“Bradford Keeney is a man on a mission . . .
The implications of his work are staggering.“
CONSCIOUS DANCER
Shaking medicine is the trembling, shaking, and quaking associated with the experience of ecstatic bliss. This major transformative experience is more than "seeing the light." It involves feeling the light, enabling entry into the numinous – the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Arguably all religions and pre-religions originally felt this ecstasy and regarded it as a sacred mystery. Let us remember that the original spiritual practitioners were fervent shakers!
The emergence of social institutions to house ecstatic rapture - whether they were churches, synagogues, temples, ashrams, medicine societies, shaman guilds, or pagan societies - resulted in the quieting of the originating experience in exchange for enforced textual understanding and maintenance of social hierarchy. The ecstatic experience that shakes us up was sacrificed for normalized belief and group conformity. This was true for shamanism as well as the major world religions. In the sociology of religion this social process is called the "routinization" of the founding charismatic experience. Wild experience is replaced by ritual where the "right procedure" overturns spontaneous play and improvisation. Guided imagery, clichéd patter, and loyalty oaths overtake wild unadulterated creativity, free expression, and heightened emotions.
The shaking traditions propose that we most deeply thirst and hunger for an ongoing immersion in ecstatic experience. The source of this shaking bliss is what the Ju/'hoan Bushmen call n/om. They wisely never give a totalizing definition of n/om, but respectfully allude to it being a mystery responsible for bringing forth life's vitality and acknowledge that its root is love. When you have n/om, it makes you shake with ecstatic delight. It's that simple. But, in our time, it is often difficult to let go of the cognitive habits and rigid belief systems that block fully awakened feelings of joy and love.
We rarely are encouraged to stand under the sky with raw and naked presence, available to be hit by n/om lightning. Even most shamanic cultures, old and new, became "tamed" and conducted in a calm routinized manner. The shamans of old were wild, unpredictable, and appeared out of control. No one, including the shaman, knew what would happen in a ceremony. The so-called "spirits" took over. The same is true of early religious ceremonies. Buddhism chased out the Bon shamans, Christians went after their ecstatics, and shamans became reduced to hereditary entitlement or homogenized training.
Shaking medicine is a call for wild experience. It is shamanism and religion and spirituality in its elemental form: wild ecstatic experience. Shaking medicine encourages the practice of wild shamanism and wild religion and wild spirituality and wild love. They are regarded as inseparable from wild art and wild music and wild movement and wild performance. This does not refer to trivial, irresponsible, or unethical behavior. The deep wild involves hyper-complexity - the mind of nature - the greater pattern that holds our psychological mind as a small part of a more encompassing interdependent network of relations.
When n/om flows, ecstatic bliss awakens. Here spontaneous healing – wild healing – emerges effortlessly and naturally. The systemic whole of the mind-body-heart-soul is sung and danced.
Are most offerings of spirituality in today's marketplace those that have been tamed? Are they predictable teachings, practices, and answers? With shaking medicine, the creative spirit doesn't get trapped and domesticated by circus tamers.
We can choose to move toward the unpredictable, unknowable, untamable wild. The sacred lives in the wild. The sacred constitutes the wild. The problem began when someone said that words are more important than being in the wilderness. When we started worshipping the words, we walked out of the wild and became tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has lasted way too long. Consider a re-entry into the wild. Become a wild shaman, a wild pagan, a wild Christian, a wild Buddhist, a wild Jew, a wild agnostic, a wild artist, a wild performer, a wild whatever you want to call it because the name is less important than the experience of being wild in this sacred way.
What does it mean to be a wild shaker? Here beliefs are less important than what is deeply felt. If you feel the pulse of life, you will feel movement and it will move you. You will move with life's rhythms and find yourself carried through the adventures of everyday. Stop trying to make things happen. Let life move/change/transform you to happen. Don't pause to worry – fervent wild aliveness won't lead you to misguided narcissism or self-indulgence. Only it can bring forth the best within all of us, enabling us to passionately hold the caring, compassion, and daily know-how required for a better world. As the old time shakers used to shout: "All aboard! There is a train heading for glory."
