Can you talk about issues of personal power in Shamanic Practice and in Buddhist thought?

I think the most fundamental issue that people deal with is power - and how to hold it properly. Issues around power manifest in a myriad of ways - from addiction to autoimmune issues. This is why people come for help.

I have found that working with power and helping people step more fully into congruence with their power is a subtle dance. Some people do not have enough internal structure to hold power and need work to develop those structures. Others have a lot of configurations around their power and need help breaking those configurations down so they can release the power (which is generally bound in wounding) that is buried within the structures. 

I work with students and private clients who come through one of the variety of doors the Foundation of the Sacred Stream offers to the deeper levels of consciousness expansion. The main training programs are Buddhist Psychology, Integrated Energy Medicine, Depth Hypnosis, Earth Wisdom and Applied Shamanism. As a matter of interest to people looking at issues from a shamanic perspective, I have found that the students coming in the door of Applied Shamanism are the ones that are most interested in issues of personal power - and they are often the ones who have the most intricately articulated patterns around power.

I really don't think shamanic practice as it is practiced in the modern environment (and this is a gross generalization that does not apply universally) has enough safeguards to protect the application of power coming in through shamanic practice. Ideally, the inner teachers are mediating this process, but students new to shamanic practice do not always have the tools they need to be able to listen to and interpret information they are given in this regard by the inner teachers.

Tantric Buddhism, which is very like shamanic practice in its catalytic and transformative nature, requires years of learning before practitioners are exposed to some of the same kind of energy fields that people who study shamanism are plunged into early in the training. In traditional shamanic environments, initiatory practices presumably address these issues. But there are many shamanic traditions where the power of the shaman over others is emphasized.  

In the modern environment, I think it is important to avoid distortions around power as much as possible. I think Buddhism provides important tools for the dissolution of the ego and the dedication of the practice to the larger field of consciousness, which the compassionate teachers represent and mediate.  I find combining shamanic practice with Buddhist understanding to be so valuable because Buddhism has so much emphasis on emptiness and service.

By combining Buddhist understandings with shamanic practices in developing practitioners, there is less chance of practitioners confusing their ego-based power structures with those provided by the teachings of the compassionate guides. And there is less possibility of practitioners dedicating the power influx provided by shamanic practice into the further articulation of power structures related to the ego rather than to the transpersonal consciousness represented by the inner teachers.

I think this issue of power is very, very important. Shamanic practice has the possibility of bringing people into profound levels of understanding regarding the nature of consciousness. The pathways to these deeper understandings must be properly managed.

When proper attention is paid to meeting students where they need to be met, it can be determined if they are in a place where their structures around power need to be dissolved in order to achieve a more correct alignment with universal power or if they need to be power filled in order to get to a place where they can actually allow this dissolution.

I see too much "power filling" or "power gathering" going on in shamanic training that does not take this distinction in the needs of the student into consideration. Ideally, processes of extraction and the removal of energetic interference address this problem, but this is not always the case when this subtlety regarding the "power needs" of the student is not fully understood. 

The result is that power coming into the psyche from the sources of the guides can get channeled into augmenting power structures that actually need to be dismantled. When the power of shamanic practice is used to build power structures that are already over-articulated in an ego-driven way, degeneration in shamanic practice is unavoidable.