Finding Our Way: A Cultural Reclamation
We see it regularly in mammals, birds and reptiles. Their capacity to find their way across thousands of miles to a specific destination, without maps or navigational tools, seems innate. The dog who finds her way home across many miles of terrain with which she is unfamiliar, the migratory patterns of hummingbirds from Canada to Mexico and back, the female sea turtles who, decades after their birth traverse the vast ocean, returning to the same beach where they hatched to lay their own clutch of eggs.
Not only do animals and birds have the capacity to find their way geographically, but also to find their way through evolutionary processes that help their species thrive. This seems to be a birthright for all living beings. We can verify this for ourselves by looking at the course of biological evolution. Everyone alive today, human and other-than-human, has been part of a species that has evolved to thrive.
Yet our capacity to navigate and evolve in ways that ensure our collective future seems to have gone dormant. What compelled us as humans to lay aside the wayfinding skills that our human family once had? The extraordinary capacities of the Polynesian navigators who successfully navigated thousands of miles of ocean by scent, stars, and other sense-based observations all but disappeared since the time Captain Cook and the British Royal Navy came along with sextants and maps and compasses. What we could once do instinctually became devalued with the rise of scientific reason in the 1600s as we upheld chartable, repeatable, measurable progress as the only kind of knowledge system worth developing.
Losing Our Way
What if, however, those older ways of knowing were developments critical to our survival as a species? So far scientific reason alone has not presented us with a way out of the current impasses we are facing in the current polycrisis. What seems to be lost with valuable knowledge systems is nothing short of our access to a generative, collective way forward.
What if it were possible to reclaim these other ways of knowing? This might include all capacities buried through our elevation of Reason as the only true way of knowing, such as our animal body sensing, our use of intuition, our ability to connect to truths in the spirit worlds, and our skill in sensing wholesome futures through a process of dialogue in the language of symbol, to name a few. The good news is that indigenous communities around the world have continued some of these traditions underground, sometimes at great expense. Those other ways of knowing that are still alive with us today are worthy of wide-scale reclamation.
At this time in human history, it seems that what we don’t know – coupled with our ignorance in defending our hubris – might actually become the grounds for our extinction. The stakes have never been higher, to reclaim all our ways of accessing knowledge and wisdom.
Course Correcting
Throughout our lives the two of us have been drawn to Indigenous methods of way finding. Astrology, at its essence, is about navigation. Its tools and techniques allow us to explore our most pressing wayfinding questions: How can a human’s purpose and potential be fulfilled? How can our collective potential be fulfilled as we work wisely with the rhythms and opportunities of the Cosmos and Earth? Astrology speaks to charting a path of beauty given our circumstances.
Shamanic practice is also a gift for way finders. It gives us the tools to communicate with the compassionate intelligence of the Cosmos for healing and decision making. Shamanic practice asks us to prioritize our relationships with the beings who comprise our alive universe. It is through these relationships that guidance is given and healing power bestowed. The question then becomes: How do we listen? How do we hear the wise guidance of an animate world without our biases, doubt and materialist conditioning clouding us?
Andean elder Arkan Lushwala speaks beautifully to this core question of how to reclaim our ability to listen:
“Remember how to receive instructions—not from other humans, but from the spirit world, from the land, from the Earth, from the sand, from the stars, from the universe... We belong to something much bigger than us, like a cell belongs to a body. And the intelligence of that body will guide that cell.
Everybody receives a piece of the instructions. No one holds the whole. The full vision only forms when we bring our pieces together—not to compete or impose, but to co-create. When we do this, something alive begins to take shape in front of us. We feel it. It has a heart.”
In ancient India, the rishis, or Seers, practiced a form of shamanic journeying that revealed the insights at the basis of astrological practice today. Their vision was a sacred and lasting gift to humanity. We tend to trust lineages that have stood the test of time, and for very good reason. What if this fundamental capacity to listen to the Cosmos was a skill of the human heart, that, despite centuries of brutal and targeted effort to eradicate it, remains innate to each of us? Furthermore, what if Earth and Planetary listening could be rekindled and trained, so that more of us could become trustworthy listeners, and thus reclaim our way finding abilities?
Sherri Mitchell writes about the core importance of this kind of listening in Sacred Instructions:
"In order to fully recognize our place in creation, we must realize that our stories are not the only stories that are being told. Every living being has its own creation song, its own language, and its own story. In order to live harmoniously with the rest of creation, we must be willing to listen to and respect all of the harmonies that are moving around us.
The only way that we will be able to hear these harmonic vibrations is to become multi-sensory beings. We must tune into our ability to see beyond the physical reality that surrounds us, and awaken to the vast unseen world that exists. Then …we find that we are able to comprehend the language of every living thing.”
Mitchell’s articulation of becoming multi-sensory beings is at the heart of our passion for our collaboration. We feel deeply drawn to continue to become these beings that our lineages and training have begun to teach us to be. We have been drawn and guided to work together because both of us feel deeply that the ultimate purpose of our work at this time in astrology and shamanic practice is to relearn together how to wayfind. In our experience, when used together, these two fields grant access to powerful wayfinding insights. In putting together astrology and shamanism we are reuniting fields that were only separated because of materialism and colonialism.
Reclaiming Older Ways of Knowing
In bringing astrology and shamanic practice together, we are really bringing them back together. We are reweaving certain cultural fabrics that have been long torn. The sovereignty to know what we each know is fundamental to our capacity to find our way forward through these times of great transition. Bringing together these systems is one strong way to train those long atrophied parts of ourselves. Far from relying on theoretical frameworks, marrying shamanism and astrology builds skill experientially.
Vedic astrology has traditionally seen the Planets as beings. This means that they not only leave an impression upon us at birth, but are in conversation with us throughout our lives. If only we knew how to engage in this conversation with humility, power and accuracy. What if we were not only allowed to communicate with the Planets, but were encouraged to do so?
Our human capacities to sense and communicate with non-human beings can be developed through practice. Techniques such as the basic drum journey, simple and authentic Earth ceremony, and body-based listening practices such as certain forms of dance can be widely taught and practiced. Instruction, repetition, and reflection from others can make us stronger and clearer in our listening skills.
And, most beautifully, as we and those in our course communities have found time and again in our shamanic-astrological practice, this communication opens up a world of benevolence, guidance and healing. We have found that the planets not only speak to us, they are invested in our personal evolution. They can and wish to instruct us in the collective work we have in front of us–to rebalance life on Earth, and establish systems, culture, institutions and communities that nourish sacred life.
Sources
Lushwala, Arkan. “Resilience and Possibility in These Times.” Pachamama Alliance Speaker Series, May 28, 2025, https://landing.pachamama.org/arkan-2025.
Mitchell, Sherri. Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change. North Atlantic Books, 2018. Chapter One available at: https://www.sacredinstructions.life/readchapterone).
