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author: Tayja Wiger and Cynthia Bend
If this book taught me one thing, it was this - do not begin reading something with expectations about what you will take away from it. I thought that this would be a book about shamanism - and it is, if only in a very round about way. The voice of the book is that of Cynthia Bend, the subject of the book is Tayja Wiger. We read snatches from Tayja's journals, there are copies of her journaling in the appendix with quite an interesting review of what the handwriting reveals, and we hear Tayja's actual words once or twice - but what we really have here is a second hand account of Tajya's shamanistic death and rebirth. (An interesting aside - Llewellyn was promoting another book from both Bend and Wiger in the front of this book. An internet search came up with absolutely no information about Tayja Wiger except for this book)
Tayja Wiger is a Native American Sioux born into a dysfunctional family. Her mother, of Sioux heritage, had severe alcohol dependency, and died when Tayja was nine years old. Her father was both mentally and physically abusive, as well as also suffering from alcohol dependency. He was a white man with a violent dislike of Indians that he took no pains to hide.
Tayja was born with one of a set of twins - her brother did not live, an issue that her family blamed on her. Her birth was premature, due to the chemical dependency of her mother, and to the physical abuse that her mother had undergone at the hands of her father. She had broken hips at birth, as well as damaged eyesight that would never get better - indeed, in her late teens she was considered legally blind.
Following an extremely abusive childhood, Tayja suffered both drug and alcohol addictions in her teens, as well as epilepsy. She also lived in the world of prostitution at one point in time. There was always a great deal of violence in her life - something that she really did not know how to get away from. She lived in a very schizoid world - and was later diagnosed with multiple personalities. By the time she was seventeen she had had three pregnancies with no surviving children.
At the age of eighteen she went into a drug treatment program, eventually being treated for a form of cancer. At the age of twenty-four she entered Wiger Woods (from which she eventually took her last name), a reparenting facility. The aim of this facility was to regress the patients back to where the original damage to their personalities occurred - usually in infancy.
Tayja bonded strongly with the home's *mother* - Jeanne Wiger. Through her she was able to experience the love her own mother had never been able to show her. Part of Tayja's illness was that her crown chakra was completely seperate - as in not connected to - the rest of her chakra system. This meant that she was unable to relate and of her experiences to herself. She had no emotional feeling for or about anything.
Upon completion of the program in the Wiger Wood facility, Tayja moved into her own apartment. She underwent studies in several different areas, to include in depth astrological analysis with a Native American astrologer. (The interesting thing here is that her crown chakra has always been open - just not connected to the rest of her chakra system. So she received massive input that she had no clue what to do with.)
This book is largely the documentation of Tayja's journey from a psychological point of view. After she moved out of the Wiger Wood facility Tayja went to a retreat of the Spiritual Frontier Fellowship. While there, she received a psychic healing for her blindness and epilepsy from Marilyn Zwaig Rossner, a lecturer and healer working with the Spiritual Frontier Fellowship.
As of the writing of this book, Tayja was an active shaman, healer, lecturer and ordained Christian minister. The adversities that she faced in life were the shamanic deaths that she needed to prepare herself for her life's journey.
There is a great deal of information included in this book re what shamanism is and what a shaman does. For Tayja, one of the difficulties was in not having Native American Shaman's to learn from. She honors her ancestry and her healing path in her life's work. She is, indeed, a modern shaman.
August 2001
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