I lost my phone and was thankful: A lesson on shamanic journeying

On separateness, intention, and what happens when we let a journey be more wholesome

The shamanic way of being understands that we are not separate from the world around us but are instead deeply woven into it. We aren’t apart from, or even a part of, nature. We are nature. When you develop that sense and way of being, it shapes everything you do. It even shapes how you might approach a shamanic journey.

Shamanic journeying is core to shamanic practice. It is the process where you ‘travel’ beyond yourself to engage with what is around you. For thousands of years those living in shamanic cultures have done this. It is the way they engage with the world around them and helps nurture wholeness.

When we engage in journeying, we can come to the work openly, letting in whatever wants to come. Or we can come to a journey with the intention of receiving something specific, such as an answer, a fix, a result. Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong. Sometimes its useful to be open and sometimes specific. But the more we carry the sense of ourselves as separate individuals, the more likely we are to journey in the second, more utilitarian way. It can be a little bit like reaching for spirit the way we'd reach for a search engine, expecting something specific we have already predetermined we need. 

I was reminded of this recently, in an oddly ordinary way: I lost my phone.

Initially I thought it would just turn up as it usually does. But after a while, I realised I needed to be more proactive and try to find it. I knew it hadn't gone far, and I didn’t intuitively feel that it had been stolen. So I wasn’t worried about security. Using tracking software, I narrowed it down to somewhere near my car, parked just outside the house. But I searched everywhere and couldn't find it.

My first instinct, naturally, was to consider journeying to find the phone. To ask my guides where it was and help me locate it. It did not, however, take me long to sense that this wasn't going to work. The intention was too narrow, too pointed, too much "me" wanting "my” thing back. So, I shifted. Instead of hunting, I journeyed first to bring myself back into balance and second to understand what was going on.

Once I was steadier, I asked a very open question to guide the journey: What could this loss of my phone mean? What did I need to learn from this? I held the intention loosely, open to the possibility that this wasn't about the phone at all and that finding it might not even be the outcome.

In the journey, four things then came to me clearly. First, that I was in a transition, moving away from an old version of myself, stepping more fully into shamanic work and into wholeness. This event was a part of that process.

Second, that our phones are not simply extensions of us anymore and that energetically we are our phones. We are so entangled with them that the line between technological and biological has blurred. From a shamanic view this isn't surprising at all, because we are, in effect, entangled in everything. But it still struck me how far this entanglement has gone.

Third, I was shown how the old phone was carrying the energy of my old self. Even though the phone was barely three or four years old, it was time to let it go. Left to my rational, individual mind, I'd never have chosen to replace a phone that young. Instead, I'd have run it into the ground for years.

Finally, I got the sense that when I got a new phone, I could forge a different relationship to it. I've never liked phones and for a long time I resisted getting a smartphone. I've treated my phone as something to hold at arm's length, like something I don’t like about myself that I was trying to push away. Whilst in the past - like many others - I got sucked into the ‘shadow’ side of phones, I usually always resisted it.

Since I now have a new phone (I never found the old one) I have become more accepting of it as having its own kind of consciousness and as something that is also inherently me. It has both its shadow and light sides. Yet, by accepting it for what it is (and who I am) I believe that I have now taken a more wholesome perspective, allowing a different kind of relationship. I clearly don’t want to be controlled by my phone, but I am in a better place of acceptance about all that it involves.   

There is, however, a more general message from all of this for practice. This is that a wider approach to journeying opened a door my practical self would have kept firmly shut. Had I journeyed only to locate the phone, I'd have missed the wider experience: the transition, the entanglement, the release, and the acceptance. I probably would have also remained a lot more stressed when the journey didn't lead to me finding the phone. By keeping intentions wide and open, I did not just get a better understanding of my lost phone. It allowed something much deeper to find its way to me in its own entangled form. So the next time you journey ask if you can also open what you focus on, and look for wider or deeper messages and experiences that the wonderful practice of journeying can provide.