Plastic Shamans and Carpetbaggers

From New Age Fraud and Plastic Shamans:
“Native people DO NOT believe it is ethical to charge money for any ceremony or teaching. Any who charge you even a penny are NOT authentic.”

Likewise druidry. If it is coaching for spiritual healing. It is impossible to ask for money if all you do is set up a safe open space for them to heal themselves in. And I specifically use the word “coaching” because real healing works on several levels, depending on the person.

For instance, I am hesitant at using “psychic handhealing” as such practices heavily rely on the placebo effect and may actually make matters worse because having quickly self-healed the illness, people are unlikely to change any patterns that cocreated the illness. Even when using a direct rewiring, a person can easily drop back to old patterns if the new patterns aren’t practiced and integrated afterwards.

We are in full agreement. Not only would it not be ethical, it wouldn’t work either.

And sometimes healing requires transferring skills and abilities to increase one’s power with, so that patterns can (more easily) change. For such work we can be paid for our time and energy, depending on the context, and not necessarily in monies (debet/credit statements on paper).

From the same “plastic shamans” site: “It was decided, from March 9th, 2003 and forward, there will be no non-Natives allowed in our sacred Ho-c’o-ka (our sacred alters) where it involves our Seven Sacred Rites.”

Gosh, though our wheels seem related (similar), how different from druidry *that* is.

True, we do have initiations that cannot be done before having gained others, but we do not exclude based on genetics, sexual preference, or religion, simply because we have experienced that it doesn’t work. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. We’d like to make some other, new, mistakes.

We have had to reconstruct our ways from what little materials survived the ages and from a few families and people that remembered. There are now three major druid orders, and I healed and trained myself with the help and workable knowledge of the OBOD.

The OBOD focuses on seven gifts that seem to work for people in contemporary contexts. We create new ceremonies on the fly if need be, guided by the ancestral knowledge we woke up in ourselves.

Most of us also practice “shopping in other spiritualities” to determine what might work for self healing too, in and for our respective contexts. That our members are from all kinds of religions makes it very easy to cross-transfer gained abilities. Cross train and gain! And we learn from every event, including worldly biguns like 9/11.

We appreciate and encourage curiosity, yet emphasize guarding our openmindedness by critical judgement. Especially from carpetbaggers and space invaders.

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” — Terry Pratchett

Druids are more like nature philosophers instead of a religion. BUT … to speak with Terry Pratchett again (yes, I’m a fan of his works)

“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” — Terry Pratchett

If we do have any focus on discerning “carpetbaggers” (“plastic shamans”) it is focused on and goes something like this: Ancient Celtic Druidry and Racism??? We fight the enemy within.

Maybe the differences are just institutional and traditional. I don’t disgruntle anybody the right to close ceremonies or teachings off, even if I could. Tribes do their own thing. Tribes are under tribal control. And the Pipes have every right, for we each have to mind our own tensors and the directions we dance in. I would like to understand tho.

Related:

• What law?
• Balancing value stream maps
• Walking talk