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The shaman in the forest jungle (or in the city) often first receives his or her calling through an illness. This illness will lead him to someone who is already a shaman and who can guide him through his illness. Along the way the shaman will learn about herbs, divination and many other things which, in time, will begin to lead to personal healing. But by then he has learnt to serve the ancestors, the forest spirits, and any person who comes for help. One of the shaman's main tasks is to make the environment an agreeable place for the ancestors. He discovers that if he fails to keep his environment beautiful and happy his ancestors begin to leave and bad spirits take their places. His environment stops operating at good levels and begins to fail. By maintaining the environment the shaman's world remains whole.
Similarly the therapist. Through a personal illness or the struggle with a deep inner imbalance the therapist is drawn into the world of painful minds and emotions. She is also in the process of discovering that the only real way to help oneself out of one's own inner difficulties is to help others. Through helping and healing others she helps and heals herself.
The artist is learning how to turn personal or collective Pain into Art. He or she is also trying to make sense of an unseen world and does so by reshaping the material in new and exciting ways which capture the unseen and make it visible to others.
Part of the fear of entering the jungle out there, or the world of the mind inside, or the artistic reshaping of the material, is that one has to - in part if not altogether - abandon the conventional world to enter it. It's a journey which takes one on strange paths which will always lead places, but may not necessarily take one to the places the conventional part of one's mind thinks one should go. One treads these paths with fear and faith. It's a journey which brings material understanding and how the material is connected to the spirit, although it may or may not bring material rewards as the conventional world knows them.
