Core Shamanism Does Not Offer Tools To Connect Us To Nature

First Published 22 November 2025

Edited 17 January 2026

"Sit Under A Tree & Ask It What it Wants From Me"

These posts are not about individual beliefs or healers who use offbeat methods to help people. My critique is of people who are selling a cultish belief systems with no foundation in reality that deny climate science and reality. 

I am wondering if I am giving these Plastic Shaman too much time? Maybe, or maybe they need to be exposed for their nonsense.

Its actually not cultural appropriation to use the term shaman because it has no meaning. It is a term stolen from an indigenous culture whose spiritual identity has been wiped out by extractivism & genocide. It is a term imposed neocolonially by anthropologists and everyone else onto indigenous people.

The term Shaman, and the contemporary Shamanic Practitioner has its roots in Romanian fascist "Traditionalism" & white western anthropology, which have stripped indigenous spirituality of cultural relevance down to core rites, rituals and individualism. Turning it into a framework which has been very attractive to every New Age woo wallah with power delusions and an eye on a fast buck.

Michael Harner asserts that Core Shamanism helps practitioners connect to the web of life, but has not offered any methods or tools to make the connection. So what happens is we end up with intellectualised over jargonised descriptions of nature and a rejection of skills that actuall bring us into deep connection with nature.

Core Shamanism has nothing to teach us about the ancient English landscape. 

Tyson Yunkaporter's book Right Story, Wrong Story, and "Aboriginal knowing". "The children are playing in a bend in the river where there are no crocodiles, but tomorrow the crocs will be there."

This isn't Aboriginal knowing, this is survival knowledge, anyone whose connection to nature is beyond the superficial knows that in some environments we are  prey.

The crocodile is a clever fellow, they know that many animals are habitual and complacent. There may be no Salties in the river now, but later or tomorrow they will lie in wait expecting a return visit.

A friend of mine's brother and friend spent several weeks camping and setting a fish trap in Northern Australia. They set the trap in the same place everyday. One day they went to check the trap and noticed a new rock had appeared overnight, a rock with eyes. It was a 4m Saltwater Crocodile.

There are countless incidents of non-indigenous Australians behaviour leading to dangerous situations, or being eaten by Saltwater Crocodiles. Crocodiles are highly intelligent dinosaurs.

So no, its not indigenous knowing, it is connection to nature and knowing we are prey in an environment we share with large intelligent predators.

Some Shamanic Practitioners argue that we dont have the language to connect to the Web Of Life. Robin Wall-Kimmerer seems to have no problem with language that connects us to nature eloquently through her writing encouraging us to go outside and imerse ourselves in it. 

Mindfulness in Nature

Mindfulness and its teaching is so widespread now that you can learn it from YouTube or do a 10 day Vipassna Meditation retreat for a donation (if you can afford it) or come back and do Dana(service) for other meditators at Darma Dipa in Herefordshire. Its not about holding concentration, its about observing the breath, mostly in the nostrils. 

By stripping the ethnoculture from "Shamanism", essantialist Core Shamanism is seperated from nature. This must be deeply confusing for people who come to shamanism believing the propaganda of their individual teachers. Every Core Shamanism "teacher" has a story of how they inherited their knowledge through visions, usually when sitting under a tree, or staring into a fire in their living room, or they got it from indigenous people who taught it in a weeks visit to the UK, or they learned via an online course and expect the shaman or shamanic pratitioner to connect them to the web of life or to teach them how to connect.

The propaganda is as toxic as the origins of Core or Essentialist Shamanism.

Fantasies about foraging food and hunting together, requires skills. Rejection of learning survival skills, is rejection of connection between understanding plants intimately, the practical skills to do so and connecting to the web of life or more to the point Nature. New Age Rewilded Spirituality pedestalise indigenous people and their skills. Though they either suggest that survival skills are too dificult, or reject them outright as going backwards.

What can Chat GPT teach us about connecting with the web of life? Can AI become a mirror and reflect back our own consciousness?

AI cannot connect us to nature. It's that simple. Harners alienating language, the Web Of Life is what Harner calls nature, but it is alienating because it suggests interconnectedness without explanation, whereas a genuine Ayahuaska medicine-man/woman would be specific, they could explain the connections which make sense to their communities. 

Indigenous people have a habit of making connections which seem tangental. For example the Sami, indigenous Reindeer herders of Satmi, inside the Arctic circle call Reindeer the "property of the wind" because they eat lichen which is sustained by air. Indigenous people often make lasting relationships with animals they do not hunt. Some communities treat them as gods and play music and sing to them. Nothing any New Age Spiritual Rewilder or Shamanic Practitioner has to say talks about this level of connection to nature.

Australian Aboriginal trackers being able to metaphorically "run alongside what they are tracking". The myriad of language available to our senses is governed by our experience  and learning. 

Yet as a tracker, I understand a language of signs and the predictability of the animal i track as well as the nuances of sound in the landscape and how it can confuse. As a forager, the language of seasons, soil and microclimate. As a coppicer, the laguage of ancient woodlands & hedges, of regeneration and the ancient landscape. As a survivalist the language of fire, shelter, finding uncontaminated water and staying alive and the raptuous beauty of nature

To connect to the web of life you need to immerse yourself in nature and be taught by practitioners who can teach about the plants which are sacred, not because they get you high, but because they are essential for our survival and they bring us close to nature so that nature can connect to us through our limbic system.

I know Buddha sat under a tree. But its a metaphor, just like 40 days in the desert.