The advertisement contains feathers from no named bird, a drum from no named people, a jungle without inhabitants and the promise of “timeless wisdom.” The retreat leader’s lineage is described as personal awakening. The ceremony has a trademark.
Every omission performs work.
No language, community, territory, history, authority or permission interrupts the consumer’s access. Difference has been cleared away so that an aesthetic can appear universal.
The category shamanism is contested because it may point toward cross-cultural comparisons while also erasing the histories and living authority of radically different peoples. Responsible discussion must preserve that disagreement rather than resolve it for branding convenience.
Kehoe: the category is the problem
Anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe’s critical work warns against the generic Western category of shamanism and the romantic projections attached to it. Practices from specific northern Asian contexts were expanded into a global type, then used to interpret unrelated Indigenous religions through colonial expectations.
From this perspective, comparison can create the object it claims merely to observe. Diverse healers, ritual specialists, diviners and religious authorities become “shamans” because an outsider has selected altered states, drums or spirit relations as the defining features.
The advertisement is an extreme version of that operation. It removes community so that technique can be sold.
Harvey: relationship before extraction
Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey works on Indigenous religions and animism with attention to living relational traditions. His contribution shifts the focus from isolated belief or technique toward relationships among persons, other-than-human beings, place and community as understood within particular worlds.
This matters because a consumer may ask, “Which practice produces the experience?” while the tradition understands practice through obligations and relations that can’t be separated from it.
Respect isn’t achieved by adding an acknowledgment to extracted ceremony. It may require accepting that some knowledge isn’t available, some acts require authority, and an outsider’s desired transformation isn’t the central purpose of the tradition.
No claim follows that all Indigenous peoples share one relational worldview. Specificity remains the ethic.
Winkelman: comparison may still reveal patterns
Anthropologist Michael Winkelman takes a comparative biocultural approach to practices grouped under shamanism, altered states and healing. This position argues that cross-cultural patterns can be studied and related to psychobiological capacities.
Winkelman’s comparative approach sits in tension with Kehoe’s critique. Similar forms can be worth studying while the differences between their histories, meanings and responsibilities remain substantial. We lose something when we make one argument cancel the other.
The responsible question is what level of claim the evidence supports. Human beings across cultures enter altered states, use rhythm, enact ritual and relate to images. That recurrence doesn’t establish one global system, authorize borrowing or prove that similar outward practices carry the same meaning.
Biocultural comparison and cultural specificity aren’t easily reconciled. Keeping the tension visible is more rigorous than choosing whichever scholar validates a preferred experience.
A practice with its own roots
I AWAKE isn’t a shamanic lineage.
The I AWAKE Method brings together reading, writing, my recorded guidance, sensory attention and imagination. It is my contemporary work, informed by named sources and developed through its own books and experiences. It doesn’t teach Indigenous ceremony or confer ritual authority, and it doesn’t rely on borrowed sacred symbols to make the experience meaningful. In the recordings, my voice is accompanied by music composed especially for the I AWAKE universe.
In the The Hidden Hero’s Journey™, Circle is the threshold into that work. A deliberate act may mark a beginning, an ending or a choice. Its meaning comes from your participation and context; it doesn’t claim authority from an Indigenous ceremony.
Reality Revealed, the I AWAKE deck, offers 78 cards and a companion book for reflection. It isn’t an oracle or an Indigenous object. You can consider its images through their own authorship, sources and ethics. An image may stir an association or sharpen a question; it doesn’t take responsibility for your choices.
What respectful imaginal practice requires
Name sources. If a concept comes from Jungian analysis, ritual studies, theatre or a specific philosophy, say so.
Do not rename a culturally specific act as a universal technique after removing its obligations.
Do not use generic sacred aesthetics to manufacture authority.
Do not teach ceremony without authorization, context and responsibility.
Distinguish recurrence from sameness. The existence of drumming in different places doesn’t make every drum equivalent.
Allow image and ritual to matter without claiming an unbroken ancient lineage or scientific proof of metaphysical worlds.
Return to the imagined retreat advertisement. You can ask who’s teaching, what they’re offering, where it comes from and what relationship they have to the people whose traditions they name.
I AWAKE reflections bring together original imagery, writing, sound and deliberate acts that mark a beginning or ending. They’re educational and experiential. They aren’t Indigenous ceremonies or shamanic training, and they don’t claim a culturally specific lineage.
Those questions don’t take the meaning out of an experience. They let you choose what you’re entering with your eyes open.
