In Bushman Shaman, Bradford Keeney details his initiation into the shamanic tradition of the Kalahari Bushmen, regarded by some scholars as the oldest living culture on earth. Keeney sought out the Bushmen while in South Africa as a visiting professor of psychotherapy. He had known of the Kalahari "trance dance," wherein the dancers' bodies shake uncontrollably as part of the healing ceremony. Keeney was drawn to this tradition in the hope that it might explain and provide a forum for his own ecstatic "shaking," which he had first experienced at the age of 19 and had tried to suppress and hide throughout his adult life.

For more than a dozen years Keeney danced with Bushmen shamans in communities throughout Botswana and Namibia, until finally becoming fully initiated into their doctoring and spiritual ways. Through his rediscovery of the "rope to God" in a Bushman shaman dream, he offers readers accounts of his shamanic world travels and the secrets of the soul he learned along the way. In Bushman Shaman Keeney also reveals his work with shamans from Japan, Tibet, Bali, Thailand, Australia, and North and South America, providing new understandings of other forms of shamanic spiritual expression and integrating the practices of all these traditions into a sacred circle of one truth.

Autorentext

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned scholar, therapist, and shaman who has led expeditions throughout the world to study cultural healing practices. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and is the author of Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance, Shamanic Christianity: The Direct Experience of Mystical Communion, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement, and the editor of the Profiles of Healing series.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

1--The Big Love
2--Rapture in Missouri
3--Turning Lines into Circles
4--Starting Over
5--Meeting the Bushmen
6--Shooting the Arrows of Love
7--Surviving the Ordeals of Spirit
8--Among the Zulu
9--Guiding Kalahari Star
10--Working the Spirit
11--Kalahari Homecoming
12--Initiation Night
13--Caribbean Spirit Traveling
14--Stinging Truth
15--Tested in Bali
16--This Little Light of Mine
17--Ropes to God
18--The Gods Are Crazy
19--Trickster Shaman
20--Mending the Strings
21--Circles of Love
22--Seen by the Original Ones
23--Say Amen, Somebody