Companions Circle Church

Companions Circle is a church circle of shamanic ways. Besides and beyond traditional or New Age or core shamanisms, shamanic ways are also always new within each moment with each shamanizer who connects with Spirit and Spirits directly over a situation, challenge, or trouble at hand to activate beneficial changes. Companions Circle aims to live and teach contemporary shamanic ways, which we often call 'new shamanics' or 'shamanic innovations' - innovative, flexible, synthesizing, and synergyzing to the nth degree. We are often inspired by traditional as well as other modern or adapted shamanisms and we draw from many sources through many fields of human activity as we are guided by Spirit and Spirits. We make no effort to practice or reconstruct or continue the lineage of any traditional or aboriginal (or modern 'trademarked') shamanisms or shamanistic religions.

Companions Circle can be a spiritual 'wayside inn' while you navigate and voyage your earthy, heavenly, universal, ordinary and non-ordinary life journey. We are here in Milwaukee WI to keep shamanic ways and shamanic practitioners present and available in our neighborhood and the world. Companions Circle is a non-profit contemporary shamanic practice in church form and a non-profit church organized as a contemporary shamanic practice.

Paradox: Companions Circle meets the IRS Church Definition and our activities fall under the generally accepted meanings of the words religious and spiritual. But almost all churches, religions, and spiritual traditions - organized or not, mainstream or alternative - seek and aim for ultimate meaning, purpose, and reality beyond the physical-material Universe. Companions Circle appears to fall under the conventional definitions of a "religious and spiritual church" yet embodies some irreligious, materialistic, unchurch-like characteristics and approaches. A key difference: For us the duality dance of matter and spirit, visible and invisible, and - ultimately - of even duality and unity, revolves around and resolves into Universal Life in ordinary reality. Shamans travel the non-ordinary realms to shift reality in all dimensions and levels towards better and best yet find ultimate meaning and purpose in returning to their ordinary-reality communities with new healing and transforming gifts, songs, and stories.

Our History And Tradition: Companions Circle began in 1990 in Milwaukee Wisconsin in the circling around of two and then three and then more spiritual companions. We began a public ministry of shamanic shifting self and reality towards better and best in 1994. We recover, adapt, and innovate shamanic ways of direct spiritual experience. We merge animism, the religion of everything being alive in a sacred way and pantheism, the religion of the divine living everywhere, and gnosis, the religion of direct individual and small group experience of Life Spirit. We practice shamanic ways of accessing the non-ordinary source realms of reality, and dreaming and imagining beyond everyday limitations and boundaries, where unlimited potential and infinite possibilities already rattle, drum, sing, and dance.

Shamanic ways began in pre-history long before the fields of human endeavor branched out, separated, and specialized. Religion, philosophy, science, art, and technology merged into one another in those days. So we draw from many diverse sources and traditions: Prophetic entertainment and spiritual alchemy; Earth, nature, sky, and star honoring spiritual ways of our ancestors; New eco-spiritual and earth-sustaining ways of balanced living in harmony; Community shamanism and shamanic innovations; Frontier science and technology; Cyber- and techno-shamanism; Psychology; and more.

Our Non-Profit Mission: Keep a Shamanic Shift Center of shamanic ways teachings and shamanic practitioners open for shamanizing all levels, realms, directions, dimensions, and orders of everyday reality towards better and best amidst ordinary challenges. Help individuals and circles anywhere "Be shamanic shift!"

Call 414-289-8661
and leave a call-back voicemail to contact The Rev. Elizabeth Cunningham Perkins if you need an ordained minister
for individualized interfaith or earth-centered ceremonies - marriage, handfasting, same-sex partnership blessing, space and place blessing, dedications,
baptisms, rites to honor events of life transition, funerals, and more!