FAQ: What do you do?
Maila T. Davenport: This is a very challenging question for me–it depends on what story the listener is living. Here’s what I mean. If I tell some people I am a shamanic practitioner, they think I am one of those “woo woo” ungrounded types. Their story: only the visible is valuable. If I tell other people I am an archetypal mythologist, they may think I am an academic who only knows the world through books, too rational. Their story: only the invisible is valuable.
All the time I am the same person, I teach people the steps and spiritual tools necessary to bring a land and community into balance to heal the torn places of our lives both socially and environmentally because it is all interconnected. I guess you can say I teach about the place where the visible and invisible touch.
How did you come to do this work?
MTD: I was a traditionally trained counselor for 18 years working in the field of sexual abuse trauma and grief. I was never satisfied with the whole “inner child” movement–too many of us did not have a “happy childhood” to draw upon for healing. So I started searching for other healing sources outside of personal experience, outside ego-based therapy model. The search led me up and out of my own culture–we currently have 3,000 cultures on the planet so alternatives are pretty accessible!
I went back to school to get my PhD at Pacifica Graduate Institute to study mythology and sacred imagination, then to apprentice in core shamanism. The wisdom I learned: “you have to have a clear fish tank for healthy fish”–if the places of our world are “littered” with the energetic residue of violence, death and despair we walk in a deadened world. If we clear these communal soul wounds through local activism that includes story and ceremony, we can walk in a regenerative world that can source us personally and collectively. We are then happy fish!
What do you like best about the work you do?
MTD: I like waking people up to their very real spiritual power. Calling for Divine transformation is not something reserved for ascetics or people willing to pray in caves. We are each hard-wired to tap into greater, archetypal forces to heal our world and ourselves.
If you think about it, it does not make much sense to have, say, only 5 spiritually empowered people on the planet in the 50,000 years of human culture—that would be like having only a handful of trees to oxygenate the planet! We are meant to live and heal in community, with open hearts a flame, touching both the visible and the in-visible. I call that walking in a sacred manner.
Professional organizations include:
Northwest Reiki Association
Powers of Place Initiative
Society for Shamanic Practitioners
Willamette Writers
