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Practice

The Practices

Eleven practices, each given in its universal form and through the Celtic lens, for the beginner and the experienced alike.

Everything on this page can be done by one person with a drum recording, a notebook and a patch of ground. None of it requires belief, permission or purchase. Each practice is given in its universal shamanic form first, and then through the Celtic lens, so that you can see clearly which is which. Begin with the first three and let the rest unfold over a year of seasons.

The Shamanic Journey

The heart of the practice. A deliberate movement of attention, carried by the drum, into one of the Three Worlds, with a clear intention and a deliberate return.

  1. Darken the room, lie down, cover your eyes. Have paper ready.
  2. Speak your intention aloud, simply: “I am going to the Lower World to meet a helping spirit.”
  3. Start the drum or recording: a steady beat of four to seven strikes a second for fifteen to twenty minutes, then a call-back.
  4. See a real place you know where the earth opens. Enter it. Go down (or up) until you emerge somewhere else.
  5. Look for what comes to meet you. Ask it, politely, whether it is your helper. Ask your question. Accept what you are given.
  6. At the call-back, thank your helper, return by the same route, and open your eyes. Write it down before you speak.
The Celtic LensEnter through a holy well, the door of a mound, the hollow of an old hawthorn or the cave under the headland. Expect the Otherworld to be sideways as often as down. Greet whoever you meet with the old courtesy: name yourself, state your business, accept no food you have not asked about, and bring something back for someone else.

Drum, Voice and Rhythm

Monotonous rhythm at theta frequency is the oldest and most reliable door into the shamanic state. The frame drum is the tool of the modern revival; the voice is the tool of the Celtic sources.

Practise drumming for yourself until the beat becomes automatic and your attention can leave your hands. A rattle is a good companion and travels better. Then practise without the drum: a repeated chant on a single phrase, a rocking motion, or simply the rhythm of your own breath counted in threes.

The Celtic LensThe filidh did not drum; they chanted. Try a single line in Irish, Gaelic or Welsh, repeated until it stops meaning and starts carrying: Beannacht ort, a blessing on you; Is mise, I am; or the Awen, sung long on three breaths. The rhythm of rowing in the immrama is a journey rhythm. So is the rhythm of walking a well-round.

Land, Sea and Sky: A Daily Orientation

Before any other practice, know where you are. This five-minute practice, done outdoors at the same spot each day, builds the relationship with place that everything else rests on.

Stand still. Feel the land beneath you and name it: the rock, the soil, the hill you are on, the nearest standing stone or old tree. Turn to the nearest water and greet it: the stream, the lake, the sea in the direction you know it lies. Look up and greet the sky and whatever weather it brings. Then put your hand over your heart and acknowledge the fire at the centre where the three meet. Give thanks. Go about your day.

The Celtic LensThis is the three-realm cosmology of the Táin as a living practice. Over weeks, the spirits of your particular land, water and sky become known to you, and your journeys will begin to open in the places where you stand.

Working with the Ancestors

Every shamanic tradition sits on the shoulders of the dead. The Celtic one more than most: the mounds are tombs, the Otherworld is where the dead go, and the year begins with their feast.

Learn your names as far back as you can, and then learn the names of the land where you live, whoever lived there. Keep a small place, a shelf or a stone, with a candle and a bowl of water for the well-remembered dead. Speak to them. Journey to meet an ancestor who walked with the spirits, in your own line or in the line of the land, and ask for their blessing on your practice.

The Celtic LensThe Irish word dúchas holds both heritage and native place; you inherit from both your blood and your ground. At Samhain set the dumb supper, a plate and a chair for those who have gone. Visit a cemetery, a cairn or a passage tomb and sit. The triple spiral at Newgrange was cut by hands five thousand years dead; those hands are ancestors to everyone who stands before it.

Pilgrimage and the Turas

Walking to a sacred place with intention is perhaps the oldest Celtic spiritual practice still unbroken. Pattern days at wells, the climb of Croagh Patrick and the rounds at island shrines never stopped.

Choose a place. Learn its story, its saint, its god, its geology and its current custodian. Travel slowly; the approach is part of the ceremony. Arrive and sit before you do anything. Walk the rounds sunwise if that is the custom there. Leave an offering that will rot or dissolve, or no offering at all. Journey at the site if it is safe and private to do so, or at home that night. Say thank you on leaving, and tell no one what was given to you until you have lived with it.

The Celtic LensOur Sacred Places guide covers nine of the great sites, and the etiquette that keeps them whole. But the nearest well, hill or old tree is also a place of power, and the one you can visit every week will teach you more than Newgrange visited once.

Seasonal Ceremony

The Celtic year is a wheel of fires. Marking the turning points, alone or in company, keeps your practice in time with the land rather than with the clock.

At each festival: clean the hearth or the altar; light a new flame from a natural source if you can; speak the names of the season; make an offering of the season’s food and drink to the land and the ancestors; journey to ask what this season asks of you; and share food with others. The whole thing can take twenty minutes or an evening.

The Celtic LensThe Wheel of the Year page gives the dates, the stories and the customs of all eight festivals. The four fire festivals are the old Gaelic quarter days and the heart of the matter; the solstices and equinoxes connect us to the Neolithic builders who aligned Newgrange and Loughcrew to the sun.

Healing Work: Soul Retrieval and Extraction

The shaman’s classic tasks: restoring power that has been lost and removing what does not belong. Profound, effective and not for the beginner to attempt on others.

Learn these methods in person from experienced teachers, after you can journey reliably for yourself, and practise them with consent, clear agreements and supervision. For your own healing, journey to ask your helping spirits to restore what you have lost or to show you what you are carrying that is not yours. Then follow their instructions in ordinary life.

The Celtic LensIn folk tradition the bean feasa went to the fairies to bargain for one who had been taken, and drew out the fairy dart with herbs and charms. The Dagda’s cauldron restores the dead to life; Ceridwen’s brews new being from old. Think of healing as a negotiation with the Otherworld rather than a raid upon it.

Dreaming and Incubation

Deliberate dreaming in darkness is the native Celtic form of vision. Before the drum was borrowed, the filidh lay in the dark with their cloaks over their heads and waited.

Before sleep, set a question. Lie in complete darkness with your palms over your eyes for a time, repeating the question until it becomes rhythm rather than words. Sleep. On waking, before moving, recall and write. Repeat on three nights. The practice can be extended to a full day of darkness and fasting under supervision.

The Celtic LensThis is imbas forosnai as described in Cormac’s Glossary, minus the raw meat. Martin Martin in 1703 described Hebridean bards composing in dark cells with a stone on the belly and a cloak over the head. Sleeping on a mound or at a well on the eve of a festival to receive a dream is attested across the Celtic world and is still done quietly at some sites.

Allies: Trees, Animals and Plants

The practitioner works by relationship. In the Celtic world those relationships are with particular species, each with a story, a name in the old languages and a place in the year.

Choose one tree near you and visit it through a year. Learn its Irish or Welsh name and its lore. Sit with your back against it; journey into its roots and its crown. Do the same with one wild animal you actually see, not one you have only read about. For plants, learn the folk uses of yarrow, mugwort, vervain, meadowsweet and St John’s wort, and never ingest anything you cannot identify with certainty.

The Celtic LensOak for strength and the druids, hazel for wisdom, rowan for protection, hawthorn for the fairy door, yew for the dead, apple for the Otherworld. Salmon for knowledge, stag for the wild and the horned god, crane for secrets, hare for the shapeshifter, raven for prophecy, horse for sovereignty. Meet them as persons with histories, not as symbols.

Poetry and Song as Trance Technology

In the Celtic world the poet was the seer. Rhythm, repetition and praise were not decoration; they were the method by which the Otherworld was approached and the fire in the head was kindled.

Keep a journey book and write each journey as a poem, however rough, in the first person present: “I am going down through the well.” Learn one traditional Gaelic or Welsh song or prayer by heart and sing it daily. Compose a praise-song for your local land, naming its features in order as the Dindshenchas names Ireland’s.

The Celtic LensTaliesin’s “I have been in many shapes” and Amergin’s “I am a wind on the sea” are shamanic self-declarations in poetic form. The Carmina Gadelica shows how rhythmical blessing was woven into kindling the fire and milking the cow. Read the essay A Fire in the Head for more.

Threshold Practice

The Celtic Otherworld is met at thresholds: the shore between land and sea, the dusk between day and night, the mist between near and far, the door between in and out. Learning to stand in the between is a practice in itself.

Go to a real threshold at a threshold time: the strand at dawn, a field gate at dusk, a river ford at the turn of the tide, a hilltop as the fog comes in. Stand exactly on the line. Breathe. Do not journey; simply attend, with all your senses, to what is neither one thing nor the other. Stay until something shifts. Step through deliberately when you leave.

The Celtic LensThe two great Celtic threshold nights are Samhain and Beltane, when the doors of the mounds stand open. Manannán’s mist is the veil itself. The strand, where land, sea and sky meet, is where Cú Chulainn fought the waves and where the sí ride out; it is the thinnest place in the tradition and it is free to visit.

Before You Begin

Read the safe practice notes. Journey in a safe, private place. Keep early journeys short. Write everything down. Find a companion or a circle to share with; the sharing is half the practice.