The Journey to You

The Journey to You - A Shaman’s Path to Empowerment is a book by Ross Heaven that links spirituality and science. It will guide you on your spiritual path in a grounded way that has benefits for you and the world today. It provides healing practices and techniques, such as image work, journeying and soul retrieval and draws on the latest scientific research and provides guidance from leading figures. For each book sold, there is a contribution to the Dream Change Coalition for Rainforest protection and the preservation of indigenous shamanic wisdom. 

The shaman asks ‘does it grow corn?’ Or does it have a useful purpose that provides value to people? We are all gods of a kind, that can assist, support and provide, and we have a responsibility to do this. The shamanic world is experiential but it has purpose and meaning, without which it is null and void. 

 

As you dance the ritual with the goddess or warrior within yourself, you ask for their name, find a gesture or symbol that describes their purpose. We see the world anew! Descartes sought truth, this is imperative, but why are we here? Life stress contributes to mental and physical illness, such as heart attacks, strokes, auto-immune illness, possibly cancers, all tend to rise when an individual is under stress. Emotional upset decreases our body’s healing capacity and creates anxiety, depression and an inability to work and cope with life. However, chemicals also contribute to cancers, auto-immune illnesses and quite likely dementias. Love, peace and compassion increases our ability to withstand stress and increases our ability to heal ourselves, and to some degree also heal others. 

Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, Buddha sat beneath a bodhi tree, Carl Jung spoke about the Hero’s Journey, as a process of transformation, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintended. In the words of T S Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

We each play many roles every day, do you wish to change some, or avoid others? Who is the essential I, the one that most represents the real you? In this book, you can meet your empowered self, perhaps through a power animal that acts as a type of guardian Angel. By meeting in our imagination, we can find the damaged and useless part of ourself, and bring it back as a symbol and replace it with something whole, beautiful and useful. Soul Retrieval is described as a method of journeying to reclaim something lost through trauma, abuse, distress or accident. All kinds of good and caring attention are healing. We are invited to choose a rock and ask it a question, waiting for a reply to what, who, why, how, where? 

My major criticism of this book is that we need others to understand us and we need to understand others, and we need to work to take care of ourselves and be useful contributors to the society that supports us. It presents pointers to drug culture, which often produces dysfunctional lifestyles and damage to family life, and mental illness, which far from being healed, can be exacerbated by drugs and radical alternative lifestyles that involve different styles of thought. Anarchism is often hidden under New Age cults and false wisdoms that sell books. Maybe the most serious idea put forward is that we can heal ourselves of serious illness, such as cancers. Because this philosophy is based on personal thought that criticises the western world, it is difficult to present generalisations There is no evidence that we can heal ourselves of cancers and in the U.K. there is a law that prevents those who wish to pretend this can happen, usually because they make money from desperate people. Psychic surgery is covered, though admitting that some practitioners have been discredited, and there are slight of hand videos for some that show fraud. Psychic surgeons should not be praised when large sums of money are charged. 

Article for Psychic World Newsxpaper by Wendy Stokes https://wendystokes.co.uk