Becoming a Shaman: Personal Growth, Ego Death & Spiritual Power

Hey now, all. I'm Joey C. Welcome back to another episode of Spirit Sherpa. This is the show that encourages and helps you on your journey to unlock your magic mojo. With me, as always, is the spirit doctor, Kelle Sparta. Hey, Kelle. Hey, Joe. How's it going?

Good. Are you ready to start again? Absolutely. What should we talk about this time? One of the big questions that I get asked all the time is, you know, "How do you become a shaman," and, "What's a shaman?" And, "How did you get on this path?" I get that all the time. Okay, so let's start there. We're early into the series here.

You've worn so many hats. One of them is a shaman. You know, is it even possible to summarize who Kelle Sparta is? Um, uh, well, you know, I'll give you, I'll give you the short story. Um, my mother was a, uh, New Ager, and she raised me in the New Age movement. And, uh, according to her, I was talking to ghosts in my crib.

So I've been doing this my whole life. Uh, at the age of six she brought home Est, which was a precursor to the, to the Landmark Forum. She brought home countless guided meditations and spiritual tapes, and we listened to JC Knight and Abraham Hicks, and y- you name it, Messages From Michael. I read every book.

Um, and she sent me to psychic development classes, and- And this was all throughout your formative years? All throughout my childhood. Wow. Yeah. So I really developed my skills very early on. And then I got married to an atheist, and he was against all things spiritual. And so I ignored them for a while, while I was married.

And then, uh, shortly before the divorce I went out and got my Reiki certification- ... and went and took shiatsu training and, you know, got back into the whole thing. And, and then I really just started on my own personal growth path really hardcore at that point. When I got my divorce, my business partner said I went off and joined the circus, because I literally dumped my life.

I was 28 years old. I hit my Saturn return, and I looked at my life and I basically had a midlife crisis at 28. At 28. I said, you know, "I hate my life." I had the American dream. I had the big house and the dog and the trophy husband and the... Not, not kids, thankfully, because I was about to dump everything.

And- ... I was a successful business owner and a pillar of my community and running a nonprofit. And I mean, I had everything that everybody said was the trappings of success, and I hated my life. I was in a never-ending power struggle with my husband. I was burnt out in my job. The, the nonprofit I was working on was in challenge, and I was turning it around.

I was tired, and I was not happy. And I was pissed, because I had been sold a bill of goods by the American dream that said, "This will make you happy," and I was not. Yeah And so I said, "Okay. Well, this didn't work," and I just chopped it all off, and I divorced my husband, I sold my business, I sold my house, and I moved out of state to live with a bunch of people I had met at the Renaissance Fair that, you know, joined the hippie commune, right?

It wasn't a hippie commune, but it was, you know, it was a bunch of roommates who all worked at the Renaissance Fair, and as it turned out, coincidentally, who were all freaking shamans. I didn't- I'd never heard of shamanism. In all of my metaphysical New Age occult, you know, all of this, paganism did not come up in all of the stuff I had studied for all those years.

So that was the first sort of introduction to it for you. It was the first introduction to it, and I ended up in a magical circle with four other people, and we did ritual, and we did energy healing work on one another. We spent four years living in what I r- now refer to as the magical house because magic was happening every day, all the time.

We were all on our spiritual paths. We were all doing our own work. We were going to events. We were bringing stuff home that we learned from each other. We were helping each other along the journey. It was really a communal process of evolution that was happening in that house, and we had people who moved in and out of the house during the four years I was there, and all of them brought their own piece of spiritual stuff into the mix.

And we actually, you'll, you'll find this funny, we had house rules that were magic rules. Okay. And all of them came from something that was messed up. So rule number one is no mucking about with time and space within the confines of the property- ... because one of our people screwed that up, and people were late.

And then no summoning anything bigger than your head. If you summon it, it's your job to banish it. No opening doors and windows that you don't know where they go. If doors and windows open of their own accord, do not wait to see what happens. Inform the house warden immediately. And always, always, always take out the trash.

Was that magical as well? Um, yes, and physical. Okay. It was both. So your journey at that point started taking you down a, a path that you had not traveled before. No, yeah, no idea. So, so for those who, who are in a similar situation, they don't know what it is, um, what is a shaman? So if you ask 100 shamans what a shaman is, you'll get 100 different answers.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Shamanism is not a defined term. Uh, it's, it's actually ... The word shaman comes out of Russia. Uh, and every tribal culture, uh, everywhere in the world has its own version of a shaman. The way that I see shamanism is, uh, that a shaman serves as the translator or bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world.

That person is in service to a community or tribe, if you will. Mm-hmm Each shaman will have different gifts that they use, uh, because we all have natural abilities. And so for me, I'm, I'm a healer. That's really my thing. I'm, I'm a healer. I carry the energy of change with me wherever I go. So this isn't just what I do, it's who I am.

The journey brings you to be the person that you become as a shaman. Uh, people always think, "Well, I, I could never do that." And it's like, look, you know, nobody can do it before they walk the journey. You know? I couldn't do it when I first started. I, uh, and I was talking to ghosts in my crib, and there was no way in crap when I was getting married at 21, there's no way I could have done the things that I did and that I've done in the interim, uh, without going through the path that I took to get there.

So what, what is ... You keep saying walk the journey. What does that mean? I always tell people, they're like, "Ooh, I wanna be a shaman." I'm like, "No, you don't." No, you don't. You know, shamanism is a calling. It, it literally comes up, grabs you by the throat, throws you on the ground, and says, "You're mine," right?

Mm-hmm. I didn't wanna be a shaman. I never wanted to be a shaman. I didn't even know what a shaman was, right? But the journey of being a shaman is, is a never-ending path of personal growth. Never-ending path of looking at the dark places that you don't wanna look at in your life, and bringing light to them so that you can heal them.

Then doing that for others, right? So for me, that's awesome. I wanna dive deep into the mucky, dark underpinning places- ... and then I wanna mother you in, through them, right? Yeah. Because I'm a Scorpio with a Cancer moon. So that's like my happy place, right? But not everybody wants to do that. But, you know, if you wanna walk the path of the shaman, it

You have to stand in your own power. The only way to stand in your power is to deal with your crap. That's what a shaman does. Now, do they do the things of connecting with nature and doing journeys and all the things that you think of as the bright, shiny cool stuff? Yep. Yes, absolutely. But you can't do those things until you do walk that path, because everything you do will be undermined if you don't.

Okay. This brings up a whole bunch of questions for me, but I, I just wanna tie back, 'cause I think this is really interesting. In previous episode, we've talked a lot about self-worth- Mm-hmm ... of self-love- Mm-hmm ... and confidence, and it sounds like those are important in what we're talking about here. It- Absolutely.

I'm sure you've been asked this 1,000 times. What are sort of those characteristics that you need to have in order to be a shaman? Well, so, uh, we, we just talked about the first one, which is control over yourself- Okay ... and your own power. Which, which means you've gotta clear out all the limiting beliefs and all the stories that you tell yourself that, that hold you back from your power.

Uh, you also have to have the ability to hold focus and choose consciously and, and powerfully. And I think we talked about that in the last episode- Yeah ... too, right? But then there's also the willingness to go into the dark places- Uh-huh ... which is what I just mentioned. Yeah. It's the- That's the stuff that's the scary stuff.

It is. It's the, it's the scary stuff. It's the, "Oh my God, I might die." You always think you might die, but ... And the fact is that you might. Not the physical you, but there is something known as a shamanic death, and shamanic death means the death of the ego, the part of you that you thought was the real you but wasn't.

We start off our lives as children as our authentic selves. And then things happen, and we develop coping mechanisms to deal with those things, and we layer different things on top of ourselves. And those things create belief structures that are not our authentic selves, and we, we start to buy into our own story that we're telling the world about who we are.

So we think, "Oh, no, this is me." No, it's not. Part of the job is about tearing those, those belief structures off, pulling them off, and peeling them away until you get down to what is the real you you started with, and that requires going into those hard places, those dark places that scare us. Okay, so my mind is blowing up a little bit right now.

Okay. When you talk about a shamanic death- Mm-hmm ... and that being sort of the, the death of the ego- Mm-hmm ... isn't that something that we're striving for, is to, to remove ego? Is shamanic death a good thing or a bad thing? So shamanic death is, is a good thing. It is? Yeah. Okay. I mean, it doesn't feel like a good thing.

No. That, that's what I'm, that's what I'm thinking here. Think about it. I mean, your ego is your personality. Your ego has a consciousness. It, it says, "I want to exist." It has a survival mechanism just like anything else. Mm-hmm. And so it resists dying. It thinks it's protecting you. Wow. And it's, it's a survival mechanism, not just of the ego, but also of yourself because you put that ego in place to protect you, and it did for a while, a long while most of the time.

You survived your childhood by using these coping mechanisms. Because you've had to build these layers, and layers, and layers on top, covering the, the authentic- Exactly ... component of yourself. Exactly, because somewhere along the line you got told that the authentic you wasn't okay. Hmm. And so you tried to become something that was okay.

Yeah. So there's this need to pull away these coping mechanisms that we put in place, and because we put them in place as children, they often lack logic. They make sense from a child's mind- Right ... but they don't make sense from an adult's mind, right? But yet they stick around. But yet they stick around because we don't question them.

They become assumption level things. Mm-hmm. You don't wonder why we don't float up off the ground when we walk, because we assume gravity works. Right. Right? This level is what I'm talking about, the assumptive level of who we are, these things that we just know are us. So there, there are small shamanic deaths that we go through which are, you know, I'm not who I thought I was, and I choose to be someone else.

Mm-hmm. And then there are big shamanic deaths, which I refer to as foundational deconstruction. The really painful ones. I don't know that painful is the right term. Okay. It- the really disorienting ones. Okay. Because what happens there is you start pulling out the foundation of who you believe yourself to be.

Oh. And what happens when you do that is that you lose your grounding because you're no long- there's no longer a foundation, right? Mm-hmm. And so literally it takes all of your brain's processing power to manage your day just getting through the rote activities. Mm-hmm. Because all your background processing time is being taken up with figuring out who the hell you are.

So you actually have to think about the things you didn't have to think about because you're thinking about other things. Exactly. So, you know, you don't pay attention closely enough, you're gonna whack your shoulder on the doorway as you walk through it- Mm-hmm ... because you didn't center yourself. Things we do every day, all day long, and, you know, year after year after year, don't think about at all, and suddenly you have to think about them all until you get your foundation put back in place.

n to you that doing something: 1000

because I had given up being perfect so that I could be human. Hmm. There are different levels of shamanic death that happen. Yeah. The more you can get comfortable with the idea of it, the better you do in the process. So we talked about going into the dark places- Yeah ... as one of the characteristics. Are there any more?

Yes. Yes. Um, there's, there's strength and will- Mm-hmm ... right? And the willingness to, to basically feel the fear and do it anyway. Okay. Because there's a lot of fear. People looked at me when I went on walkabout, and people would say, "Oh my God, you're so brave." You're right, I am brave, but I am not brave in this because I feel very called- Mm-hmm

and I feel very led. I don't have fear. You, you can only be brave if you have fear, right? Yep. And so there's a need to develop your courage- Mm-hmm ... as part of the process. And then, yeah, there's a, y- you really kinda need a healthy dose, dose of recklessness. Yep. Uh, because the fact of the matter is that doing this work is one initiation after another, which is basically jumping off one cliff after another- Yep

and not knowing where you're gonna end up. You also have to have that willingness to die and be reborn over and over and over again shamanically. You have to have a knowledge deep within yourself that when you die, and when you blow yourself up- ... occasionally, which also happens, not the same thing, by the way.

No. Um, but, but in either case, that you will be able to put yourself back together again. Hmm. Because... And that's a, that's a competency thing, right? There's that, that competency piece we talked about last time. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. This doesn't sound terrifying at all. All right. If somebody says, "Boy, that sounds like fun to me-" Mm-hmm

um, how- They're nuts. How ... Yeah, they're- Yeah. I didn't wanna make that judgment, but yes. But if should that happen, how would they go about starting on that journey? The process of, of starting on a shamanic journey is, is the process of starting on working on yourself. Okay. Uh, no shaman worth their salt is going to try and skip over the personal growth process before they go into the magic side of it.

Mm-hmm. Because if you do, you short change yourself in the, in the end. The, the very first thing you need to do is start digging out those pieces that are cracks in the, in the container that we talked about last time. Yeah. Right? That's the very first thing, is to dig out all those belief structures that are creating the cracks in the container.

And then y- you know those buttons- ... that y- you know, somebody pushes and you- Hashtag triggers. Hashtag triggers, right? That just, like, send you flying off the handle and, and, you know, screaming at somebody for spilling a cup of milk, you know? Yeah. You're just like, "Rah!" You're just, like, this sudden raging lunatic, right?

Yep. Um, you know, you gotta pull the power out of those triggers, and you gotta remove them. Yeah. You gotta pull... You, you have to uninstall those buttons because, you know, you, you blame the person who pushed them and say, "You made me feel this way." Well, no, they didn't. You put them there. You put the button there.

Yeah. And all they did was say, "Hey, did you know there's a button here?" Right? Because I can look at you and say, "You're purple. I can't believe how purple you are. You're disgusting how purple you are," and you're gonna be laughing your ass off. Right. Because you'd be like, "I don't know what girlfriend's problem is 'cause I am not purple."

I'm not purple. Even if I was purple, what would be wrong with being purple? Purple's a great color. What, what the hell is your problem, woman? But if I replace the word purple with fat, ugly, lazy, stupid, crazy, whatever your button is- Insert trigger here ... insert trigger here- Yeah ... and now suddenly you're a flaming lunatic screaming at me because I've hurt your feelings And I didn't do anything- Right

except call you purple. Right. Right? It's, it's, it, you're the one with the button. Right. The reason you don't go off on purple is because, one, you don't think you're purple, and two, purple isn't bad. So in order to have a button, you have to both believe that you are the thing and that the thing is bad. So it's like you have to give the power to the trigger in order- Exactly

for the trigger to actually be powerful. Exactly. Hmm. The process of claiming yourself is about claiming your space- Mm-hmm ... saying, "I have a right to exist"; setting your boundaries, saying, "Fuck off, get out of my space"; Mm-hmm ... owning your power and saying, "I have a right to my power and I can be trusted with it," which means I've drained that well of rage that I have from all of those triggers- Yeah

so that I don't lay waste to everyone around me. Right? And internalizing your sense of value so that you never has to, have to ask for validation again, which starts the process of self-love. The next stage is pulling the power out of those buttons and then i- uninstalling them. Right? And all of this is just the starter- That's the-

to starting on the path ... that's the foundation. That's, that's before you even start walking. Before you even start doing the magic. Yeah. You know, now, you know, I would teach you magic along the way in that. Right. You know, there's, there's some basic skills that you can develop and there's some- And there's some-

foundational ... that'll probably help you along the way to, to- Absolutely ... heal yourself and to calm yourself and things like that- Absolutely ... that along those way. Yeah. I re- I, I always recommend that f- reiki is a great example. Yeah. I always recommend that people, um, get certified in reiki while they're going through this process because It's a, I, I call it training wheels for energy users- Yeah

right? Because it's, it's a great system that doesn't take a lot to understand, that allows you to do a lot of work with it on yourself and on others, and to trade. Mm-hmm. And that amplifies your, your evolutionary process. Getting, getting that energy work done regularly amplifies your energetic process.

Yeah. So I, I recommend that. I, you know, I recommend that you learn how to clear your energy field. I recommend that you learn how to shield. Yeah. So I recommend that you learn how to do ... I recommend that you learn how to protect your house. Mm-hmm. Right? Because you need to make sure that you're in a safe, solid space.

So- This goes back to the containers that we were talking about ... goes back to the container. Exactly. Yeah. If you want to do any magic, shamanic or not, any magic at all, you need to have the ability to hold your power, to coalesce that power inside of a solid container, to give it focus and direction, and be willing to let it go and come into fruition in the world.

In order for you to do that work in a safe and solid way, you need a solid container that you can know how to create. So you learn how to create a basic circle that allows you to operate safely within it. Most important thing ever for beginners, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause you don't want things messing with you.

And that means you wanna create a safe container for your house too. And the reason for that is that as you get better at energy work, you become more visible on the astral. And when you become visible on the spirit plane, things notice you. You become the bright and shiny. You become the bright and shiny, and they come to see what's going on.

So these are basic safety skills. It's basic 101 practical skills. Yeah. Right? So, you know, there's a process to, to becoming magical, whether it's a shamanic path, or a Wiccan path, or a Hermetic path, or a Druid path, or whatever path you wanna take that puts you in the magical realms. There's a process. And developing your base understanding of the realm itself, of yourself and what you can expect of yourself, as well as the players in the field, right?

Is just smart. Yeah. So, you know, take a couple years, figure that stuff out. Get that stuff down before you decide to try and astral project, right? And, you know, I mean, hold- Put on your training wheels first. Yes. Yes. I know we wanna do everything yesterday, but oh my God, really? Seriously? Let's slide into Ask Kelle here.

All right, because I just, just had this conversation today, uh, with, uh, somebody I have been talking to on a shamanism group in Facebook, and he has been practicing with the Rosicrucians. A- and his world, most of the shamans come out of voodoo and, and there's, there's a very different sort of way of being, and he doesn't wanna walk that path.

And okay, fine. But, you know, the Rosicrucians told him that he could astrally project at any time, no problem, and that if he got in over his head, his guides would be there to protect him. And I'm like, "That's a pretty Pollyanna approach." And, and he's like, "Well, why do you say that?" And I said, "Well, think about it for a minute.

If you can be possessed while you are in your body, how much easier is it to possess you when you are out of your body?" Mm-hmm. I said, "Are you putting up protections around your body before you leave it?" "Oh, no. They say I can find my way back." I'm like, "Yeah, you can find your way back. There's a silver cord that you can just follow right back to your body, no problem.

But what if somebody else is in it?"

Occupied. Do you have the skills to kick them out? I gotta tell you, if you're out of your body and they're in it, I have got some mad skills on that, and that would be a challenge for me. So WTF, dude. Yeah. Right? Don't fucking do that. That's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. And the idea that your spirit guides will get you out of anything you go into is kinda like taking a single bodyguard with you- Mm-hmm

into the land of the Crips and the Bloods and spitting on both of their houses. And then saying, "Oh, protect me. Protect me." It's like, g- get serious. That's not necessarily gonna be enough. Right. It depends on where you go. Hmm. Will it save you in a lot of instances? Sure. Depends on how badass your guides are.

Who knows? So, you know, this is the sort of thing that I'm, I'm talking about, is that people come into these places, and they think that they can play, and sometimes you can. Yeah. But you don't know when you can and when you can't, because you don't know where you are. Hmm. So maybe you're on a playground, and maybe you're in the middle of a biker bar.

Yeah. Okay, let's talk about what people can do to sorta dig further into this. We've talked a lot about shamanism, a lot about, um, the journey that we have to walk as individuals. Mm-hmm. What more can people do to dive into here? Is there, is there anything you can offer there? Well, so, you know, we talked about really having to walk that personal path, right?

And to do your personal work first. I actually have a program designed to, to get you there. Okay. I spent 40 years of my life in personal growth and development in the s- in the spiritual world doing all of this, and the big problem with that world is that you take a two-hour class here, and you take a two-hour class there, and you, you learn this, this section with this person and that section with that person, and you, you miss key elements somewhere along the way, and then you wonder why you can't make it to your next level.

So what I did as I went through this process of 40 years of study is I actually codified the process of what it takes to get from one stage to the next and to be able to make that process move forward. That couple of years I was talking about typically takes people 20 years- Wow ... if they get there at all.

So what I've managed to do is to compress that process down to a year for each of those 10 years. I've created those programs such that I have managed to really put into place a way for people to really get through that in a very efficient fashion, and I've set it up on a rolling enrollment with group coaching calls so that people can see a little bit of what's ahead and get reminded of what's behind because it is a holistic process.

Right. And so they get to learn it in a holistic fashion. The first year of that program is called Mastering Spiritual Evolution, and the second year is called Mastering Inner Healing because that's really what it's about. If you just go to masteringspiritualevolution.com, and you can learn all about that program.

It is an in-depth deep dive into your personal stuff. When you step into the process, you actually enter into the morphic field of the group, and that group energetic has this, this gestalt, this, this movement associated with it from all the people who have been doing it before. You literally get a turbocharge just from joining the group.

If you think that this is a path that you wanna go on, if you're one of those people who are nuts, right? Yeah. And you think that, that you'd like to take this, and you wanna do it efficiently because it's, it's an efficient path. Mm-hmm. Um, it's hardcore, but it's an efficient path, then I would really recommend taking a look at that, that Mastering Spiritual Evolution program.

And again, masteringspiritualevolution.com. Dot com. Yeah. But whether that path leads you to shamanism or not, it's, that's it- Irrelevant ... this is work that- Yeah ... that you should be doing anyway. Exactly. Yeah. If you wanna create a life that you can love, you wanna live powerfully in the world, you wanna get rid of your buttons, anything along those lines, these two years are good for that, and you'll get a little bit of extra, you know, fun, energetic stuff along the way.

Masteringspiritualevolution.com. Yes. That'll take you to information about these programs. There was one other thing I wanted to mention. We talked about your journey and your walkabout specifically. Mm-hmm. I wanna mention to the listeners, our theme song- Yeah ... to Spirit Sherpa is a song that you found in your walkabout, right?

I, I wrote. And that's you. You wrote it. Yeah, I wrote it. It's you performing it, all of it, right? Yeah. I call it Drive About. The song is called Drive About, um, because I did my walkabout in my car. For those of you who don't know, walkabout is an Aboriginal term from Australia, and it literally means to walk out into the world until you find yourself.

In Aboriginal culture, that means going out into the desert because that's where they live. In my, my case, it was driving all over the country- Mm-hmm ... and landing in different places. And I wrote that song while I was on the road, and I drove 13,000 miles, and I was on the road for a year- Wow ... living from my car and, and, and on the kindness of strangers who took me in along the path.

The song is really interesting because I wrote the lyrics, and I was dating a guy at the time who was a sound engineer, and he had a recording studio in his house. One of us played my drum for that. Well, if he's played the drums, we gotta give him credit. Well, all right. So Daniel Singer, if... I think he might have played the drums.

He definitely did the recording for me. Okay. I said, "I don't have music. Would you write it for me?" And he's like, "Yeah, you know what the music is. Just sing it." He's like, "I'm just gonna hit the record button, and you just sing it, and you'll figure it out." And I just opened my mouth, and I just sang the song.

I had no idea what the song was gonna be, and I just sang it. I just channeled it. Then I went back, and I listened to it, and I realized that the words I had written were the actual words of what I was telling other people about my journey. Mm-hmm. But they weren't what was going on inside of my head. And all the fears and the, the, you know, insecurities and all of the stuff that I wasn't really saying out loud It was the outside stuff, not the inside stuff.

Right, it was the outside stuff. And so I went back again a couple weeks later, and I recorded the harmony over the top, which was all of the niggly little things going on in my head that were not being spoken aloud, because I wanted to be transparent, and I wanted to share that part of myself, and I did that through the song.

That's, that's awesome. It's a beautiful song, and as soon as you played it for me I'm like, "That's perfect for this," because it's all about the journey. It's all about, you know, getting through stuff and filtering out those harmonies Yeah ... that are, that are there in the back of our head. All right, that's all that we have time for this week.