Shamanism works at a level from which we are often dissociated in our modern busy lives. It helps reconnect the different dimensions of the person and return the patient to wholeness by restoring or enhancing harmony and well-being. This explains that empowering patients in their healing process is at the heart of a shamanic practice. The healing process allows the patients to renew their connection to themselves, to nature, to others, and to energies and powers greater than themselves. That reconnection also entails a greater awareness and presence to each moment. Beyond better health, patients actually gain wisdom from the process. There is also an understanding that a patient’s healing also brings well-being to the whole family and community and, indeed, individuals report transformation affecting also people around them.
During the process itself, the shaman creates a safe and sacred container for the client to develop a state of deep relaxation and radical presence in which healing energies can be brought to the whole being, bypassing most usual resistances, facilitating a healing most have stopped believing in. One thing all of my clients report is never having felt such a state of peace and relaxation before in their entire life. The different elements of that process are progressively being documented by neuroscience, so that we can progressively understand why this ancient tradition is so powerful.
Another aspect that colleagues in conventional medicine often stress is how this healing approach treat the being not only as a whole but as an absolute unique case. Two persons with similar situations or stories might be treated very differently as the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ is happening to them might actually be very different, and their spirit is different. Therefore, each time, the healer is called to ‘forget’ everything she may think that she already knows about a certain type of pathology or trauma, and listen deeply to what is needed by each person in the moment.
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