• Ancestral disciplines
• Union of yoga and shamanism
• Selene Calloni Williams
• Characteristics of shamanic yoga
• The deep ecology

Ancestral disciplines

The antiquity of two traditions or disciplines – it depends on how we want to define them – such as yoga and shamanism are literally unfathomable. 

Shamanism resurfaces from every ancient prehistoric find and perhaps it is not entirely incorrect to believe that it has even accompanied the process of homination in its most ancestral forms, or the passage from animal to man. 

Yoga as we know it today is spoken of in the most ancient texts of humanity  (the Vedas ), referring to it as one of the most ancient things left to the rishis by the ancient fathers, almost mythological figures that we can even define pre-Adamite.

Union of yoga and shamanism

Researchers and experts such as  Debashish Banerji , professor of Indian philosophy and culture at CIIS in California, and of Indian art history at the University of California, confirm in their studies that there was undoubtedly an ancient era during which philosophical knowledge and the occult methodologies typical of the earliest urban centers merged with the techniques of the peoples of the forests and steppes with a shamanic heritage.

It was the latter who provided techniques that later evolved into mantras  and yogic asanas , and also many figures of theriomorphic divinities, or partially animals, most probably derive from the contribution of shamans to yoga, closely connected to the spirits of nature they were accustomed to perceive. in their visions.

Selene Calloni Williams

Today there are attempts to remedy the gap that for centuries if not millennia divided yoga from shamanism, and a form of yoga called  shamanic yoga was born , a term brought into vogue by Selene Calloni Williams , yoga teacher and popularizer of yoga-related topics. , to shamanism, to esotericism, to nature, to meditation, after having traveled around the world and practiced various disciplines. Today she teaches and disseminates all over the world and is famous both in Italy and abroad as a best-selling author. 

Characteristics of shamanic yoga

This new version of shamanic yoga, in which we find common ground Hindu yogic traditions, Buddhist tantrism , Mongolian and Siberian Sicilian legacies, knowledge of psychoanalytic alchemy, seeks to unite body, emotion, mind and spirit, incorporating imaginal methodology and rituals that integrate the two great rivers of yoga and shamanism in a single current, for concrete forms of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being, aiming at the so-called ” reabsorption of reality “.

The deep ecology

Great social relevance is given by shamanic yoga to what is defined as ” profound ecology ” or ecosophy , a philosophical form based on environmental ethics that emphasizes what is “Eco”, from the Greek oikos , or ” casa ”, by extension: environment. 

This passage of attention from anthropocentrism where at the center of everything there is the Antropos , that is the educated human being and therefore disconnected from his own vital naturalness, to an ecocentrism where it is the context and the holistic environment that have the primary importance, it is a crucial fact of our age which, by helping us to perceive ourselves as an element part of the whole, can change direction in an age of abuses perpetrated towards the sacredness of life .