What is full shamanic immersion?

I think there are two issues raised here.  One is our tendency to switch off and not acknowledge what is happening when we feel overwhelmed by something that previously impacted on us as a strange and potentially hostile experience.  The other issue is the possibility or even likelihood of becoming retraumatised or perhaps traumatised in a different way, though bumping into the barriers that prevent you from having a more fluid experience of the kinds of events you fear.

I think both of these are realistic fears, and this is probably why "do it yourself shamanism" is a riskier prospect in some ways than if you really had someone to help you who knows very deeply what they are doing.

I don't know what more to say about those issues at the moment, except that the fears you have a realistic, but that there may be more to gain by trying to shamanize yourself, as I managed to do, I think, even though you may end up with other inadvertent wounds, in the process.  I think I did feel more vulnerable during the process of absorbing more of what Marechera had to say, as I was out of synchronization with typical academic manners, and for a long time, while I had to write my thesis, what people would say to me struck me as highly artificial, even pompous and completely inappropriate.  But I had to continue in those circumstances where everything seemed weird to me.  And that being out of synch kind of led to situations having the potential to damage me.  One really has to take oneself in hand and walk through all of this. 

But the answer to your question as to what full immersion IS, is much easier.  It is when you can read the text all the way through, as a kind of narrative and see it as a WHOLE or from the outside, without breaking it up into little separate pieces.   The text is shocking, so one wants to break it up into distinct parts that one can focus on and digest one by one, but that is a sign of the brain resisting processing the WHOLE.   It means you have hit something that you have to switch off from in order to maintain your illusion of integrity.  But if you cannot process the whole as an emotional and psychological whole, that is by gaining fluidity to move through the text quickly, you are still not a whole person yourself and you still have some instinctive resistances.

So that was the process I went through.  I read the book many, many times.   And in my case it had all sorts of elements in it from my historical past, that had run alongside my earlier existence.   These historical events had been occurring whilst I was a child, and I had experienced the indirect influence of them but I had never experienced them directly for myself.  So it was very important for me to integrate that historical knowledge of myself, to make myself whole.