That’s nice!” says shaman Adam Kane when informed that our readers have chosen him for a Chronogrammie. “I tend to always be cautious. I have to keep my practice ego-free to be effective; it’s a careful dance.”
Shamanic practice is not necessarily the first health and wellness modality that leaps to mind, and Kane says that’s as it should be. “If you have something going on physically, you see your doctor; if you have something going on that’s mental or emotional, see a therapist,” he says. “It’s when something is not touched by either of those that soul work tends to excel. The art of healing and the science of medicine are both essential.”
As a child, Kane saw nature spirits; his parents had the sense to accept his intuition and his vivid dreaming as gifts, and he began reading tarot professionally at 15. Vision quests and communion with his guides led him to take up further study, and his path led to Charlie “Red Hawk” Thom. In 1993, he realized that what was birthing in him was called “shamanism” and spent several years mostly outdoors, listening to our area’s mountain spirits. He’s studied with masters from Tibet and the Andes, and attained multiple certifications.
Now he provides ritual and ceremonial healing and education to the community via the Shaman’s Tent, based in Saugerties. “We provide a space to explore what we cannot put words to,” Kane says. “Society has moved away from easily accessible ritual and ceremony, but it’s such an important part of being human. Ritual and ceremony can be very simple or very complex; it’s the power and focus that matters, not the pageantry, bells and whistles, although those can help us focus.”
Kane says shamanism provides a useful lens on current events. “We keep outsmarting nature in an effort to avoid inconvenience, and nature keeps having to get more and more intense,” he says. “When the pandemic first hit, a Rinpoche I work with described it as ‘a hole in nature occurred around the air element,’ impacting the ability to breathe. It’s a challenging time; it helps to keep your attention toward the idea of what a harmonious world looks and feels like, without attachment to the outcome, and ask: Does this move us closer or farther away? We don’t need to know everything to do the next thing, the next small piece.”
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This article appears in July 2020.
