Dohee Lee: A Modern Day Performance Shaman

Dohee Lee

A composer and virtuoso performer trained at the master level in dance, drumming, singing, and shamanic music, Dohee Lee is forging a new performance form rooted in ancient Korean shamanic practices. Using the artistic tools of immersive post-modern multimedia performance - choreography, interactive electronic sound and installation and instrument design, elaborate costumes, live video manipulation and animation - she recognizes the medicinal power of personal stories and myth and makes rituals in the service of healing individuals and communities. Collaborating and improvising with musicians, spoken word and visual artists and working in site-specific and intricately designed performance spaces, Lee examines cultural memory, trauma, war, nature, human transformation, spiritual practice embedded in daily life. She creates rituals that change our perception of what performance can be.

Jaguar Medicine

Jaguar represents shamanic power, magic, shapeshifting, transformation, and the life-and-death principle. She embodies the wisdom of the underworld, the primal space of the unconscious deep within each of us. Jaguar's lesson is to move beyond your fear of the dark unknown. Jaguar is the epitome of a chaotic storm moving through your life, all the while demanding you to remain calm, centered, and grounded. This fierce animal is the gatekeeper to the unknowable. Jaguar medicine includes comprehending the patterns of chaos, walking without fear in the darkness, moving in unknown places, soul work, and reclaiming power. Invoke Jaguar to reclaim your true power. Click here to view my video "Jaguar Rising."

Mourning Dove Medicine

Photo by Dawn Huczek

Mourning Dove is maternal, gentle, serene, and embodies peace, love, and harmony. She is linked with dawn and dusk when the veil between the seen and unseen worlds is at its thinnest. Dove can help us connect with the spirit world at these times. The Mourning Dove's song speaks to our heart and stirs our emotions. Its mournful "coo" soothes our soul and calms our troubled thoughts, allowing us to find renewal in the silence of mind. Dove teaches us that, regardless of external circumstances, peace is always within us. We need only still the mind and go within. Click here to listen to my song "Mourning Dove Dawn" on SoundCloud.

The Way of the Shaman Documentary

Michael Harner

Michael Harner blazed the trail for the worldwide revival of shamanism and shamanic drumming with his 1980 seminal classic The Way of the Shaman (over 600,000 sold). Founder of The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Michael Harner is widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on experiential and practical shamanism, and has had an enormous influence on both the academic and lay worlds. This documentary movie takes us through Michael's early expeditions as a young anthropologist in the jungles of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon and his life-altering insights into shamanic power. The film is an informative and inspiring look at the people behind the evolution of this groundbreaking spiritual healing methodology that honors and builds upon the ancient knowledge of the world's shamans. Movie available free online: https://vimeo.com/220889134

What is Soul Retrieval?

Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice known to humankind. A shaman is as a practitioner who has developed the mastery of "accessing altered states of consciousness" and "mediating between the needs of the spirit world and those of the physical world in a way that can be understood by the community. Most shamanic cultures around the world believe that whenever we suffer an emotional or physical trauma a part of our soul flees the body in order to survive the experience. By soul I mean our spiritual essence, life force, the part of our vitality that keeps us alive and thriving. It has always been the role of the shaman to go into an altered state of consciousness and track down where the soul fled to in the alternate realities and restore it. In indigenous societies like those of the Pacific Northwest, soul retrieval specialists were often known as soul catchers.

The loss of life force is known as soul loss. It is important to understand that soul loss is a natural thing that happens to us. It is how we survive pain. Our psyche cannot endure the kind of pain associated with a severe emotional or physical trauma. So our psyches have this self protect mechanism where a part of our essence or soul leaves the body so that we do not feel the full impact of a painful experience. In psychology we call this disassociation. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality. It isn't hard to recognize that there is a lot of planetary soul loss today based on how we behave towards each other and the web of life. To learn more, look inside Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self  by Sandra Ingerman.