ISC
~ Guiding Vision
The
Guiding Vision of the ISC is:
“We
Speak the Voice of All the Worlds”
This was given to us by the community Spirit Helper in a Visioning
ceremony.
Here is the story of why and how it came to be:
Part of our community building has been to create a shared vision
to work with and from. This process began at the first meeting
in Sep 2008, where we had discussions and brainstorming. This
developed further in Nov 2008, where we explored a process called
PATH (Planning Alternative Tomorrows with Hope). Though not shamanic,
it can be Spirit-led and offered a way for the whole group to
put their words and images on the same piece of paper. In this
way we created a many-coloured Vision of what felt important with
the ISC, and this helped us decide what we wanted to make happen
over the coming months to manifest that intention. Below is the
original Vision part of our joint PATH picture.
We
felt the community needed to be both a place of support and nourishment
for ourselves as shamanic practitioners, and a way to help us
in bringing shamanism to the world. In this way we are turned
both inward and outward as a circle, and have as our intention
to help both ourselves, each other and the world around us. Being
in the ISC often also helps us find out more about how to do these
things, and what becomes possible when we work together.
Though the PATH process was powerful and inspiring, we still did
not have one guiding vision statement. To find this, we asked
the Spirit Helper of the community. It told us to do a ceremony,
whereby each person individually brought an image of their own
personal passion - the fire in their heart - to the shared community
altar. A member of the circle was then chosen to journey to the
Spirit Helper and embody it, as the rest drummed and sang her
on her way. The Spirit Helper looked out through her eyes at the
personal images we had offered, and like in a huge mosaic, saw
the bigger picture emerge from the pieces of the puzzle - the
joint Fire made from all our little fires. In our coming together,
it found the ISC Guiding Vision, and this is how it came:
At
first I heard the word “Voice” and I kept hearing
this word. Gradually the rest came, I could feel it, I could
feel our Voice, the voice of the community. It was the voice
of the community and each individual voice, and that every voice
was the voice of the community. And that each voice was the
voice of all the worlds, that’s what we do, that is who
we are, we speak the voice of all the worlds. And at first I
thought, there was a slight moment where I said “we speak
for all the worlds?” and no, it was very clear, the words
were very clear, they were those words - “we speak the
voice of all the worlds”.
The
Spirit Helper told us it was important that the vision was created
together because this will make it strong. It also said that once
we had the Vision, we should trust it, that this is the shared
vision - even though it may mean different things to different
people or if we don’t yet fully understand what it is saying.
Some of us were surprised by it, and it can at times seem mystical,
not immediately clear what it means.
But
it is a vision given to us by the Spirits and it offers opportunity
to work with it shamanically, to go deeper into what it speaks
to each of us, as well as for the community as a whole. By actively
bringing it into our circle when we meet, or when we are on our
own, we come to a continued deepening of its resonances and how
it guides us as a shamanic community.
If you are an ISC member, you can read more on the Forum
about the Guiding Vision - the ritual through which we found it,
different ways of working with it shamanically, and sharing your
own experiences of it.
