One of the deeper shamanic tricks — which is a very costly one, but sometimes necessary — is to simply take the violence on offer into oneself in a mode of emotional equilibrium. It diffuses that way, and after a very long time, finally it is gone. That is what my memoir is about in fact. (Sometimes I even lose track, myself, of how to understand it in articulated terms.)
But I had to cope with the generational violence my family had experienced in this way. Now, certainly, my father had extreme abandonment issues, which began when his father was killed in WW2 and then became most exacerbated by his loss of the Rhodesian war and the consequences for starting again that this brought about. Very, very sad things. One could use the crude modern parlance for similar sorts of emotional reactions to those that he developed, and say that he was “Borderline”.
But one cannot allow oneself to become equally thrown off balance when one is in association with such a person. That was HOW I learned to develop my whole ‘shamanic’ knowledge about what it is to be in or out of balance. Actually it is life and death in some instances just to stay IN balance.
So I learned all about psychological balance and equilibrium and how to maintain it, even when waves of crisis are rolling over me.
That is what I consider to be my shamanic endowment (as well as insights into how balances are maintained).
In the end, a shamanic type may need to bring an end to generationally infused violence by means of absorbing it and diffusing it, so that it no longer has any potency. That is what I finally managed to do. It’s what I write about in the closing passages of the book.
I’m going to write another book, which invokes similar principles of absorbing force and diffusing it, called “parachute landing fall”.
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