Last month we explored what a Shamanic Practitioner is.. “someone who acts as a bridge between the shamanic indigenous world and the modern world and borrows the medicine and wisdom of these shamanic people to bring healing and balance.”
But what is a Shamanic Healing?
According to The Power Path ”Shamanic healing is a spiritual and medical practice based upon the belief that all healing includes a spiritual dimension.”
A shamanic practitioner is trained to recognize that all illnesses have a spiritual component and that everything is connected–the spiritual, emotional, physical and mental. Therefore, if one of these systems is out of balance the disharmony can be felt within the entire energetic field or web. The goal of a healing is to create balance within this web and create harmony where the spirit is suffering. A shamanic practitioner is trained to step into the unseen world and locate the cause of the disconnection from Spirit.
Practitioners and their training vary greatly and some specialize in soul retrieval, cord cutting, drum journeying, extraction etc. In a shamanic healing the practitioner will often use certain tools to assist in moving the unwanted or blocked energy. Depending on the tradition, some tools may include feathers, mesas, sacred songs or certain herbal or plant medicines, to name a few. (We will explore these in more depth in future articles.)
Consider a shamanic healing when there are issues of depression, stagnancy and apathy in habits, PTSD, or triggering of past events that you don’t necessarily know the root cause of. These are just a few examples of blocked energies that a shamanic healing could address.
Healing’s are performed with the understanding that it’s not actually the practitioner that is doing the healing work-but Great Spirit; the practitioner is simply a qualified, skilled and experienced tool who has developed a longterm relationship with the invisible world. Spirit can now work through the practitioner to facilitate the healing.
The participation of the client is imperative as intention plays an enormous role in the efficacy of a shamanic healing. If a patient refuses to disengage from his suffering, then a shamanic healer can be of little service. But if one is willing, a shamanic healing can engage and catalyze the spiritual and self-healing capacities of the body that are often overlooked or pushed aside by traditional therapies and modern medicine.
Amanda is a shamanic practitioner and the director of The Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange. She is photographer and mother and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
