely millions of them. It is like looking out at the stars and seeing all the stars that exist.
When we are working with the spirits, we want to make sure we are working with our helping, compassionate allies.
When you are learning the basics of shamanic journey, make sure that all of your journeys to the spirits will be in places that there are only helping spirits. The Lakota people I have learned from say that each person is born with 405 helping spirits and allies. They are here with you; you are born with them, and their main function is to be of service to you and your human experience. It is not necessarily a literal number, but it is a number of vast quantities, great abundance. It implies that you have a tremendous amount of help available to you at any given moment. You may choose to use this help throughout your life, or not.
Yet, we go through life thinking we have to do it all by ourselves, we are alone and we don’t have any support. But that is not true. You are just not seeing the help that is around you.
They are here to help you with any type of thing you want to present to them. There is no good question or bad question, or valuable question or non-valuable question. Their help in life can be magical, miraculous, profound, guiding, transformative, informative and fun. You can use your spirit helpers for minor things or gain insight and direction for the major decisions of your life. You can heal yourself and your loved ones. You can learn to direct energy in such a way that you can change the past and look into the future. The non-physical doesn’t follow the same physical laws that you have been taught. There are no limits to this realm except those from your own perspective.
Shamanism is based on working with non-ordinary reality spirits. And, to me, most of shamanism represents life skills. And we have gotten very, very far away from that in our culture.
In LightSong’s Level 1:Basic Shamanic Journey class, everyone attending is an adult and this is probably the first class that they have had learning about spirits in non-ordinary reality, yet these beings, if you look at an indigenous culture, would be taught to the children as soon as they were born.
The idea is that we came from the spirit world and we are here having a physical experience. But you, me, we are all first and foremost and primarily a spirit. We are broadcasting energy. I asked the spirits once, what do we look like to you? I mean, we are always trying to journey to you, what do we look like? And they showed me and there was no body. There was no body there, there was just this form of light and sound and color and various ways that that appeared.
They are seeing us in our radiance, which is our true form, which is our spirit form.
It is the part of us that lives on, and it’s the part of us that allows us to communicate to other spirits because it is just like communicating with the person next to you. Your spirit is communicating with that other spirit. It is ordinary, it is natural, it’s normal. The only one that said, well, that’s odd is the Western culture. It got lost in our training and our upbringing.
Click here for more information about Level 1 class.