“Bradford Keeney is a man on a mission . . .
The implications of his work are staggering.“
CONSCIOUS DANCE
Shaking medicine is the trembling, shaking, and quaking associated with the experience of ecstatic bliss. This major transformative experience is an entry into the numinous – the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Arguably all religions and pre-religions initially felt this ecstasy and regarded it as an awakening of the original mysteries, the most extraordinary experiences possible for a human being.
The emergence of social institutions to house ecstatic rapture - whether as temples, ashrams, churches, synagogues, medicine societies, shaman guilds, or pagan societies - resulted in the quieting of the originating experience in exchange for uniform narrative understanding and maintenance of social hierarchy. The ecstatic experience was sacrificed for normalized belief and group conformity. This was true for shamanism as well as the major world religions.
In the sociology of religion this social process is called the “routinization” of the founding charismatic experience. Wild ecstatic experience is replaced by standardized ritual that overturns spontaneous play and improvisation. Guided imagery, clichéd patter, and loyalty oaths overtake raw unadulterated creativity, free expression, and heightened emotions.
The shaking traditions propose that we most deeply thirst and hunger for an ongoing immersion in ecstatic experience. The source of this shaking bliss is what the Ju/'hoan Bushmen call n/om. They wisely never give a totalizing definition of n/om, but respectfully allude to it being a mystery responsible for bringing forth life’s vitality and acknowledge that its root is open-ended limitless love. When you have n/om, it makes you shake with ecstatic delight. For members of textually constrained cultures, it is often difficult to loosen the cognitive habits and tightly constructed belief systems that inhibit fully awakened feelings.
We rarely are encouraged to stand under the sky with raw and naked presence, available to be hit by ecstatic lightning. Even most shamanic cultures, old and new, became “tamed” and conducted in a calm routinized manner. The shamans of old were wild, unpredictable, and appeared out of control. No one, including the shaman, knew what would happen in a ceremony. The so-called “spirits” took over. The same is true of early religious ceremonies. Then Buddhism chased out the Bon shamans, Christians went after their ecstatics, and shamans became reduced to hereditary entitlement or homogenized, standardized training.
Shaking medicine is a call for wild ecstatic experience. It is shamanism, spirituality, religion, and transformational performance in its fully improvised elemental form. Ecstatic shaking radically encourages the practice of wild shamanism, wild religion, wild spirituality, and wild transformative performance. This does not refer to trivial, irresponsible, or unethical behavior. The deep wild involves hyper-complexity, the greater mind of nature that holds our psyche as a small part of a more encompassing interdependent though always-changing network of relations.
We can choose to move toward the unpredictable, unknowable, and untamable wild. The sacred lives in the wild. The sacred constitutes the wild. The problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain, domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long.
Consider a re-entry into the wild. Become a wild shaman, a wild pagan, a wild Christian, a wild Buddhist, a wild Jew, a wild agnostic, a wild artist, a wild performer, a wild whatever you want to call it because the name is less important than the experience of being wild in this natural though always uncommon way of giving priority to mystery over mastery.
In these challenging and complex postmodern times, shaking medicine is arguably best held by the aesthetic freedom granted by the performing arts. Some explorers of the human spirit are walking away from overly rigid institutions, explanatory frameworks, and reductionist training (whether spiritual, therapeutic, or educational) in order to invent a shape-shifting stage and ceremonial ground for the liberating performance of wild ecstatic transformation.
