Meeting the Piranha People

For me, shamanism is all about working with the uncountable forms of fear that arise as we wander our way through life. Fear is so deceptive because it often dresses up as wisdom or common sense, as creativity, as morality, or as devout faith. It is a Herculean task to stay aware of how we are guided by fears that we don’t want to engage with, and we often fail.

Failing is no actual failure, of course, because the mystics tell us we came into the body specifically to engage with fear. When we were a pre-embodied spirit, what was there to fear?

As death is our teacher of beauty, love and compassion, fear is our teacher of self-awareness. Fear comes to open us to power - if we take the opportunity.

I frequently receive a frantic message or call from someone who is convinced they have an “attachment” – some kind of malevolent spiritual entity that has attached itself to their energy body. The internet has made everyone an expert in the diagnosis of spiritual illnesses, so you don’t have to be online long before you can be convinced that, if you feel just about any emotional discomfort, you probably have an attachment. The attachment has come to you typically because someone with malevolent energy has sent it to you.

So, the person who can’t stop feeling icky about the ex-boyfriend believes he has sent some kind of attachment. The person who had a frightening experience while taking magic mushrooms in their living room is convinced they have an attachment. A scary person lives down the hall and is sending attachments to me.

This is a difficult topic because any of the above examples could be actual attachments. The shamanic tradition is clear that there are free-floating energies in the world that are looking for a home or looking for food, and they can see us as both. However, just as the Christian tradition has urged people to project their fears outward onto the devil, in neo-pagan-urban shamanism, we often do the same thing – project fears outward onto some “attachment.”

A projection is an internal issue that we project outward, like a movie, onto something external. We are each other’s projection screen all the time. “That person is so arrogant” nearly always means “I am afraid I am arrogant.” Psychologists affirm that the level of passion with which I despise, fear – or admire – something is directly proportional to my fear that I am the actual owner of that energy. So, 99% of “attachments” are likely my own projections.

“How dare you say that? The suffering I feel is real. This thing came to me. I don’t control it! I’ve gone to nine different healers of every modality, and no one can get rid of it!”

Shamanism is a path of taking personal responsibility, of learning from the times we falter. Learning from mistakes is how we build our power. The new age obsession with attachments is rife with what the shamans call the spiritual parasite of martyrdom. It is far, far less likely that something has attached itself to me, and far more likely that it is I who am attached to the drama and the distraction of being a noble victim.

Go back through the examples above of what people call attachments (the ex- boyfriend, etc.) and ask “what fear, inside me might dress up as what I want to call an attachment, in order for me to escape responsibility for my life?”

Attachments can be fairly easily cleared from your field but won’t be if you are attached to the drama of having an attachment, especially if you don’t do the follow up practices required to build your power.

Our world is deep in the throes of martyrdom, which, according to shamans, is one of the classic spiritual parasites that eat our life force. We are all given total permission nowadays to identify our suffering as someone else’s fault, call it evil and work to eradicate it – to force others to stop being evil.

My definition of evil is “unaddressed, human unconscious fear, projected outward.” Evil only comes into this world through human beings, not through any other creature. Evil is a human act of asking someone or something else to carry my unconscious fear, and then giving myself permission to kill them for it, metaphorically or physically. I hope I can kill my fear by killing them.

A year and a half ago, in one of my trainings in Peru, I was at the end of an eight-day dieta with a powerful plant in the sanango family. It’s a “master” plant that you work with after you have already worked deeply with many previous plants that build an inner matrix of power and protection. The plant was utterly cosmic, taking me on many astounding journeys into endless oceans of light I could never imagine on my own, and it showed me, day after day, how I, too, was made of pure light. 

But after a few days of glory, it took me to an otherworldly room to meet several beautiful, welcoming beings that I perceived as awesome cosmic teachers. As I talked with them, I began to realize that their intention was to eat me. Their radiant faces became the faces of Piranhas with red Scottish hair, eyes bulging over immense jaws lined with glistening teeth, insatiable for the taste of human flesh. I was flooded with intense fear, and became trapped in that dreamy spirit world, flailing to keep the several piranha people off me, hysterically crying out to the Spirit of Tobacco to rescue me. It took a tremendous struggle to free myself from their jaws and claws as Tobacco pulled me by my legs out of the spirit world and back into my tent in the jungle where I was dreaming.

Utterly distraught, I bolted from my tent, hyperventilating, into the jungle and began smoking myself with tobacco to rid me of that death energy, to put up a hard protective wall between me and those evil beings. I spent the day in a teary haze of fear. And a deep sense of failure – that I hadn’t spotted the truth soon enough, that I had allowed myself to be seduced by their beauty. I was stupid and naïve.

Later, I told my teacher about the experience. He listened with no reaction. I wanted him to give me some magic charm to say, a mantra, or a power song, or some technique to make sure this would never, ever happen again.

He said quietly, “Next time let them eat you to see what happens.”

I didn’t like this answer at all. I was very mad at him. I wanted him to affirm that I had been predated upon by beings from the lower astral plane - hungry ghosts - and that I had triumphed through my solid relationship with the tobacco spirit, and I did a good job getting back alive. That’s a good story that I can tell again and again, and makes me feel pretty special.

Every religious tradition makes room for the “wrathful deities.” In Buddhism, the wrathful deities are manifestations, or the “other face” of the enlightened being, including the Buddha himself. Green Tara of total compassion takes some terrifying wrathful forms as well. On and on it goes across cultures.

The job of the wrathful deities is to destroy the obstacles to enlightenment. They stomp and roar to cleanse the traveler of the obstacles – ignorance, pride, impatience, greed, self-deprecation, and other forms of fear that hide inside our thoughts. Those take form as our unconscious habits that limit us and hold us back. Shamanic language for this could be that fearsome visitors arrive when you are ready to actually make your bid for the next level of power. They shake you loose from old habits, or if you would rather stay attached to them, the wrathful deities protect you from stepping into power that you aren’t ready for.  

It's possible our world right now is staring into the bulging eyes of the wrathful deities. The “shift of consciousness” we all talk about cannot come only in beautiful form – it is always accompanied by the wrathful deities who are there to assist in the shaking off of the old structures.

For over a year, I’ve wrested mightily with that experience in Peru with the Piranha people. I’ve concluded that the experience was an opportunity offered to me by the Sanango plant to shed another layer of ego. For the first few days of the dieta, it showed me its face of boundless cosmic wonder. Then, the other face. It was the ego that was terrified of the piranha folk. Maybe what they wanted to eat was my safe thinking, my habitual self-deprecation, my resistance to greater knowing.

I think about the times in my training that I have let the powers eat me or kill me. Particularly, 30 years go, when I had a three-month long nightly terror ride of tormentors in various shapes come to me every night. Finally, I was grabbed from behind by a large man with flaming red hair who held me in choke hold. His arms were thicker than my legs, so there was no getting free. He whispered into my ear in a thick Scottish accent, “Let go, Laddie, just relax into it and let me kill you.” I did. I died. I woke up from the dream. The three-month terror ride ended, and I entered a new stage in my life and shamanic work.

May every person be assisted in shaking off their old ignorance, fear and habits by the wrathful, protecting deities. May the world be renewed with their help.