From PM to Shamanic Practitioner, order and chaos
Ask an astrologer about my chart and they’ll point out a lot of innate ‘creative tensions’ as my sun conjunct mercury in 12th house virgo squares a stellium of planets in 3rd house sagittarius. One line I got describing that was ‘discerning craftsperson with the soul of a pilgrim storyteller’.
Well, my pilgrim soul was meandering through life in my early twenties – the answers I sought during my Philosophy degree still pending, with some heavy financial pressure on my back. It was the credit crunch and two jobs I’d just landed had fallen through within a few short months so I was getting pretty anxious. I got a marketing job as an Account Manager, which was fine but boring, while the weird techie guys on the other side of the office seemed to be having a lot more fun. I asked to switch to train as a Project Manager in their digital department, and that was the beginning of my first career.
As a PM you ‘walk between the worlds’ of the corporate cosmos. You’re your own thing. The grease between the wheels. Initially I floundered as management, clients and the account teams would flex their muscles and demand stuff I knew my guys would never agree to, then returned back to my teams with pizza as a flimsy bribe that no one bought. They’d eat the pizza though. Over time though, I learned to stand my ground. The demands and ‘forces’ of the industry and the projects became something I learned to harness and to work with, with greater and greater fluency.
PMs are agents of change and transformation. They navigate order and chaos. And there are different approaches to that. I qualified in PRINCE2, a 'waterfall' method. Linear, fully planned from start to finish. Then I trained as a Scrum Master, which is what's used for digital projects and situations where things need to be more fluid. You create some kind of structure out of chaos, but you also harness the chaos. The chaos serves to enhance the potential of change.
Looking back, learning that stuff taught me how much it pays to be in the moment and respond according to what it dictates. The number of hours I spent making long, complex waterfall plans only to have a CEO come up and say the project had been cancelled or significantly changed and I’d have to plan it all over again is a far higher number than I want to remember.
Years later, as I began my wandering period and had to drive off on a hunch with no plan whatsoever, just trusting I’d be guided, I began my training in the opposite extreme. Chaos became a way of life, and I was being asked to Master it. I had to unlearn the part of me that wanted certainty. The part of me that wanted to manage risk. The part of me that tried to justify what was happening in terms of ROI. The rules had changed. When the spiritual energies kick in the whole thing is the leap of faith. No guarantees. No visibility. Just cultivating your connection with something beyond what you thought was you. Liminality. The darkness and confusion of the underworld.
A shamanic ceremony holds elements of structure and elements of chaos. The structure enables the chaos and the chaos enables change. That’s why structure is so important. The rituals, the magickal devices, the degree to which you’re able to hold yourself accountable in how reliably and steadily you show up, the way you’re able to create and hold the container for the work, this is what enables the transformational processes within the ceremony or healing space to do their work.
The structure's great but the real way to create transformation in your healing is to harness the power of chaos within a safe environment to set a new baseline. Prigogine, who won the Nobel for it, described what happens in open systems that are pushed past a stable range: they don't gradually shift. They hold, they hold, they hold — and then they hit a bifurcation point and fall into chaos. And in that chaos, they self-organise into a new structure. A higher one. The old baseline isn't repaired. It's replaced.
That's what's actually happening in a good healing process. The structure — the routine, the pattern, the "this is how I do this" — isn't the thing that's broken. It's doing its job. The problem is that it's too small for what's coming. So the work isn't to fix the structure. It's to let it break, and to be in a space where breaking is survivable. The chaos isn't the failure state. The chaos is where the new baseline is being built. You just can't see it yet because you're in the middle of the fluctuation.
The practitioner's job is being the vessel. Not to prevent the chaos, not to speed it up, not to interpret it in real time. Just to be the stable thing in the room while the system reorganises. That's what "holding space" actually means, mechanically. You're not being supportive. You're being the wall that the chaos bounces off of so it doesn't just scatter. Without it, the system doesn't self-organise. It just falls apart. With it, the person comes out the other side in a shape they couldn't have designed from inside the old one. That's the part that's hard to fake. And it's the reason the container matters more than the technique.
As part of being the vessel I had to unlearn being the ‘doer’ also. Messages, healing energies, directions, they start to flow through you more and more. As you learn to get out of the way, you get used to being a vehicle for these wider aspects of the Self that is looking to heal Itself in the form of ‘someone else’ with you as a mechanism for that. Part of that also meant rewiring people-pleasing habits. No more buying pizzas. That was coming from my own agenda. I’ve learned that being ‘nice’ and being an effective reader and healer are two different things.
I don’t call myself a shaman. Not yet. I stick with ‘shamanic practitioner’ although I’ve been in a very real shamanic initiation process for a long time. But I’m also learning that ‘initiation’ is different for everybody. A traditional shaman would learn rigour from repetitive experience of delivering their work in their community. From the discipline of their training. I’m learning that too. But, while it’s probably the least sexy preparation you could imagine, I’m appreciating the PM years as their own form of initiation. Everyone’s path is unique.
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