The author’s journey to becoming a Bushman shaman and healer and how this tradition relates to shamanic practices around the world
• Explores the Bushmen’s ecstatic shaking and dancing practices
• Written by the first non-Bushman to become fully initiated into their healing and spiritual ways
In
Bushman Shaman, Bradford Keeney details his initiation into the shamanic tradition of the Kalahari Bushmen, regarded by some scholars as the oldest living culture on earth. Keeney sought out the Bushmen while in South Africa as a visiting professor of psychotherapy. He had known of the Kalahari “trance dance,” wherein the dancers’ bodies shake uncontrollably as part of the healing ceremony. Keeney was drawn to this tradition in the hope that it might explain and provide a forum for his own ecstatic “shaking,” which he had first experienced at the age of 19 and had tried to suppress and hide throughout his adult life.
For more than a dozen years Keeney danced with Bushmen shamans in communities throughout Botswana and Namibia, until finally becoming fully initiated into their doctoring and spiritual ways. Through his rediscovery of the “rope to God” in a Bushman shaman dream, he offers readers accounts of his shamanic world travels and the secrets of the soul he learned along the way. In
Bushman Shaman Keeney also reveals his work with shamans from Japan, Tibet, Bali, Thailand, Australia, and North and South America, providing new understandings of other forms of shamanic spiritual expression and integrating the practices of all these traditions into a sacred circle of one truth.
SHAMANISM / SPIRITUALITY "Brad Keeney may be the closest we have to a genuine American shaman. In Bushman Shaman, he shares his remarkable adventures into the psyche and his equally remarkable sensibility as an explorer of the human spirit. Fascinating." --Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence "Bradford Keeney invites us to go beyond modernity to the oldest culture on Earth to find true magic and power. May those who take this journey with him surrender to their own ecstatic dance, and in so doing, find their way back home." --Malidoma Patrice Some, author of The Healing Wisdom of Africa and Of Water and the Spirit In Bushman Shaman, Bradford Keeney details his initiation into the shamanic tradition of the Kalahari Bushmen, regarded by some scholars as the oldest living culture on Earth. Keeney sought out the Bushmen while in South Africa as a visiting professor of psychotherapy. He had known of the Kalahari "trance dance," wherein the dancers' bodies shake uncontrollably as part of the healing ceremony. Keeney was drawn to this tradition in the hope that it might explain and provide a forum for his own ecstatic "shaking," which he had first experienced at the age of 19 and had tried to suppress and hide throughout his adult life. For more than a dozen years Keeney danced with Bushman shamans in communities throughout Botswana and Namibia, until finally becoming fully initiated into their healing and spiritual ways. He offers readers accounts of his shamanic world travels and the secrets of the soul he learned along the way, including his discovery of the "rope to God" in a Bushman shaman dream. In Bushman Shaman, Keeney also reveals his work with shamans from Japan, Bali, the Caribbean, and North and South America, providing new understandings of other forms of shamanic spiritual expression and integrating the practices of all these traditions into a sacred circle of one truth. BRADFORD KEENEY, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned scholar, therapist, and shaman who has led expeditions throughout the world to study cultural healing practices. He is the author of Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement, Shamanic Christianity: The Direct Experience of Mystical Communion, and the editor of the Profiles of Healing series.
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Bushman Shaman is a pleasure to read and will be of great interest to people studying psychotherapy or trance-dance healing.”
