Walking in Two Worlds

Abstract

This phenomenological study sought to reveal the meaning for and experience of individuals who navigate two often-disparate ideological and experiential “worlds” within the culture of the United States. These two worlds can be described, respectively, as animistic—being embedded in and giving priority to relationship and nature—and Western mainstream—being embedded in and giving priority to materialism and rationalism. The phenomenon examined was—functioning within the mainstream culture while experiencing an animistic lifeworld. The animistic worldview is at odds in significant ways with the belief systems underlying the prevailing worldview, and is often misunderstood and demeaned. Six participants and the researcher participated in this qualitative study. The interviews were semistructured and open-ended. Through analysis, the underlying constituents and essential structure of the experience emerged. Constituents were (a) the experience of social stigma, (b) a deeply relational way of being-in-the-world, and (c) an expansive sense of identity. An experience of both belonging and alienation emerged—the true self-world remains concealed behind a “veil” or “mask” for the person’s protection in mainstream culture. Further research, particularly to benefit clinicians and clients, is needed to expand understanding of these dynamics which so affect people who walk in two worlds.

Keywords

animism relational identity alienation nondualism cross-cultural shamanic lifeworld worldview

In the corner of a small cafe, Tisnuk (not his real name) told his story of a prophetic dream and its outcome:

I had a dream I was going to be in a bunker, with pierced steel planks. [Pierced steel plank is] what they use to land aircraft on in the swamps; it can withstand the heat and wouldn’t bog down. Just before that mortar attack, I was knocked to the ground and an angel said, “You are going to die tonight.” I wrote my mother and my father a letter and thanked them for everything they had done for me and I told them that I was going to die tonight. . . . The next mortar attack—it didn’t happen that night. The next morning, we were reassigned to a different part of the base. . . . We moved to this other hooch—hooch is a living area like an apartment . . . and I walked into the back room and there is this pierced plank steel bunker that I didn’t know was there. The next week, all of a sudden I hear this slam, and a slam means that somebody is running to the bunker because they don’t have time to close the door. The first shell that hit blew up the hooch where I used to live, so that was completely wiped out. Meanwhile, I was safe in this pierced steel plank bunker.

“The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own” (Davis, 2009, p. 6). Tisnuk was raised in two cultures, mainstream Western/American and Native American, each with very different understandings of reality. Of mixed race, his is not a monochromatic perspective. In his indigenous culture, he explained, certain dreams are gifts or communications. After his escape from death and his homecoming from Vietnam, he returned to “the old ways” that, in his youth, he had temporarily turned away from, while pursuing a doctorate in a well-established university steeped in a Western worldview. He is a person who walks in two lifeworlds.

The fundamental question of this study was as follows: What is the phenomenon of walking in two ideological/experiential worlds? There are splits in Western culture and consciousness: between body and mind, cognition and emotion, science and soul, and animal and human, and these splits profoundly affect “cultural dialogue” and individual experience. Our culture tends to prime us for being open to, or being closed to, experience (Gates, 2011). In our Western cultural story, progress and competition are assumed to be positive forces that form the fabric of reality, yet recent studies suggest cooperation is more fundamental and, progress also has a destructive shadow (Fixico, 2003; Highwater, 1981; Mander, 1991).

All people have roles in public and private life informed by “taken-for-granted” sociocultural understandings and value laden interpretations of reality and the nature of existence (Husserl & Welton, 1999). Within scientific research (including psychology), worldview may obfuscate findings. Parry (2015) writes,

I would venture to say that the most frequent reason “anomalous” results are dismissed, or simply go unreported, is because they’re outside the paradigm of the researcher and therefore they either do not see it or do not report it. (p. 94)

However, any of the interpretations and understandings held in the mainstream Western worldview may come less readily to some: immigrants, people of some ethnicities, and others whose worldviews are on the margins of mainstream society. Such people, like the participants of this study, may encounter two disparate experiential and ideological worlds. They may frequently both feel outside the norm and be treated as outsiders. They may feel it is necessary to hide their deepest identities to avoid ridicule or sanctioning. After all, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fifth edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) is the bedrock document for mental health diagnosis. People (nonindigenous) and peoples (indigenous) who experience an animistic lifeworld may, to their dismay, find some of their experiences described as delusional within this point of view, thus diagnostically placing them on the schizophrenic spectrum. Moreover, spiritual experiences are intrinsically suspect in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fifth edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Delusions and hallucinations are two of the criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. How are these symptoms to be discerned from spiritual experiences?

The concept of spiritual emergency, which differentiates transformational crisis from psychiatric disorders, is supported independently by evidence from many different fields. Particularly important of the data related to the shamanic traditions found in the historical and anthropological literature. Shamanism is the world’s oldest religion and humanities most ancient healing art; its origins very likely reach back tens of thousands of years to the Paleolithic era. (Groff & Groff, 1989, p. 78)

Within a Eurocentric culture with roots in monotheistic religions and secular scientific materialism, animistic worldviews are frequently mislabeled paranormal, psychotic, or primitive (Dupre, 2001). In the Western world, animism has long been described as a “failed epistemology.” It is a relational epistemology” (Bird-David, 1999), which haunts present-day culture in fetishism, such as in commercials for “sexy” cars (Hornborg, 2006), and lingers among nature mystics such as John Muir (2001) and Annie Dillard (2007), who described their experiences in a relational way that resembles animism.

To answer a call put forth for “epistemological hybridism” (Duran, 2006), that is, to embrace a multiplicity of worldviews, this phenomenological study sought to clarify the sociocultural context for the participants by disclosing their lived experience. In addition, it challenged dominant-culture assumptions about animist worldviews and about modernist knowledge systems, examined the power of labeling, and aimed to give voice to an often-silenced group. Ultimately, the findings of this research can be summed up as follows: there are both indigenous and nonindigenous members of our society who live in an animistic lifeworld while maintaining their functionality in the mainstream culture. It is vital that clinicians come to better understand and acknowledge that this world view embodies the paradox of living in relationship with other humans and in relationship to a living natural inspirited world—and is not pathological.

Background and Overview of the Literature

According to Hillman, in his foreword to the book Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995), the story in Western philosophy between person and natural environment has taken the root meaning, the study of soul, out of psychology and led to a “subjectivist exaggeration” (p. 4). The person has been decontextualized from the natural world and reduced to “interiority.” Animism is an ancient relational understanding of the world as being alive and communicative. The common Western conceptualization of animism is that it is erroneous and primitive. Piaget’s theory—that animism was an early cognitive-developmental stage children outgrew (Sheldrake, 2003)—has become the gold standard in developmental psychology. But to characterize animism as primarily cognitive is a misrepresentation. Animism is an experiential way of being and knowing. Animism and animistic cultures have been judged within the context of the “spiritual/materialist dichotomy of 19th-century design” (Bird-David, 1999), where materialistic science was the true path to knowledge.

At best, modernity is a double-edged sword. Our dependence upon rationality has enabled great technological invention, but it is also disabled our ability to see human beings as dependent upon the whole. (Parry, 2015, p. 116)

People within the scientific community (which includes mainstream psychology) who have experiences like the dream told by Tisnuk, above, tend to keep those experiences to themselves (Mayer, 2007).

Being nondualistic, animism is an epistemology and an ontology in which there is no conception or perception of the separation of the material from the spiritual; matter and spirit are inextricably entwined. In contrast, current environmental crises reveal the weakness in scientific materialism’s disregard for the significance of relationship and interdependence (Bird-David, 1999).

Historically and in the present, forms of earth-based worldviews—with animism at their heart—exist cross-culturally. Examples include the Neo-Pagan—Wiccans, Pagans, Goddess worshipers, Druids, Shamans, and Unitarian Universalists (Berger, Leach, & Shaffer, 2003)—and Chinese traditional religion (York, 2003). Throughout the history of the Western world, suspicion and even hatred have been directed at earth-based worldviews. As Spretnak (1997) put it, “The perceptions of ordinary people who were intimately familiar with the creative strategies of nature were uniformly ignored as childlike and unscientific” (p. A1). In fact, colonization and monotheistic religions nearly annihilated peoples with animistic worldviews (Cajete, 2000; Matthews, 2001). One European explorer in a jungle complained that the natives pursued “the secrets of nature and other things, knowledge Our Lord has reserved for Himself” (Narby & Huxley, 2001, p. 1).

Although there is a strong emphasis on valuing diversity in mainstream psychology, there is a scarcity of literature that reflects animism as a viable way of being-in-the-world. However, animistic cultures are frequently studied in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and religion (Chiappari, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Hornborg, 2006; Ingold, 2006; Winkelman, 2004). Autobiographical and scholarly writings by indigenous and nonindigenous peoples have conveyed the lived philosophy of earth-based spirituality (Fixico, 2003; Harner, 1982; Highwater, 1981; Mander, 1991; Prechtel, 1999; Somé, 1994). Respect and even admiration for cultures with animistic worldviews is frequently found in anthropology and ethnography (Hornborg, 2006; Ingold, 2006).

Within psychology, animistic worldviews have been studied in multicultural counseling studies of culture and identity (Tisdell, 2006) as well as in ecopsychology (Roszak et al., 1995), and cultural acquisition and insensitivity have been explored (Cajete, 2000; Highwater, 1981). Yet in educational institutions indigenous people are taught about their traditions primarily by nonnatives (Gallagher & Goertzen, 2007). The review of the literature completed in undertaking this study found no qualitative study that addressed what it is like to adhere to an animistic worldview while functioning within the dominant culture.

Methodology

Qualitative research, including descriptive phenomenological (Giorgi, 2008) and heuristic methods (Moustakas, 1990), are in-depth and strive to be faithful to human experience. Ultimately, a qualitative study is deemed credible if the study is true to the lived experience of those who contributed to it (Moustakas, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1989). Phenomenology is rooted in the narrative of the participants’ lifeworld where the researcher seeks out the collective eidetic structures of human experience (Finlay & Ballenger, 2006). The phenomenological method is particularly well suited to this study of animistic spirituality because both the methodology and the type of spirituality derive understanding from direct perceptual “rootedness” in the environment in which we live (Cajete, 2000).

The heuristic phenomenological method facilitates an exploration of a lived experience. The researcher draws on his or her experience along with the experience of the research participants. This researcher shared some affiliation, such as a meaningful connection with the natural world, with the participants in the study (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985).

To reveal the lived structures of the lifeworld, the phenomenological research process utilizes the phenomenological reduction. There are several types of reduction that assist the researcher in uncovering the essence of the phenomenon under study in a fresh way. The phenomenological reduction, the Epoche, or bracketing, is a shift to a psychological attitude of open inquiry to bring forward a lived phenomenon. The researcher seeks to suspend a natural science attitude and to bracket out theories, assumptions and taken for granted understandings to freshly disclose the phenomenon (Giorgi, 2008). The eidetic reduction is the method that allows the underlying essential structure of the psychological phenomenon to come forward. With the eidetic reduction, the researcher attempts to weed out diverse and disparate elements to come to the quintessence experience itself. Imaginative varying tests out this essential structure to see if it is steadfast (Englander, 2016).

For purposes of this qualitative study, Moustakas’ style was adapted to be more inclusive of the discoveries derived from the participants. After initial personal engagement, via writing and reflection on the topic in the researcher’s experience, the researcher recruits, and interviews appropriate participants. The researcher then fashions an “individual summary depiction,” capturing the essential quality and meaning of the phenomenon for everyone. Each participant reviews the individual summary and has the opportunity to edit and/or confirm the description, which is then completed with participant feedback incorporated. From this feedback, the researcher writes a final “composite summary depiction,” derived from the essential meanings and themes of only several of the participants’ descriptions of the phenomenon, along with in-depth portraits of several participants who typify the phenomenon.

The Research Process

After the approval by the human subjects review board at my university, the snowball method was used to recruit participants. Of the 13 potential participants, six (2 men and 4 women) were chosen as suitable. Consistent with the scope of many phenomenological studies, the sample size was deemed sufficient (Giorgi, 2003). Two of the participants had indigenous heritage, 4 were Caucasian. Among the participants, two were, by self-report, gay. Furthermore, all the people recruited for this study self-reported that they were without major mental health issues and history.

The participants ranged in age from 30s to late 60s and all had achieved some higher education, two of them had doctoral degrees. Four of the participants had lived in wooded areas for long periods of time. Their names (self-selected pseudonyms) were as follows: Bianca, Charlie, Daniel, Malissa, Tisnuk, and Jennifer. Each 1- to 2-hour, open-ended-question interview and follow-up interview was audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed with adaptations of Giorgi’s (2003) descriptive phenomenological and Moustakas’s (1990) heuristic methods. Interview transcripts were broken into natural “meaning units” and transformed into psychological language to bring forward constituents and the essential structure of the phenomenon (Giorgi, 1983). Following Moustakas’s (1990) method, individual summary depictions of each participant’s experience of the phenomenon were written. Those depictions were then relayed to each person by mail or in person, inviting their clarification. The summaries were revised in accordance with participants’ feedback. The few revisions were significant. For example, Charlie, a 43-year-old Lesbian woman, despite the challenges of social stigma she had endured, wanted the joy she felt for her animistic worldview included, as she felt this beneficial aspect of her experience had not been clearly expressed.

In the next step, a cross-analysis of all the material was completed. This analysis entailed comparing and then synthesizing the pertinent data from each source. First, idiosyncratic content was distinguished from general content in the quest of contextual commonalities, differences, and themes (Giorgi, 1983). Then, the researcher’s focus shifted to discerning the essential structure of the commonly experienced phenomenon described by participants. One of the major findings of this study was that animism is the heart of earth-based spiritual experiences. Now it seems so evident, but the researcher had not started the research with this awareness.

Composite Summary Depiction

Drawing on both the individual summary depictions of each of the participants and the collective structure of the phenomenon (described in detail below in the Discovery section), the composite summary depiction of the researched phenomenon is as follows:

The essence of the experience and meaning of walking in two worlds is challenging at best and, alienating and painful at worst. It is like being “in the closet.” One may be “in” the closet in certain settings and with certain people, and “out” in others. Similarly, one is connected to the mainstream culture and its consensus reality. One lives and functions within this reality and yet there is another reality (deemed “sacred” and “communicative”) that is drastically out of sync with the consensus reality. This inner, sacred reality is potent, holistic, embodied, and simultaneously transcendent, with no split between spirit and material. As one study participant put it, walking in two worlds is like living “behind the veil” or behind a mask. The true self-world matrix often remains concealed to protect what is felt precious and authentic. One often feels like an outsider, even a pariah.

Discoveries

Through the accounts of the research participants, it has become clear that it is in the fundamental nature of an animistic lifeworld that embodied experience precedes ideology. In other words, although details in participants’ descriptions varied, the common threads signifying animism (in-spiritedness, relationality) were present in all their descriptions. The discoveries fell into three themes: (a) the experience of social stigma, (b) a deeply relational way of being-in-the-world, and (c) an expansive sense of identity. The essential structure of the phenomenon emerged as a dynamic of profound relationality and separateness, a broad continuum of experience the poles of which were experienced as community versus alienation, belonging versus being sanctioned.

The rhythm of relationality and separateness is a fundamental human experience. However, for the people in this study, this dynamic seemed intensified due to the sharp contrast between their animistic lifeworld and the dominant consensus reality which deems animism to be “primitive.” For them, the natural world is alive—communicative in visible and invisible ways—and they live within a complex web of belonging and a sharp delineation of being “other,” within mainstream society in important contexts.

The participants’ deviation in worldview from some dominant-culture norms emphasized and deepened their feelings of separateness in contexts such as the workplace. They described their animistic worldviews as intimate and sacred. In certain circumstances, their spirituality was also kept private to avoid subjecting themselves or others to judgment or misunderstanding. Consistent with Highwater (1981), the participants reported life experience clearly substantiates that relationality in general has been marginalized under a patriarchal social system.

The Experience of Social Stigma

All the participants expressed a strong sense of interdependence and expanded personal identity that incorporated a multifaceted experience of “we-ness” in contrast to the “hyperindividualism” of the dominant culture (Cajete, 2000; Mander, 1991). Charlie, for example, illuminated how being “queer” is like practicing animistic spirituality:

It’s similar to being queer. It’s another form of queerness to be living in a shamanic way. Not a choice to be that way, but definitely a choice of how deeply I will embrace and celebrate it and what will I offer to you or withhold from the “mainstream.” But I know it would be beneficial to be generous with my queer gift. Still, will I be safe or will I be small? Will I hide? What is necessary to retain and protect what is sacred?

Tisnuk described the strain of moving between two worlds. As a person with indigenous heritage, his anguish from experiencing discrimination was profound. The “communalism” and a “collective identity” of the Native peoples have been at odds with individualism from early on in American history (Takaki, 1993, pp. 88-101). Tisnuk illustrated this strain:

When we were doing our graduate work at the University . . . it was cross-culturally stressful, because on the weekends we were traveling and participating in various . . . gatherings . . . and on Monday, one was expected to compete in a classroom at a very high level about the various applications of Analysis of Variance, or Co-variance. . . . We didn’t know whether we were coming or going sometimes. The whole assumption in intellectual scientific investigation and inquiry is, until it can be shown to be empirically verifiable, it is not valid, nor does it exist. From this limited explanation one can get a feeling for why we have difficulty . . . especially because we are aware of what happened . . . sensitive issues—such as generational grief and dispossession without compensation—that the dominant society would rather not deal with.

Bianca described her spirituality as inexplicably entwined with the accessible and the everyday:

I was just remembering back to being a teenager, talking to a boyfriend about these ideas, and I remember what I said to him is that what I really want is to be ordinary. I don’t want to be out there. I want to be ordinary. Ordinary is sacred too and so it doesn’t mean a removal from this world, or removal from the society or removal from other people . . . I grew up in an apartment and . . . I was taken to the beach every day of my life until I was 5, summer and winter. So physically . . . that meant that, physically, barefoot. I was physically in touch with the earth every single day, for a good portion of the day without clothes, without shoes between sand and water and dust. So, I have continued to really trust in that, in nature being a part of things. As a kid that, um, getting that sensation that “Oh this is a perfect day,” and that this is a perfect day where I could appreciate where I was physically. That was outdoors: the sun; the sky, usually the beach. And so, that sense of “it’s a perfect day” was tied in with “all is right with the world”—which is the basis of my spirituality.

All the participants knew their worldview was subject to social stigma. The schism between their way of being-in-the-world and the dominant cultural norms, in addition to prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory actions toward their spiritual worldview, was more distressing for some than others. For example, Daniel, an artist in his mid-30s, eventually reconciled his “crisis of alienation” through his grappling with being gay. His and Charlie’s (a lesbian in her mid-40s) struggles with the risks of “coming out” seemed to have inoculated them against the sting of prejudice toward their unusual worldview. To avoid social stigma, Charlie said she was cautious, often secretive, and sometimes reframed her beliefs to be more acceptable or understandable to others. In the follow-up interview, when asked if she was referring to witch persecutions when she mentioned the persecution of “common people,” she confirmed she was referring to the “witch killings” here and in Europe. She continued,

I tell almost no one, socially and at parties and such. I’ve told maybe one or two people. I usually tell my clients because I find it unfolds that that’s why they’re there. Sometimes, by word-of-mouth, people find out I’m doing shamanic work. . . . Most people don’t even know that I do this. I qualify a lot at times. I frame my perspective psychologically a lot of times. Or I’ll bury my true perspective and this is for the reason of safety. I feel very careful about people thinking that I’m psychotic, far out, just, you know, mentally ill, or in a way where someone is not to be taken seriously.

After a pause, and with a disturbed expression, she added, “There might be an element where I’m actually afraid.”

For Tisnuk (a man in his mid-60s) and Jennifer (a woman in her early 50s), both of indigenous descent, the sense of ideological separateness was an ongoing source of suffering in their lives—suffering which moved from foreground to background depending on the social context. In their daily lives, they were in close contact with both cultures while preferring to be with the indigenous community where they generally felt more at ease.

In contrast, one participant, Bianca, did not feel distressed regarding the social stigma often encountered because of adhering to animistic/spiritual worldview. Still, she was aware of the prejudice toward people with her worldview. She described being intentionally silent about her worldview in the presence of most people, including the majority of her good friends. “ . . . I’ve always thought I was smarter than most people. Or not smarter—not necessarily smarter. But others people’s beliefs—that never intimidated me.”

Like Bianca, Malissa (a woman in her early 60s) did not share her spirituality with many people. Yet Malissa suffered with her silence:

I don’t like to talk to very many people about my spirituality. I work at a community college and . . . religion is a kind of an anomaly amongst college people . . . I feel like—shamanism is considered weird and ooey-gooey and hokey, and kooky . . . my sense is that it makes people feel uncomfortable.

Historically, those with similar shamanic beliefs were often either considered “ignorant heathens” or a “demonic race” (Takaki, 1993, p. 44). A watered-down version of this prejudice seems to continue. Jennifer described a variation of prejudice in the form of internalized oppression:

The [Native] children are in the public school system . . . and the parents get together to meet on how we can support our children. I heard . . . Native American parents, through the sharing, talk about their own children as if they were stupid. It wasn’t mean-spirited, but it was kind of the basis of their belief system. They truly were concerned about how they could smarten-their-kids-up kind of thing.

Participants described social and internal struggles. Daniel said, “I’m beyond the judgment part . . . one way is that I’m a gay male and I grew up in the Bible belt. You are told there you can’t be spiritual.”

A Deeply Relational Way of Being-in-the-World

With reverence, and often awe, the participants described a cherished relational core to their lived world, present both tangibly and in transcendent ways. Charlie said, “It is difficult, but it’s the biggest gift in my life.” Bianca pointed to the Earth and affirmed, “My sense is definitely right here.”

Tisnuk stated, “Service, which entails courage and obligation, is a part of a living spirituality as well.” He described his community and what it meant to him. His use of “we” rather than “I” is a traditional Coast Salish way of speaking. “They unearthed one of our burial grounds . . . we also put up a fight and were successful, on a smaller scale, of having the desecrated remains of our ancestors returned.”

In a similar way, Malissa emphasized that her “spirituality” had emerged from her existential experiences:

I think of myself as a panentheist. Not a pantheist but a pan-en-theist. The word panentheist means . . . is that divinity is in creation so divinity is in nature, but divinity is also beyond nature, it’s also transcendent. I would say that I believe in both the imminence and transcendence of divinity.

Charlie described when she lived in the woods in a yurt. Living in nature was the means to an intense journey rife with presence and mystery as well as hard physical work:

So, one day I was coming home . . . and the dogs ran ahead barking wildly. I went into my yurt, and there was a big hole in the side of the yurt and my cast-iron stove was maybe 10 or 15 yards outside in the woods. And I wondered, how could this have happened? I couldn’t figure it out so I called the neighbor and he came over and said, “Oh, a bear has been inside your house.” And then I realized that’s exactly right. There were hallmarks of the bear everywhere, so the bear would not go away. It would come inside when I was gone, and it would circle my house at night, and it was scary, scary. And finally, finally . . . so I began to speak to the bear . . . and just made offerings and respect—I never did see her again. . . . That was when I first learned that I could communicate with animals . . . and I always found tremendous cooperation, and there were a lot of cougars, bear in the area . . . we lived in a kind of harmony.

An Expansive Sense of Identity

Throughout this study, the researcher embraced Halling’s (2008) view of transcendence, described as a breaking through of wonder within everyday experience as it unfolds. Like indigenous peoples and mystics cross-culturally, the participants disclosed an expansive sense of identity. Highwater (1981) has pointed out that,

Primal cultures are tribal rather than idiosyncratic in their psychology. Most North American tribes possess what must be called a ‘communal soul . . . in comparison with the Western precept of the soul . . . as personal property that ensures, under certain moral regulations, the eternal perpetuation of the private ego. (p. 169)

That sense of enlarged identity and of transcending the ego also has a shadow side (grief). Most of the participants had suffered from social stigma and from loss due to the depth of their connections and identification as “we.” Four of the people mentioned the pain of witnessing the degradation of nature. Three of them mentioned grief due to an awareness of the Native American Holocaust while two of them (non-Native) said they were troubled by the cultural acquisition of indigenous people’s spiritual practices.

With a sad expression, Jennifer alluded to the contrast between a collective versus an individual identification:

Also in the Western culture is a lot of separation of families . . . In our culture, that is rather new. It happens some . . . but on the reservation they try to have these institutions right there on the reservations. The separation creates things like ageism and other isms of all kinds, so people are separated by power or economics.

Similarly, mystical traditions portray a self that transcends personal identity and ego: a “transpersonal” self (Frager, 1989). As with Malissa and Charlie, Bianca’s usually private sense of self brought her joy as well as a sense of the atypical nature of her life experiences. Bianca stated,

I have got quite a few friends who are atheists or agnostic. Sometimes when they say things I realize how shocking it is to me. I don’t try to challenge them on it at all. But for me . . . it is the base of who I am.

She commented on a time in her life when she was distressed,

I was actively seeking, during that period, communion with a higher power of some kind and as I was lying on the beach I had a sensation, a knowing. I got to see for a couple of minutes that it was all one. So, I could see that the waves coming in were eroding those pebbles that were making the sand that the tree was being fed by it. And I could just be a part of it all: being one.

Malissa pointed out her concern with pursuing an authentic experiential spirituality:

At one point my sister . . . goes, “Oh, I found just the person for you!” So I call up this guy and he goes, “My name is”—it was basically “Big Dick the Kahuna” or whatever—and he goes, “I’m a Hawaiian shaman,” and I was, like, gag me please! I think there is just so much of that—of white people who read a few books about Indian spirituality . . . and then they run around practicing Indian, saying I’ve been initiated by so and so, or whatever. I do think it’s possible to be legitimate, I think it’s hard.

Not all the participants reported experiences were uplifting; heartbreaking experiences also served to hone values and worldview. Jennifer said “The [Western] teachings that stand behind separating people are not of our Earth. They are cruel and heartless . . .” Also, the participants defined themselves by who they were not. All but one declared he or she did not identify with the New Age movement. Malissa said,

The new age movement seems kind of like prosperity Christianity, where it’s self-serving and the idea is that it’s kind of feel-good religion. I think it’s very American and I think it’s very middle class and upper-middle class, it’s there for people to kind of be comfortable with their spiritual life and not have to be challenged by it. I would say that that’s the opposite of my spiritual life; my spiritual life is very much about being challenged.

The Limitations of This Study

Polkinghorne (1989) points out that phenomenological methods draw credibility from an exhaustive discovery of the lived experiences of the participants and the sound representation of the essence of the experience presented in the findings. Even though the sample size was small, the underlying structure of the lived world of the participants was credibly revealed. It is possible that the research participants were atypical, as they were referred by participants and colleagues or friends of participants. As such, there may be commonalities among them distinguishing them from other potential participants. And, another possible perceived limitation is that this research pertains to a North American context although cross-cultural studies, as discussed in the literature review, suggest otherwise.

Although the discoveries are compelling and clear, other questions or another methodology could have generated somewhat alternative understandings. Despite positive interview interactions, a different interviewer might have elicited fuller or different disclosures from the participants, as relational dynamics unique to those involved or may not be of benefit to the research. The phenomenological reduction was utilized to attempt to push the researcher’s prior knowledge, subjective self, and assumptions aside. So, although the strength of the common themes suggests otherwise, the researcher’s preconceptions may have affected the outcome of the study. Finally, the researcher began this project with the “walking in two worlds” metaphor in mind because of her personal lifeworld experience. In completing the research, another metaphor was generated—that of being “in the closet” or “behind the veil” that is, in hiding. At heart, as it relates to this research, both metaphors allude to the same dynamic.

Discussion

This study contributes to the body of qualitative work that (a) explores and champions multiculturalism, (b) challenges established knowledge systems and modernistic assumptions, and (c) unfolds a meaningful lived experience. The findings of this research are significant and relevant for clinical psychologists by providing a wider ideological, historical, and sociocultural perspective through which to better understand their clients. Frequently, cultural influences are minimized in diagnostic and treatment modalities, which tend to focus on the intrapsychic and interfamilial. Also, “unusual” experiences are rarely welcomed into the room between therapist and client as they are frequently viewed through the narrow culturally laden lens of pathology.

For therapists, teachers, and researchers, a deeper understanding of one’s historical–cultural life context can open unrecognized assumptions that may be detrimental to uncovering and understanding the client’s lived experience and to the therapeutic relationship. Culture, knowledge systems, historical context, worldview, and personal psychology are tied together in complex ways. Furthermore, this study advanced investigation into the overlap between epistemology and culture. Knowledge systems are entwined with cultural worldview.

This study may contribute to reawakening an embodied and resouled existential understanding of our being-in-the-world. Barrett (1986) and Eisler (1988) recount the dispiriting of the Western world and its ripple effects through our society. The natural world, women (as allied with nature in patriarchal theology), and indigenous cultures have suffered from the formidable shift from a relational social power structure (in ancient times and among many native cultures to this day) to a social power structure centered on objects, objectification, and advancement. The philosopher Barrett (1986) concluded that no matter how far, as a culture, we think we have progressed in a postmodern era, “we are back with the disembodied consciousness of Descartes” (p. 160).

Many individuals in our society inhabit multiple social and private roles. There are times and circumstances when the consensus reality of the dominant culture is discordant and distressing to some people. The intensity of this dissonance and distress varies among individuals. This research offers insights into the experience of people in such circumstances, for example, immigrants; gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals; biracial, multiracial, or multilingual individuals; individuals with unseen illnesses or disabilities, mystics and other people whose way of being-in-the-world, in some significant manner, falls outside of the norms or understanding of the dominant culture. There is more to learn about how the social and environmental context of various peoples’ lives influences and enhances or suppresses their spontaneous experiences. Therefore, this research is germane for other fields, such as education, philosophy, sociology, developmental psychology, feminist studies, cultural anthropology, theology, social justice, and ethnography.

People tend to have preconceived notions about certain populations of people and may generalize about such peoples’ beliefs. Racism and stereotyping can infect knowledge systems in subtle ways. In addition to disclosing a lived human experience, the aim of this study was to challenge taken-for-granted Euro American dominant-culture assumptions about animistic worldviews and modernist knowledge systems. For clinical psychologists, it is imperative to assist marginalized individuals and groups to have a voice in personal contexts, and especially in the cultural discourse, because the cultural discourse affects all arenas of a person’s life. A broader discourse may enrich all of our lives. Through helping to give voice to this subject and to the participants, the researcher sought to go beyond cross-cultural approaches to diversity—to answer the call put forth by Duran (2006) for a decolonized epistemological hybridism.

Although three participants used the term shamanism, and books on shamanism appear in many New Age bookstores, none of the individuals recruited for this study identified with the New Age movement—a modern amalgam of Eastern, Western, and indigenous influences infused with modern psychology, phenomenology, and holistic health (Drury, 2004). The New Age movement has been described in derogatory terms as irrational and consumer-driven, spiritual materialism (Tisdell, 2006) and, more positively (Welch, 2002), as “contemporary religiosities that emphasize personal transformation and healing” (p. 21). Animistic “spirituality” is grounded in interaction rather than abstraction, in community rather than a purely individualistic venture. Perhaps, the New Age movement is seen differently depending on whether one is looking from the outside in or the inside out; some who may seem to be New Agers to others may not identify with the New Age movement themselves. Subjecting people to labels is a precarious venture which too often leads to dehumanization.

Cultural acquisition was mentioned spontaneously and separately by two of participants. As Takaki (1993) noted, we have been acculturated to behave and believe that socially structured “whiteness” is not only the norm but is sanctioned and subsumes the majority of paradigm beliefs of other lower status cultures and subcultures. We, as a society, intentionally or not, too frequently criticize and dismiss alternative beliefs and practices. The profound relationality and reciprocity revealed by the participants, and inherent to this ancient yet enduring worldview, may be helpful in addressing our environmental crisis and malaise. The researcher’s traditional indigenous medicine man friend once told a gathering that in his home village, and in ancient times, grief was not uncommon but depression was unknown (Johnny Moses, personal communications, December 18, 2010).

As this study came to completion, additional considerations and questions arose. Further investigation into the background of people who ascribe to an animistic worldview might yield insights into other commonalities or differences they share. For example, the one participant who was the least perturbed by bias against animism (Bianca) lived in a rural environment and reportedly had strong encouragement from her mother regarding childhood attachment and joy with nature. Were these factors that facilitated resilience? And how might exposure to nature and the slower organic rhythms of nature shape whom we become and how we do or do not open to certain experiences and perceptions?

Most people raised in a Eurocentric society are influenced by educational and other cultural institutions that affect social, ideological, and even neurological shaping. How might education encourage or dissuade factors associated with animism: attachment, synesthesia, and hemisphere dominance? For instance, most people with synesthesia are left handed (generally associated with right hemisphere dominance), the societally neglected hemisphere according to neuroscientist Taylor (2006). Given that the brain and the mind are remarkably complex, if mainstream education and Western languages tend to highlight, and even shape, predominantly left-hemispheric functions, what might the implications be both socially and ideologically for persons with an animistic, spiritual world view?

Several of the participants feared others might label them as “crazy” but none of them declared they felt in danger of “going crazy,” nor had they ever had a psychotic break. In the researcher’s clinical experience, psychotic individuals are, for the most part, unable to discern everyday consensus reality from their psychosis and rather than being enriched by their unusual experiences and perceptions, they are diminished by them. Harner (1982) related an illustrative event in the Amazon during his field research. He asked an indigenous elder if the solitary man talking aloud to himself in the jungle was a medicine man? The elder replied (in rough translation)—“That man is crazy”—conveying that a medicine person functions in daily life. What’s more, Deloria (2006) stated that occurrences in Native American tribes, such as prophetic dreams, were confirmed and normalized by their everyday usefulness.

Through this study, the lifeworld of those who walk in these two worlds has been unveiled but this is just a beginning. This research seeks to bring the phenomenon of “walking in two worlds” to the fore in an open and articulate manner with the hope of loosening the hold of bias and of unlocking minds and hearts. Still, more voices will contribute to breaking the “silencing” and will be heard through additional studies.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Joanne D. Halverson has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Antioch University and her masters in existential phenomenology from Seattle University. For over 25 years, she has worked as a therapist, educator, and supervisor. Relishing multiple perspectives, she has worked with people of varied ethnicities, ages, and cultures. She has specialties in trauma, grief, spiritual concerns, relationship issues, resilience, creativity, attachment, aging, and dispute resolution. She has presented at seminars and conferences on her research into resilience, wisdom, aesthetics, ethics, and indigenous healing methods applied to therapeutic interventions and facilitated retreats and healing ceremonies for veterans and women. Currently, she works in private psychotherapy practice as well as supervising, consulting, and teaching in the psychology department at Seattle University. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest having lived in both the city and in a cabin in the woods. As both pupil and friend, she has been deeply involved with several traditional indigenous Coast Salish spiritual leaders. Her belief is that our lives, in much of current Western culture, are too frequently lived within a torn web of connections, connections which are our innate birth right and can be restored.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Barrett

(1986). Death of the soul: From Descartes to the computer. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Berger

Leach

E. A.

Shaffer

L. S.

(2003). Voices from the pagan census: A national survey of witches and neo-pagans in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Bird-David

(1999). “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40(Suppl. 1), S67-S91.

Cajete

(2000). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.

Chiappari

(2002). Toward a Mayan theology of liberation: The reformulation of a “traditional” religion in the global context. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 47-67. doi:10.1111/1468-5906.00099

Davis

(2009). The wayfinders: Why wisdom matters in the modern world. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: House of Anansi Press.

Deloria

(2006). The world we used to live in: Remembering the powers of the medicine men. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.

Dillard

(2007). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

10.

Douglass

B. G.

Moustakas

(1985). Heuristic inquiry: The internal search to know. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25, 39-52. doi:10.1177/0022167885253004

11.

Drury

(2004). The New Age: Searching for the spiritual self. London, England: Thames & Hudson.

12.

Dupre

(2001). Human nature and the limits of science. New York, NY: Oxford University.

13.

Duran

(2006). Healing the soul wound. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

14.

Eisler

(1988). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins.

15.

Englander

(2016). The phenomenological method in qualitative psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 11, 30682. doi:10.3402/qhw.v11.30682

16.

Finlay

Ballenger

(2006). Qualitative research for allied health professionals: Challenging choices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

17.

Fixico

(2003). The American Indian mind in a linear world: American Indian studies and traditional knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.

18.

Frager

(1989). Transpersonal psychology: Promise and prospects. In Valle

R. S.

Halling

(Eds.), Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology: Exploring the breadth of human experience (pp. 289-309). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

19.

Gallagher

Goertzen

(2007). Linguistic privilege: Why educators should be concerned. Multicultural Perspectives, 9(1), 40-44. doi:10.1080/15210960701334094

20.

Gates

E. R.

(2011). Recovering the eco-unconscious. Gatherings. Retrieved from http://www.ecopsychology.org/gatherings/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Recovering-the-Eco-Unconscious-Robin-E.-Gates.pdf

21.

Giorgi

(1983). Concerning the possibility of Phenomenology Psychological Research. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. 14(1-2). 129-169. doi:10.1163/156916283x00081

22.

Giorgi

(2003). The origins of the journal of phenomenological psychology and some difficulties in introducing phenomenology into scientific psychology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 39, 33-58. doi:10.1163/156916298X00076

23.

Giorgi

(2008). Concerning a serious misunderstanding of the essence of the phenomenological method in psychology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 39, 43-58.

24.

Grof

. (1989). Spiritual emergency: When personal transformation becomes a crisis. Los Angeles, CA: Tarcher.

25.

Halling

(2008). Intimacy, transcendence, and psychology: Closeness and openness in everyday life. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

26.

Harner

(1982). The way of the shaman. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

27.

Harvey

(2005). Animals, animists and academics. Zygon, 41, 9-19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.2006.00723.x

28.

Highwater

(1981). The primal mind: Vision and reality in Indian America. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

29.

Hornborg

(2006). Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world. Ethnos, 71, 21-32. doi:10.1080/00141840600603129

30.

Husserl

Welton

(1999). The essential Husserl: Basic writings in transcendental phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

31.

Ingold

(2006). Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought. Ethnos, 71, 9-20. doi:10.1080/00141840600603111

32.

Mander

(1991). In the absence of the sacred: The failure of technology and the survival of the Indian nations. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

33.

Matthews

(2001). Sophia: Goddess of wisdom, bride of God. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

34.

Mayer

E. L.

(2007). Extraordinary knowing: Science, skepticism, and the inexplicable powers of the human mind. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

35.

Moustakas

(1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology and applications. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

36.

Muir

(2001). My first summer in the Sierra. McKibben

(Ed.), My first summer in the Sierra and selected essays (pp. v-xx). New York, NY: Penguin Press.

37.

Narby

Huxley

(Eds.). (2001). Shamans through time: 500 Years on the path to knowledge. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam.

38.

Parry

G. A.

(2015). Original thinking: A radical revisioning of time, humanity, and nature. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

39.

Polkinghorne

D. E.

(1989). Phenomenological research methods. In Valle

R. S.

Halling

(Eds.), Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology (pp. 41-60). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

40.

Prechtel

(1999). Long life, honey in the heart: A story of initiation and eloquence from the shores of a Mayan lake. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

41.

Roszak

Gomes

Kanner

(Eds.). (1995). Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

42.

Sheldrake

(2003). The sense of being stared at: And other aspects of the extended mind. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

43.

Somé

M. P.

(1994). Of water and the spirit: Ritual, magic, and initiation in the life of an African shaman. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

44.

Spretnak

(1997). The resurgence of the real: Body, nature, and place in a hypermodern world. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

45.

Takaki

R.T.

(1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Los Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

46.

Taylor

J. B.

(2006). My stroke of insight: A brain scientist’s personal journey. New York, NY: Viking Press.

47.

Tisdell

E. J.

(2006). Spirituality, cultural identity, and epistemology in culturally responsive teaching in higher education. Multicultural Perspectives, 8(3), 19-25. doi:10.1207/s15327892mcp0803_4

48.

Welch

(2002). Appropriating the didgeridoo and the sweat lodge: New age baddies and indigenous victims? Journal of Contemporary Religion, 17, 21-38. doi:10.1080/13537900120098147

49.

Winkelman

(2004). Shamanism as the original neurotheology. Zygon, 39, 193-217. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.2004.00566.x

50.

York

(2003). Pagan theology: Paganism as a world religion. New York, NY: University Press.