Interview with Miss M. Mann

Shinju - First of all, thank you for doing this. It's really kind of you.
Maisie - You're welcome.
Shinju - The idea is, it's an essay on shamanic artwork, and so it's for people who aren't familiar necessarily with shamanism but will have probably a good idea of art. It's more concentrating on what is a shaman than the art side of it. Which is why I decided to interview you. There will be other people I will be interviewing more on the art side.
Maisie - I don't necessarily use that label myself but if that is how I'm perceived then that's fine. I haven't got a problem with that. It's just that I don't wear a T-Shirt saying, "I'm a Shaman".
(Laughs)
Shinju - OK. First of all can you say, for the tape, who you are and what you do?
Maisie - My name's Maisie, what I do with my own portion of my life is spend a lot of time going amongst friends and supporting creative people's big nights out and dancing a lot and making a lot of friends through dancing.
Shinju - OK.
Maisie - Incidentally, financially I support this by working in a call centre, its very repetitive.
Shinju - What to you is a shaman?
Maisie - To me, although it's not necessarily a word that i would use, you have to work with everybody's definitions of themselves, that's just gracious. To me a shaman is someone who maintains a fairly consistent contact with the collective consciousness of life.
Shinju - OK, well that's a good description.
Maisie - Usually that includes, from what I've seen of others following it, an element of being a conduit between that and people who feel they don't have their own direct line sorted out yet.
Shinju - So within the context of that answer, would you consider yourself a shaman? Do you find yourself connected most of the time?
Maisie - Yes and no, a lot of the time yes, thankfully. There are times when I forget; it's sometimes like a radio that drifts off the station. It's a hum that's always there. You know the Buddhists and the Hindus talk about Om as the sound of the universe, what it's relating is, I guess, physics could describe it as the total hum

from the universe. Others experience it as a voice of the consciousness and the life that flows through everything. Did we get an answer there?
Shinju - I think so. I think that was quite a nice one I quite like that. Could you tell me a bit about the other people you've met who share this experience with you.
Maisie - Right. Myself, more than anything I guess, I'm a dancer, in that I seem when I'm in that mode to touch an awful lot of people. An awful lot of strangers with very smiley faces will approach me to share that they've enjoyed my dancing which is a two way thing because to me I'm moving in complete free flow and the Universe is moving through me when I dance we're all helping each other plug in, in a nice friendly environment where no one mind if you move funny.
Shinju - Egging each other on?
Maisie - Yeah kind of. Other shamen There are people who I know who choose what they consider shamanic techniques whether or not they consider themselves to be shamen I don't know, but people can work in various ways and there are people who are very, very talented with drawing meaning from what people tell them and through conversation can share light and access to the total consciousness usually its people who have lost sight of their own component of that. Which we all carry everything, everything is alive everything carries energy compacted in the same small range of frequencies that we interact with, you know, solid matter light sound, our own existences. So yeah, there are people who are very good conversationally. There are people who paint and sculpt and musicians. Basically who, in whatever way allow their own love of life perhaps to come through their work rather that you know trying to put their own view forward through their work, trying to say something I don't believe that the energy that comes through that could be purely referred to as shamanic I think that, for those people ego is probably interfering but there are musicians and painters and sculptors who for instance wont be swayed by market demand, who simply...
Shinju - Integrity is part of the shamanic experience?
Maisie - Yeah usually those people have a deep acknowledgement that in a way they've created nothing they've merely acted as a point of expression into our three dimensional reality and to me that's what makes it an art I believe it is a spiritual thing. It's why I wouldn't refer to anything being produced expressly for corporate gain as art.
Shinju - I'm just a bit curious to see how closely you think creativity is to being a shaman? I mean Shamanism, from what I've discovered from the anthropologists perspective is classically described as having a mastery of techniques of ecstasy,