Embracing the Wider Field With Home Altar Constellations

Recently someone asked me what it was like to be a shaman. That question has been posed to me a lot over the years, so I came out with my normal answer. Shamans are animists, I said. We believe even the “inanimate” things around us are alive and have different levels and modes of interactive personal consciousness.

OK, said my friend, but what’s that like for you? How do YOU experience it. This popped me out of my habitual rut, and I had to think about it fresh. Yeah… What has it gotten to be like, 30 years down the pike?

How I Experience Shamanism

Well, I said, my deeper beliefs about reality have grounded around this idea that the world I experience is itself the god-energy, the divinity. It’s not dead lumps bumping in the night, or mindless rays cruising through a universe of empty space too vast to even imagine. Those mechanical models are useful in certain ways, but they have ripped the living heart out of reality.

I know that when I look out of my senses, I’m seeing “god’s body,” so to speak. It is everything. I know that it’s always trying to communicate with me, to dance with me. I know also that it cares, that it’s trying hard to love me, even though I’m slow to receive that love at times.

Interference from the Modern World

Now, I was raised in the mechanical, “scientific” worldview—so I still have interference coming from that at times. There are instances where I wish I was experiencing things from the “living reality is talking to me” perspective, but I’m not.

There are corners and cracks in my awareness into which those now central beliefs have not yet penetrated. And some of my earlier, not quite healed traumas hide out in those corners.

And yet there are also many times when that animistic experience is heightened, full on intense, and others where I look back and suddenly see the deeper dance that was going on earlier while I was somehow absent. In rituals, especially facilitating family constellations, it’s always more present.

So give me, my friend said, an example.

Here's the Example I Gave Her

Well, ok, there I was driving South from Lake Ontario towards Philly, towing a boat, and the car’s rear wheel drive differential was leaking oil fast enough to spew a fine mist of the gunk all over the trailer and boat. Yuck. I’m stopped at a diner for breakfast, wondering if I’m going to make it home. I’m eating at the counter.

I look up to notice my waitress and another one, both in front of me, each looking across one of my shoulders out the diner window. “Oh look,” says one, “the bear is up.” I turn around and look out behind me but don’t see anything. When I say, “what?”—one of them says “oh it’s a balloon of a bear that’s holding a little car.”

I had this funny feeling as this was happening that I get when some part of me senses reality messaging me, but the rest of me is too distracted to pay attention. Anyway, as I walked out after eating, I saw there was indeed a 10 foot tall white balloon of an erect bear with a little red car cradled protectively in its forepaws. It was inflated curbside in front of some business. Weird, I thought (thoughtlessly), and went on my way.

Receiving the Message

Then later, home during a ritual, the meaning of this slightly bizarre sequence popped out crystal clear to me. Bear was my main indigenous shamanic teacher’s totem, and has always been close to me as well. My teacher and the bear energy were holding my car safe, trying to tell me that it and the boat and I would get home and be ok. Stupid me—I missed it and went on worrying.

Do I think the waitresses knew about this specific message? Unless one of them was pretty evolved—I think not. The message to me emerged out of the deeper whole of which we are all part. They were just doing their everyday thing.

How This Ties Into Family Constellations

If you are familiar with family constellations, this little story exemplifies the way I very often feel into the meanings of events and situations around me. The white bear event above was very much a little constellation. Two women looking exactly over my two shoulders into the space behind me pointing out some love and help from Spirit I needed but was disconnected from.

Some facilitators argue that the “field” stops at the edges of the constellation, so to speak. So to them, if a siren howls in the distance or the room lights blink—that’s irrelevant. I don’t work that way. A bug or a dog can move a constellation from stuck to resolving if you are open to its participation.

Once you start embracing the “wider field,” you move into a place where all kinds of things start sending you messages.