This is a picture of Korean shamans in trance standing on rice blades.
This is a dangerous activity for sure!
But they could do this successfully in trance because Divine instruction knows all.
This is not a type of practice that is specific to Korean shamans. Sure, it's not always rice blades, but nearly every shamanic practice in cultures around the world has some kind of dangerous activity that they perform in trance.
You have probably heard of some of them--firewalking being the most famous. Even the southern Baptist snake handling is a form of this.
Here is the purpose: if a healer fears death, then he or she cannot stare death in the face and help another person heal.
Helping others heal can be spiritually and emotionally dangerous work. This physical action is actually Spiritual athletic ability.
I used to fancy myself a modern shaman, but after reading this book, I don't believe I have fully mastered this ability and it's time to go back to practicing my spiritual athletic abilities.
It was once my Instagram handle-- irreverent shaman. And some random woman berated me for culturally appropriating because I used the word shaman. She accused me of detracting from the native people who practice real shamanism (She was white too.. 
)
Actually the word Shaman is an anthropological word. It was used by scientists to describe this common healer among different cultures that they did not understand. Because this role is the everything fixer from disease to emotions to spiritual questions. And the solutions to these problems did not make logical sense to the scientists--how could singing a song heal a disease???
My point is-- the word Shaman is a distinctly white people word for someone else's cultural healer. It's not cultural appropriation. If anything, it's a little ignorantly demeaning. People who are actually part of the culture usually have their own word for it. Like "Bruja" in Mexico.
These anthropologists were so perplexed because they did not have someone like this in their culture.
What they did not realize is that their culture desperately needed a shaman. They should have found this a normal thing to have in a society but it was weird to them.
The missing white people shaman was actually intentionally removed from Europe in the early 1000s.
She was called witch.
It's estimated that 400,000-2 million people were burned at the stake for practicing their cultural healing traditions. The vast majority of these were women. And it happened over 400 years. 10 generations of burning will make a whole collective forget about their shamans.
This removal served two purposes--
1. It separated the Europeans from their roots which allowed the catholic church to move into that rootedness and control the spiritual and medical conversation.
2. It suppressed the feminine power
We are still dealing with the effects of this today, and it impacts more than people with European descent.
This is the biggest reason cultural appropriation is even a thing. White women, particularly, have a drive to find this lost information. They are wandering around with cultural amnesia trying to find that thing that soothes their soul and reignites the connection to the Earth.
Reconnecting with their actual culture is too scary because the collective unconscious remembers "witch=death."
But yoga is okay!
I remember being in my early 20s feeling like there was some deep knowledge that I desperately needed but was never given. So I obsessively started learning about other cultures and spent the next decade unwinding my resistances to the information that my body yearned for.
Every October I honor and grieve the witch wound.
You are not alone if you felt this way.
Jaye Anne