People of the Broken Path
Our fractured selves and what it takes to heal into wholeness
Christina Lee Pratt, Last Mask Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Humans are adaptive. We often fragment to deal with immediate trauma and to cope with the ongoing stress of familial and social dysfunction. But even in the most complex life, we can learn to accurately identify the type of fracturing, 1 of 4, and facilitate direct, safe, effective, and resource-efficient means of repair.
Session Description
Current brain science demonstrates that people of all ages often fragment in response to unpredictable, prolonged, and extreme stress, both personal and cultural. They find themselves stuck in persistent patterns and disconnected from the quality of relationship with the physical world that would allow repair, ritual, and restoration.
In this state of fragmentation, alternatives to the habits of extraction, judgment/shame, and dominance inherited from Colonizer/Settler thinking are hard to create and maintain. Each person is absolutely unique, and we still fragment in four shared ways: marginalization, dissociation, shadow, and soul wounding.
We can learn the internal signals from each kind of fragmentation. From this perspective, we can easily learn to discern what we can do for ourselves, what we can do with peers, and what we need to ask for trained and experienced help to repair. This way of looking at what harms us empowers us with skills for engagement in community-based protocols, ever-deepening healing, and transformation of unresolved ancestral patterns.
In this experiential workshop, we share the basic skills that we can each do to identify and mend fragmentation within ourselves. These are the foundation of the more complex skills that repair personal disconnection, social fragmentation, and despair, with grounded presence and wholeness. Together we can liberate ourselves from internalized patterns of oppression and cultivate the practices of freedom, ritual, and whole-hearted relationship with all things.
Presenter Bio
Christina is an author, teacher, and authentic, non-traditional shamanic healer, meaning she works directly with helping spirits within a set of skills, teachings, cosmology, and community that are not appropriated from other cultures' or peoples' traditions. With online and in-person curricula, Christina is a teacher of exceptional clarity, humor, and practicality. Her mission is to help us engage the unique power of diversity and work collectively to engage the social justice challenges of our time with innovation, creativity, and restorative love. Together we can create a just world where life flourishes and we hold sacred the responsibility to be ecologically and economically sustainable in our every action.
Christina is the founder of Last Mask Center in Portland, Oregon, offering her full live, online curriculum. Her healing services specialize in soul retrieval, ancestral healing, and pioneering new healing forms needed to restore sustainable health in our broken culture. Through in-person retreats, she offers The Cycle of Transformation Teachings, a challenging, five-year training in skills, teachings, cosmology, and community. Christina is the host of the international podcast archive, Why Shamanism Now, the author of the two-volume set “An Encyclopedia of Shamanism”, and a presenter in several summits, including those for Shift Network and Sounds True.
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