The Shamanic Practice of Keeping a Secret

“Keeping a Secret” is one of the teachings of the North Direction, or the mythical realm of Hummingbird, in the Q’ero Incan tradition of the high Andes. For a while I was confused as to what that meant. Is it referring to a secret world that the rest of us aren’t privy to, such as the Lower World, the Upper World, or the connection with the cosmos and of Mother Earth or Pachamama? Is it keeping a secret about traditions, beliefs and mystical powers? What is this secret that the shamans aren’t telling us?

Now that I’ve delved deeper into shamanic practice, it’s beginning to make sense. Shamans aren’t keeping a secret from anyone else, they are keeping a secret from themselves. We are infinite beings, but most of us do not understand, nor can we conceptually grasp that. We aren’t designed to understand it.

Our human brains have receptors (the pineal and pituitary glands) in order to connect to our higher chakras and to source, giving us glimpses of the immense greatness of all that is. We can access this through deep states of meditation or trance, some more readily than others. Plant medicines such as ayahuasca, peyote/San Pedro and psilocybin mushrooms can also help us journey into these realms. But it’s fleeting. We can’t hold it. We easily slide back into our mundane worlds of bill-paying, taking kids to soccer practice and stressing about being late for an important meeting.

We are guided by our egos, which so many of us believe is a bad thing, and so we give ourselves the difficult goal of “transcending the ego”. While we never want the ego to be in complete control (much like the mind, it makes a great servant, but a terrible master) we do know it’s here to help us navigate through this reality. It’s here to help us connect with other human beings. Without the ego, we wouldn’t be able to relate to anyone. We were given the ego in order to ground us within this space filled with emotions, stresses, blissful encounters and distractions. We are here to experience our forgetfulness, not necessarily to remember our divineness.

But we continue the unfettered task of searching for a truth outside of us. If we are searching for our godliness or oneness with source energy, it means that we don’t know it already. This can feel dis-empowering and keeps us searching; always the perpetual seeker. The search becomes a distraction. And because you’re always searching, you’re never “there”. The shaman understands that we are a part of, and reflections of, source energy, but to remain empowered we keep this truth a secret from ourselves. The shaman knows we are keeping a secret, so although she continues to learn, to grow, to ask questions, she stops “being” the seeker. When you stop being the seeker, you become the truth of existence.

If we were all aware of the secret, we’d move from the 3rd dimension of reality to a higher dimension where there is more recognition of our connection with source. But here we are in the 3rd dimension of matter and form, of linear time, and of duality, where our souls signed up for this existence in order to experience. We agreed to forget when we came here.

We are at an amazing time where we are moving from the 3rd third dimension, utilizing the bridge of the 4th dimension, into the 5th dimension. This is the prophecy that the Q’ero and many other ancient lineages speak of. The end of the days as we know them are upon us. We have kept the secret from ourselves to remain in the 3D game, until our energetic, emotional and physical bodies could handle the transformation. We are raising our collective vibration in order to incorporate this secret as part of our inherent nature, not just fleeting glimpses. The practices of the shaman are assisting us to move into this space. We must be patient, we must seek without being the seeker, and it will all unfold in complete cosmic perfection.

What an exciting time to be alive.

Photo credit: Kristina Flour