The dance of attunement as played out in early human experience is the topic of Daniel Stern’s book The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Stern defines attunement as the “performance of behaviors that express the quality of feeling of a shared affect state without imitating the exact behavioral expression of the inner state” (142). The energetic aspects of attunement are called vitality affects, and vitality affects are present in all behavior. The ability to track and attune with vitality affects permit one person to “‘be with’ another in the sense of sharing likely inner experiences on an almost continuous basis” (157). While Stern limits his exploration of attunement to the early development of the child and the dilemmas that emerge with the onset of language, I will take his concepts and extrapolate them to the world of shamanism and illustrate how these principles of attunement are used in shamanic practice.

The Shaman’s ability to attune to another sentient being, along with their capacity to align with the elements of nature, form the basis of shamanic practice. Stern speaks of our capacity for amodal perception, and it is precisely this fluid perception that is characteristic of a Shaman. Stern illustrates how the onset of language brings with it the loss of this conscious amodal perception. Using the example of a child’s perception of a patch of yellow sunlight on the wall, the child can move between various sensory channels that experience the patch of sunlight (sparkle, warmth, intensity, etc.) without fixating on any one modality. It is not until someone says, “Oh look at that patch of yellow sunlight,” that the child is then forced to isolate the experience to the visual. “Language can thus fracture amodal global experience. A discontinuity in experience is introduced …” (176).

Stern claims that a divergence or slippage between world knowledge and word knowledge forces a space between interpersonal experience as lived, as represented, “... and it is exactly across this space that the connections and associations that constitute neurotic behavior may form” (182). He also refers to this slippage between experience and words regarding the self, the sense of a continuity of coherence in our sense of being that gets split.

Yet periodically some transient sense of this experience is revealed.....with the breathtaking effect of sudden realization that your existential and verbal selves can be light years apart, that the self is unavoidably divided by language (181).

Stern goes on to say that “it is little wonder we need art so badly to bridge these gaps in ourselves” (182). I believe that the Shaman is the consummate artist in this respect. These gaps in one’s sense of self can manifest as neurotic behavior, depression, emptiness, numbness, unhappiness, et al, and it is through shamanic skills such as pattern tracing, shape-shifting, and soul retrieval that the shaman supports the healing of these gaps.

I recently attended a workshop on advanced soul retrieval and had the opportunity to practice the healing of these gaps with a client. I had never met this woman and was given her name the day before the session. In shamanic practice, aligning and attuning with oneself and the elements before seeing a client is critical. As part of my preparation, I first called in the seven directions (east, south, west, north, mother earth, father sky and the within) and in aligning with these directions I am aligning with the power of the elements (fire, earth, water, air, and our divine nature). It is precisely this alignment that allows access to the fluidity of what Stern refers to as our amodal perception. For me, this attunement creates a felt sense of open space (air), fluidity (water), connection (earth), and conscious awareness (fire). In addition, I spent time clearing and creating a sacred space in which we would work, so that when the client arrived and began to attune to the environment, she would feel comfortable, relaxed, safe and welcomed.

When my client arrived and we got settled in our work space, I began to shape-shift and use a method known as pattern tracing. I surrendered my typical awareness and opened to the many other channels of perception. As I began to ask her questions, I was listening to her words more as a background to some of the other modalities. For example, when I asked her if there was anything in particular that she would like to focus on, she said that something she had been noticing lately was a little nagging feeling about her confidence in herself. While she is very successful at what she does and she knows that she is very good at it, she said there is this little feeling of doubt that creeps in occasionally.

As she was saying this, I was watching her physical movements. While describing her sense of confidence and knowing that she is good at what she does, her right hand was gesturing toward her throat chakra. When she described her small feeling of doubt, her left thumb and forefinger came together in a gesture of “itty-bitty,” her head tilted to one side, and her gaze went upward. My interpretation of what was being communicated, was a lack of congruence between the self that acts and interacts in the world, and her sense of an inner self, or in Stern’s model, a lack of alignment between the existential self and the verbal self. The throat chakra is the center of expression, and I got the sense that she expresses herself in the world very well, which she later confirmed.

Simultaneously, I was tuning into my own body and noticing that as she was describing the feeling that something was not quite right, I started feeling a strange vibration in my lower three chakras. My throat chakra felt pretty open, but the first, second and third chakras were activated. What I know from my own work, is that what I was feeling in these chakras was fear, and my sense was that what needed to happen for her to feel more aligned, was to ground her sense of self in the lower chakras, and that we needed to investigate what fear was preventing this from happening. In pattern tracing, I am tracking and attuning with my client in an effort to help her sort through where she is out of alignment, what is the root cause, and what healing is needed.

According to Stern, feeling states that are never attuned likely end up isolated and underground, especially those at the level of core and intersubjective relatedness, such as the sense of a core self. “Such experiences then simply continue underground, nonverbalized, to lead an unnamed (and to that extent only, unknown) but nonetheless very real existence” (175).

The Shaman journeys into this unknown territory. I believe the very real existence that these energies are leading, in an isolated and underground state, are the very energies that end up manifesting by way of wreaking havoc in our worldly existence. In shamanism, this is known as soul loss, and can take numerous forms. As a way of illustrating this, another issue that was described by my client was that she was feeling completely overwhelmed with her personal relationships and this was creating a lot of stress. She believed that she needed to shield herself from any anger and hostility she was experiencing.

In shamanic practice, journey space is the place in which we can receive information that will serve the client at that particular time, and support them in their healing. When a Shaman enters journey space, they are entering non-ordinary states of reality. We access the many domains of amodal perception and the information that is conveyed is rarely literal. The language of journey space is typically communicated in symbols and metaphors, and these will have specific meaning for the client because it is the client’s landscape or inner universe that we are navigating. For me, journeying for a client is similar to Stern’s notion of interpersonal communion, which he defines as a form of relating to another sentient being created by attunement. While he might limit this sense of communion to physical behaviors and emotions, the Shaman is aware of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies of the client.

When I entered journey space for my client, I felt immediately paralyzed. I could not move to upper world, nor down into lower world. I was stuck in middle world and felt like I was under siege. I believe this was a metaphor for what my client was experiencing in her life. With my awareness, I created a bubble of protection in order to block the onslaught, and then we were able to proceed with the journey. In this journey, I recovered two soul parts of my client that had been fragmented or split off at different points in her life. One soul part had to do with her feeling of being overwhelmed at a very early age, and the other part with her will. Interestingly, when I asked the soul part why she left, I felt a blow to my third chakra which is the will center. In the integration phase of our session, we talked about how these things related to the issues that were playing out in her life, what insights the journey gave us into the original wound, and how this could support her healing.

In my exploration of shamanic practice, I often question what is truly happening. Encountering and communicating with power animals, helping spirits, and lost soul parts can seem pretty bizarre to my normal awareness. Yet, in my study of shamanism, I can not deny my experience of these other modes of perception. I think Stern’s argument that language can fragment and isolate our perception to one modality is fascinating.

Stern goes further and says that the numerous messages in various channels are being fragmented by language into a “hierarchy of accountability/ deniability [his clash between verbal and nonverbal messages]” and that is what becomes deniable to others becomes more and more deniable to the self (181). It is possible that what is happening is a remembering or a reclaiming of our original capacities for amodal perception. By my aligning and attuning to these other perceptions, the client also has an opportunity to resonate with these frequencies and reclaim whatever might have been lost to their conscious awareness. It is similar dynamic to what happens when a spiritual teacher gives a transmission of a particular state, for example, the true nature of mind. What is this person really doing? I believe that the teacher becomes that state through attunement, and then the student has the opportunity to attune to the teacher, sense that state and experience it for themselves.

As Stern summarizes, with the advent of language and symbolic thinking, we have the tools to either distort or transcend reality. We have the capacity to create expectations in opposition to past experience, or create a wish contrary to current facts.

They can represent someone or something in terms of symbolically associated attributes (for example bad experiences with mother) that in reality were never experienced all together at any one time but that can be pulled together from isolated episodes into a symbolic representation (the ‘bad mother’ or ‘incompetent me’) (182).

Stern claims that it is through these symbolic condensations that reality becomes distorted and neurotic constructs form. I believe that it is through these neurotic constructs and distorted perceptions that Shamans can journey in reverse, reclaiming, aligning, and attuning to the deepest truths of our Being.

Sources

Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. Basic Books, 2000.