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Post by Admin on Jul 21, 2021 11:32:00 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2021 12:23:45 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 17:18:56 GMT
The Number One Thing Psychiatry Can Learn from Shamanism Posted By sunshyne49 on June 23, 2020 www.science-ofthe-soul.com/index.php/2020/06/23/number-one-thing-psychiatry-can-learn-shamanism/Something important is missing from the psychiatric model of ‘mental illness.’ It’s not a secret or anything, but rather more of an omission. It should be there, but by no accident it’s absent. You see, human beings are multi-dimensional. We are made up of mind, body and spirit. All three are utterly essential components of life, and until the transhumanists figure out how to disembody the mind, our wellness and happiness is fully reliant on the synergistic balance between these three elements. Sure, psychiatry along with the medical sciences has the body well enough figured out. And they’ve produced copious theories along with tomes of supporting research on the chemical relation between the body and the mind. With all of this they can haphazardly tweak the performance of the mind by dumping chemicals into the body, even if they have to add more chemicals to offset the effects of the initial chemicals. They’ve also grown quite adept at selling the idea of better living through chemistry. A fine example is the top-selling pharmaceutical Lyrica. It was designed to treat fibromyalgia and muscle and nerve pain, but is now widely overprescribed as an anti-anxiety and antidepressant. Such a warped interpretation of the mind-body connection. In 2016, sales of Lyrica netted over $4.4 billion for Pfizer. It’s really big business. What’s missing from the psychiatric mindset, though, is an acknowledgment of spirit. You see, the underlying difference between psychiatry and shamanism is that of worldview. Psychiatry holds onto a predominantly materialistic picture of nature, operating from the perspective that what we can see is all there is. Shamanism, on the other hand, works from the point of view that what we see is only a tiny percentage of what is actually happening. That there are other immeasurable spaces in which we can interact, if only we sufficiently expand our attention. That most of the magic, good and bad, happens in these other realms first, before it manifests in the physical realm. The psychiatric modality is dreadfully incomplete when measured against the shamanic view. This results in incomplete or partial healing, which is amply reflected in the state of mental health today, where depression is rising astronomically in tandem with sales of pharmaceuticals. The pills work well enough to mask the symptoms, but they don’t work well enough to overcome the need for the pills. I know this because I’ve been down both roads. I’m speaking from personal experience. Interestingly, at the same time, there is a surge in interest in shamanic healing. Ayahuasca tourism is pretty much mainstream now, and the African plant medicine iboga continues to gather renown for its ability to help people overcome so-called mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, while also dramatically helping people to overcome past trauma. People who’ve had these experiences, including myself, often refer to plant medicine ceremonies as the gift of years worth of high-quality psychotherapy in a single night. We say this because the shamanic traditions first treat the spiritual root causes of these conditions. We feel this to be true. It’s difficult to communicate with language, but the knowing is unmistakable. Once the spirit is healed, the mind and body are easily able to return to normal, proper functioning. Synergy being restored, people don’t need an indefinite prescription of medications, in fact, most people who experience shamanic plant medicines only do so one or two times. There is no need to keep returning to the doctor. Genuine healing works this way. This is possible only with the understanding that the spirit is the highest component of the self, the most important aspect of being alive. For spirit is the eternal portion of the individual, that which comes long before the body arrives, and that which lives on long after the body returns to the earth. It is where the magic, both good and bad, happens. When the spirit is happy, the mind and body follow suit. I sometimes reflect on both my experiences with modern psychiatry and those with shamanic plant medicines, searching for common ground. I wonder if there exists the possibility for the unification of science and spirit in order to positively affect the human condition, and I figure that if there is, it will require modern science to in some degree accept the shamanic view of the world and to open up to the needs of the spirit.
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2021 13:38:59 GMT
The Undead Shamans of Bhutan An interview with two scholars who have studied the Bhutanese deloms By Sarah FlemingWINTER 2021 tricycle.org/magazine/deloms/In early 2011, Stephanie Guyer-Stevens and Françoise Pommaret set out across Bhutan in search of women believed to have come back from the dead. Known in the Bhutanese language of Dzongkha as deloms (“returned from the dead”; Tib., delogs), these women act as mediums for local spirits, heal the sick, and travel to the hell realms to bring back messages from Yama, the Lord of the Dead. Though they are not well known outside of Bhutan, deloms serve as Buddhist teachers in their communities who offer instructions on how to lead a more compassionate life (and escape the torments of hell). In their new book, Divine Messengers: The Untold Story of Bhutan’s Female Shamans, Guyer-Stevens and Pommaret share the stories of seven women they encountered in their travels, along with a translation of the biography of an 18th-century delom. Fusing ethnography and Bhutanese religious history, the book offers an intimate portrait of the interplay between Buddhism and shamanism in contemporary Bhutan. Guyer-Stevens and Pommaret spoke with Tricycle about what these messengers from the dead can teach the living. What are deloms, and how did you first encounter them? Françoise Pommaret (FP): A delom is a woman who is said to have died, traveled to the hell realms, and returned to this world to save the living from the suffering she witnessed. When I was a PhD student in the 1980s, my professor introduced me to delom biographies as a potential dissertation topic, and I traveled to Bhutan to begin translating them. At that point I assumed that deloms were figures from the past. But as I was doing my fieldwork, someone told me there was a delom in his village. I was stunned—I didn’t know they still existed. Stephanie Guyer-Stevens (SG): Decades later, when I met Françoise and she told me about these deloms, I suggested we travel through Bhutan together and document their stories. She feared they might be diminishing in number, but in fact, they had proliferated. Once we started to ask around, it seemed like everyone knew a delom. They’re not just characters from biographies—they play an active role in the day-to-day lives of their communities. What did you discover about the everyday lives of deloms through your conversations? SG: Deloms are very ordinary women, and they speak in very ordinary language. Unlike monks and other Buddhist leaders, they live in the village, and they’re often uneducated. They don’t choose this path—instead, they are said to have been chosen by their tutelary deity, and many don’t want the role because of the physical stress and sickness it brings. Before they are recognized as deloms, these women often fall ill with a seemingly incurable disease. Even after they are recognized, deloms are still vulnerable to illness: they say that they are hypersensitive to pollution in their environments and have to continually protect themselves from exposure to others’ negative thoughts, emotions, and impurities. And unlike in the traditional biographies, where deloms make a single trip to hell, the deloms we met reported having died many times, each time bringing back new instructions from the Lord of the Dead. FP: Living in the village gives them a particular style of authority. While people might go to the monastery with more philosophical questions, they go to deloms with their personal problems and day-to-day dilemmas: family disputes, social conflicts—all the things that villagers do not confide in monks. In responding to these problems, deloms teach the basics of Buddhism, but they don’t use traditional texts. The Buddha doesn’t necessarily even figure as a character. They use divination, often with rice or dice, and make offerings to local protective deities. Their guidance is what we might call the lived rollout of the teachings. “Many don’t want the role because of the physical stress and sickness it brings.” How do deloms navigate the space between the Buddhist world and the religions that predated Buddhism in Bhutan? FP: Deloms definitely see themselves as Buddhist. They are guided by compassion in fulfilling their role, and they often must undergo terrible suffering. This is where Buddhism plays a big part: deloms are concerned with the betterment of the whole community. But the deities that access them are from pre-Buddhist religions, so they do have a lot of shamanic traits. SG: In the Buddhist world, and especially the Western Buddhist world, it is often assumed that shamanism and Buddhism can’t coexist. But they do. Deloms are proof of this coexistence, and they demonstrate how pre- Buddhist deities continue to influence contemporary religion in Bhutan. What has surprised you most in meeting contemporary deloms? SG: One of the women we met told us it was a shame that people aren’t as interested in the hells anymore— they’re so wrapped up in their earthly lives that they’re no longer looking at the larger Buddhist picture. Originally people would seek out deloms primarily to communicate with their ancestors and dead relatives. Now deloms function more like community healers, offering people guidance. FP: And they’re busy. I was startled by the number of people who come to deloms with their problems. Sometimes we had to wait in line for hours—getting an appointment with these women was like hell!
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Post by Admin on Nov 19, 2021 12:49:17 GMT
Indigenous Healing Poses a Challenge and Opportunity for Global Mental Health Similarities in the therapeutic process may reconcile apparent differences between Global Mental Health and indigenous healing practices. By Samantha Lilly -November 19, 2021 www.madinamerica.com/2021/11/indigenous-healing-poses-challenge-opportunity-global-mental-health/The Challenge of Indigenous Healing for Global Mental Health journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13634615211038167Abstract Psychiatry and anthropology have a long relationship, and it is worth examining aspects of how that relation is carried over into the developing field of Global Mental Health (GMH). One place at which the two disciplines overlap significantly is in addressing religious phenomena and ritual performance in relation to mental health, and one of the greatest challenges for GMH is how productively to take into account forms of indigenous healing based on religion and ritual. In this paper I compare recent texts in GMH written from the standpoint of psychiatry and anthropology, observing that the psychiatric texts emphasize evidence-based determination of treatment efficacy, while the anthropological texts emphasize ethnographic understanding of treatment experience. Reconciling these two emphases constitutes a challenge to the field, attending to contextual variations in treatment events, illness episodes, phenomenological factors both endogenous and intersubjective, and sociopolitical factors both interpersonal and structural. In addressing this challenge, I propose an approach to therapeutic process that on the empirical level can facilitate comparison across the diversity of healing forms, and on the conceptual level can constitute a bridge between efficacy and experience. This approach is predicated on a rhetorical model of therapeutic process including components of disposition, experience of the sacred, elaboration of alternatives, and actualization of change that highlights experiential specificity and incremental change. Deploying this model can help meet the challenge of understanding efficacy and experience in indigenous healing, and prepare the ground for the further challenge of how practitioners of GMH relate to and interact with such forms of healing.
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Post by Admin on Nov 25, 2021 15:48:37 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 5, 2021 14:01:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 5, 2021 14:33:27 GMT
Curanderismo Soul Retrieval Ancient Shamanic Wisdom to Restore the Sacred Energy of the Soul By Erika Buenaflor www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Curanderismo-Soul-Retrieval/Erika-Buenaflor/9781591433408A step-by-step shamanic guide to navigating the non-ordinary realms, locating lost soul fragments, and reintegrating them Drawing on her more than 20 years’ experience working with present-day Mesoamerican curanderos/as and the ancient shamanic healing traditions of the Mexica and Maya, Erika Buenaflor, M.A., J.D., provides a step-by-step guide for the curanderismo practice of soul retrieval. She explains how the soul is a form of sacred energy that can escape when someone experiences trauma or is threatened by challenging and stressful situations. Its absence can be responsible for a host of negative conditions including physical ailments, depression, insomnia, and dysfunctional behavior patterns. Exploring how to retrieve this sacred energy, or soul fragments, as well as resolve cases of soul theft, the author details how to journey through the non-ordinary realms of the Underworld, Middleworld, and Upperworld to locate lost soul fragments and reintegrate them. She explains how to enter a trance journey, providing instructions for shamanic breathwork practices, shamanic dancing, sounding and toning methods, as well as hand postures (mudras) to facilitate trance states. She explores how to perform soul diagnosis, create a loving and nurturing space for soul fragments to return, and work with the healing wisdom of the 5 Mesoamerican cardinal directions: South, West, North, East, and the Center, which marries the other directions and offers a portal to other worlds. She offers pressure point exercises to release the energies of traumas and contemplative exercises to continue the reintegration of soul fragments after the trance journey. She also explains how to connect with animal guardians to aid you in the soul retrieval process. Revealing how to achieve a lasting retrieval of soul energy, Buenaflor shows how the dynamic process of curanderismo soul retrieval can heal many forms and degrees of trauma and help people move forward in life with more clarity, self-awareness, empowerment, and greater depths of authentic self-love.
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Post by Admin on Dec 5, 2021 15:14:37 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2021 17:02:44 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2021 17:14:41 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2021 17:15:56 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2021 17:26:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Dec 30, 2021 17:28:30 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2022 18:43:05 GMT
The Wisdom of Mental Illness: Shamanism, Mental Health & the Renewal of the World: Shamanism, Mental Health & the Renewal of the World by Jez Hughes (Author)
"Featuring a foreword by Dr David Luke, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Greenwich. This book explores how the ancient path of shamanism can help us to understand the nature of mental illness, recasting psychological breakdown as a potentially transformational experience. What we label as pathological could actually be an initiation into a better relationship with ourselves and the world.
Written for those who are experiencing or who have experienced mental illness, or whose loved ones are going through such episodes, or who are mental wellbeing practitioners, this is a guide to the potentially transformational experience of that which we label mental illness. It explores the ancient concept of the "shamanic sickness", whereby the prospective shaman underwent many years of mental distress as part of their initiation, and looks at what this can teach us about mental health. It argues that, in some cases, what we seek to medicate could actually be a calling to a path of service and healing.
The book also explores our cultural biases around mental illness. What we define as pathological, many cultures see as a sign of being inspired and in touch with greater powers. It looks at our uneasy relationship with altered states of consciousness and how these might hold the key to healing many symptoms of mental illness. Finally it looks at how we, as species, have come out of balance in our relationship to nature and the devastating affect this is having on our mental health. By learning from ancient indigenous cultures who have remained in balance with the natural world, this book looks at solutions to heal this modern imbalance and find a way forward for the Earth and ourselves."
About the Author
Jez Hughes is a shamanic healer and teacher. Founder of the training centre Second Sight Healing, he is a regular teacher at the College of Psychic Studies in London, a popular speaker across the UK, and has featured on a panel of experts for mental health charity MIND. He has been profiled on BBC radio and across the national press. Jez has a close relationship with the indigenous Wixarika (Huichol) tribe from Mexico and is the main cultural liaison for their work in the UK. He is the author of The Heart of Life: Shamanic Initiation & Healing in the Modern World.
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