I haven’t posted here in a long time, for about a year, in fact.
Part of it is because I have been feeling an intense blockage in almost all areas of my life, from work and material gains, to working with and finding a balance with my emotions with regards to a traumatic experience by someone in my life only about five years ago, and finally to just feeling generally blocked.
Part of my path and perhaps genetic makeup probably means that while I aspire to be a shamanist, I’ll probably never be able to really journey, but must instead rely on partial visualization and a sort of half-muddled journey state to work on my inner boundaries and whatever else I am made up of. It may be because of the increasing and accumulative blockage, or it may be I’m simply not predisposed to be a shaman.
And the last part is that I realize I’ve been too frivolous with exploring my path (according to my own standards, that is), and that I may have been culturally and spiritually appropriating from others and perpetuating harmful ideas which the world presently have of them.
For example, I used to draw heavily on “Native American” traditions, but any basic research will show that the “Natives” are not just one people who can be simply and conveniently covered by any umbrella term. They are varied and each group has its own identify. They have also been prosecuted and marginalized for years by others who had sought to subjugate them and are now still appropriating from their culture without thought.
Also, I find myself more and more drawn to the Norse tradition. But because of the potential for appropriation, I’ve hung back, not allowing myself to do much until I’ve managed to find a solution and perhaps a balance in this.
See, I’m a Chinese. And a Chinese who is born and bred in Singapore, at that. Being Chinese, I may claim to have ties to any path from the Chinese tradition, and by extension (since China has been attempting to claim the country anyway), any Mongolian tradition. But I find that extremely forced and again, frivolous. Sure, I may also claim myself a taoist or a buddhist. Not knowing my physical family lineage has nothing to do with it. It is more a deeply spiritual feel, for lack of any better word. So, how do I go about exploring paths and perspectives which are geographically so far and distant from this that I was born into? There have never been any chances for those cultures or spiritual ideas to reach Singapore so that I can even make the remotest claim to have been influenced by them and can incorporate them into my own path and paradigm. And, even if I feel the strongest pulls to both the Norse and Mongolian shamanic ways, so what? It is still appropriation in a sense, because they are not inherently integrated into the Singapore’s group of very limited faith for me to draw upon.
What makes it worse is that I’m a person who’s struggling. I’m struggling not just to break free of the confining and sausage-factory lifeviews which are ingrained into us by this country’s capitalistic lifestyle etc., but I’m also struggling to understand more about how I can juggle everything so that I do not appropriate. Hey, I’m not the most intelligent person I know of, partly because I just was not born like that, and I am sometimes still just sucked back into the popular and herd mindset I grew up with. I can rant about it all I want, but the effect is still the same: that I’m probably never going to be as discerning as the few shamans I know of as acquaintances and whom I admire and respect greatly for their real-ness, and I won’t be as able to think critically as they do.
All in all, it’s quite the muck I’ve been in and am still stuck in. I’ve recently asked for help from someone else, but am also reviewing my beliefs and options so that I can see where I want to go from here.
I may possibly delete all my past posts because I am struck by how shallow they are. But to do that will leave me with nothing to fall back on as references, so perhaps I may just move all of them into a subsidiary page attached to the main blog page.
