Shamanic Healing
Though a well-educated contemporary shamanic practitioner may also understand and observe such phenomena, these are not shamanic areas of functioning. A shamanic practice does not conceptualize or engage in healing based on these things. Shamanism and contemporary medicine are different professions that rely on different perspectives that utilize different techniques that in turn, rest on different understandings. Shamanic reality is quite different than the medical model, and when engaged in shamanic healing, the practitioner is attentive to matters that the medical model overlooks.
Shamanism and Healing
Shamanic healing is different from that of Western medicine. It is significant to keep in mind, however, that throughout the vast majority of human existence on this planet, that it was the shaman who provided the healing. For shamanic practice to survive throughout the world over the last 40 thousand years with fairly consistent practices and world views... it doesn't take much to suppose that they must have had something right!
Shamanism is sensitive to shamanic reality, and its influence on ordinary reality being one of the reasons why shamanic healing is understood as being effective. In contemporary terms, the shaman does not work with ‘cancer’ or ‘depression’ per se: these are constructions that utilize, in this case, a medical model. A medical model works from the understanding that the casual factors of illness are some things (for instance, biological, physiological, psychological-induced), and not others. The shaman is not trying to be an oncologist or a psychiatrist. Actually its the farthest thing from it.
The shaman begins from a model of the world that understands it far differently as, for instance, an oncologist. Instead of 'cells' and 'biochemical interactions' or 'thought disorders' or 'neuroses', the shaman sees a spirit-filled world with beings and forces that combine with untoward effects on a suffering person who is unable to live into their natural wholeness. The shaman works within a shamanic frame of reference, working with what the contemporary Western world would call ‘non-ordinary’ aspects of reality.
Actually, it is only in the bare sliver of recent history that a ‘medical model’ has assumed the role of providing human wellness and healing, and this, only in the more developed areas of the globe. With all of our combined, worldwide shamanic history of practices learned, tested, and passed down from teacher to student or rediscovered again and again, it is hardly surprising that these widely separated practices are not only very similar to one another, but that they actually are effective. What doesn’t work is naturally discarded, and what does work is retained.
Shamanic healing involves looking for many things, including a separation from a part of one’s personal power or a part of one’s soul when diagnosing and alleviating the suffering of their client. Because illness as understood by a shaman can manifest following a separation from one’s power, he or she works to recover such power by means of a power animal retrieval. Because illness understood in this way might also a manifest following a separation from an integral part of the self (a ‘soul part’), the shaman gathers lost soul parts with a soul retrieval.
When we allow ourselves and our clients the recovery and free expression of a full self, we open an avenue for healing. And, as soul parts can be retrieved, so can one’s power.
