Touched by Spirit; Transformed by Spirit
by Ask a Healer
Question on healing: How do you know if you have had a true spiritual initiation, or shamanistic experience?
Healing Facilitation Response: It comes to me to share one such experience because, for me, it has elements that have also been true of most spiritual initiations I've gone through. One common element is that extreme change occurred in an instant, though it typically took time, often years, to integrate the lessons of that transformative instant.
One aspect that always stands out in those experiences, the thing that consistently lets me know it was a spiritual initiation or transformative experience is that I will be incapable of continuing life as it was before, in some significant way.
In the experience I'll be relating, there was a moment of a supernaturally sweet smell (noticed by me as well as the other two people in the room), the energetically overwhelming awareness of a Divine Presence, and the pervasive cellular reconfiguration I felt during the experience. I felt it in my body, in what seemed like every cell.
After such an experience, it is as if the map of my life has been changed and, where there were roads before, none exist after. To be clear, it is the same sensation I would have if I were driving down a literal road, following the directions on the map and suddenly realized that the map had changed and the road that was supposed to be there, was not there at all.
Shamanistic experience, for me, usually involves some sort of ceremony or ceremonial structure within it although the actual spiritual experience often happens after the ceremony is already over. The frequency gets installed but does not activate, a lot of times, until I'm home and alone or with a trusted friend.
Even visions, messages and energetic shifts that do not seem connected to any ceremony, ritual or prayer still have a feel of ceremony to them. Because I understand that we are all connected, I believe I have sometimes been blessed by ceremony done by others.
In any case, whenever a spiritual initiation comes, I know something is at work in a specific way in me that will change my life in a noticable, irreversable way.
On rare occasions, the Shamanic experience or spiritual initiation will include what I call a direct energy transfer, or a direct dispensation that can be felt at a cellular level in the body and which effects a cellular change that is spiritually specific. The experience related below is certainly that kind of baptism. Receiving a Sacred Frequency
Spiritual health disclaimer: Shamanistic experience can bend the boundaries of reality to a disturbing degree and it is my feeling that only those trained to do so should enter shamanistic states deliberately with the use of mind-altering substances. There are safer ways. Drumming is one way; integrative breathwork another. My own shamanistic experiences and Sacred Initiation experiences have all occurred in a a chemically un-altered state up thru 2001. Although I would have been confused by and doubted altered experiences in the beginning, I would currently not be opposed to a Sacred Plant initiation at this point in my own walk.
