While shamanic practice may seem to be in a completely different category from the other therapies covered in this book, it is actually another holistic medicine that, like acupuncture and homeopathy, addresses disturbances in an individual's electromagnetic or energy field, and in so doing, brings body, mind, and spirit back into alignment. Each of these therapies has its own ways of dealing with energy disturbances, but the goals are the same: the clearing of negative influences and block-ages and the restoration of balance, wholeness, and connectedness.
In addition to its useful analysis of energetic issues, shamanic tradition offers a view of mental disorders that is sorely lacking in the Western world and that holds the key to a whole other way of healing. Disregard of this view has led to treatment based on suppression of symptoms, rather than therapeutic methods that bring the body, mind, and spirit back together. In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé, PhD, an internationally celebrated African shaman, diviner, and teacher. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.
Shamanic traditions around the globe subscribe to this view, and the West could benefit greatly from absorbing its wisdom. As psychologist and anthropologist Holger Kalweit writes, “If we were able to understand sickness and suffering as processes of physical and psychic transformation, as do Asian peoples and tribal cultures, we would gain a deeper and less biased view of psychosomatic and psychospiritual processes and begin to realize the many opportunities presented by suffering … “223
Dr. Somé is a member of the Dagara tribe, which is from an area situated at the intersection of Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) in western Africa. Dr. Somé left his homeland to study in Europe and the United States and holds three master's degrees and two doctorates from the Sorbonne and Brandeis University. He has authored two books, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community and Of Water and the Spirit.
The latter is his moving autobiography, which tells of his kidnap at the age of four by Jesuit missionaries who kept him prisoner and trained him as a missionary until at 20 he managed to escape. After an arduous trip back to his village, he underwent an initiation that restored him to his people and opened the way to his shamanic practice. Now dedicated to bringing the healing wisdom of the Dagara tribe to the West, he conducts workshops and classes around the world, while still maintaining a close connection with his village in Burkina Faso.
What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.
One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.
“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I've seen in my village,” says Dr. Somé. What struck him was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”
—NANCY ROSENFELD, author and bipolar-disorder survivor
On the ward, Dr. Somé also saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and some psychics are able to see. “They were causing the crisis in these people,” he says. It appeared to him that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the people the beings were trying to merge with, and were increasing the patients’ pain in the process. “The beings were acting almost like some kind of excavator in the energy field of the people. They were really fierce about that. The people they were doing that to were just screaming and yelling.” He couldn't stay in that environment and had to leave.
In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person reconcile the energies of both worlds—”the world of the spirit that he or she is merged with, and the village and community.” That person is able then to serve as a bridge between the worlds and help the living with information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer. “The other world's relationship with our world is one of sponsorship,” Dr. Somé explains. “More often than not, the knowledge and skills that arise from this kind of merger is a knowledge or a skill that is provided directly from the other world.”
The beings who were increasing the pain of the inmates on the mental hospital ward were actually attempting to merge with the inmates in order to get messages through to this world. The people they had chosen to merge with were getting no assistance in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds, and the beings’ attempts to merge were thwarted. The results were the sustaining of the initial disorder of energy and the aborting of the birth of a healer.
“The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Somé. “Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying as many people as possible in an attempt to get somebody's attention. They have to try harder.” The spirits are drawn to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. “The sensitivity is pretty much read as an invitation to come in,” he notes.
Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive. Western culture views sensitivity as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don't see sensitivity that way, and as a result, sensitive people don't experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, “it is the overload of the culture they're in that is just wrecking them,” observes Dr. Somé. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people.
The foreign energy addressed in shamanic healing enters the energy field that surrounds the body, which is also called the aura. While, unlike shamans, laypeople cannot typically see their aura, they receive evidence of its existence all the time. Have you ever “felt your skin crawl” when you met someone new? Have you ever suddenly and for no apparent reason felt drained or depressed when you walked into a room of people? These reactions are the result of discordant foreign energies entering your energy field, or aura, where they are not a good match with your energy and consequently produce a sense of unease or discomfort.
Energy influences may not be transitory. The energy field around your body is subtle and fragile and can actually be damaged, which renders it more permeable to foreign energies and more likely that they will remain. Among the events or practices that can damage or pollute the aura are emotional or physical trauma, psychic or verbal abuse, other people's negative or bad thoughts about you, and substance abuse. Physicians and psychics alike have noted that the energy field can be occupied by energies that produce mental, emotional, and physical symptoms and, if allowed to remain, can lead to disease.226
Psychiatrist Shakuntala Modi, MD, of Wheeling, West Virginia, has been researching energy field disturbances for over 15 years. She has identified a range of physical and psychological symptoms and conditions that result from such disturbances, including depression, headaches, allergies, uterine disorders, weight gain, stammering, panic disorders, and schizophrenia. Further, under clinical hypnotherapy, 77 out of 100 patients cited foreign “beings” in their aura as responsible for the symptoms or condition for which they were pursuing treatment.
Dr. Modi's research revealed that these beings are “the most common cause of depression” and “the single leading cause of psychiatric problems in general.”227 Dr. Modi also found that after removing the foreign energies from the patient's energy field using hypnotherapy, the patient's symptoms “often cleared up immediately.”228
The concept of energy disturbances in a person's energy field causing a variety of physical and psychological problems is gaining greater recognition and acceptance in the healing professions and among the public at large. A simple way to look at the issue of “energy pollution” is that, like the environment and your body, your energy field is subject to toxic buildup and requires cleansing to restore it to health. Just as we take measures to clean up our planet and engage in various body detoxification methods such as fasts or colonics, we need to take steps to clear the toxins from our auras.
Shamanic healing is a method for cleansing your energy field of the toxins that are interfering with your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Or in the case of a being trying to merge with you for healing purposes, shamanic practice brings your energy and that of the being into alignment, thus resolving the symptoms resulting from discordant energy and enabling the healer in you to be born.
To test his belief that the shamanic view of mental illness holds true in the Western world as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mental patient back to Africa with him, to his village. “I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there's truth in the universality that mental illness could be connected with an alignment with a being from another world,” says Dr. Somé.
Alex was an 18-year-old American who had been suffering from psychotic manic-depression for the previous four years. Along with dangerous ups and downs, he had hallucinations and was suicidal. He was in a mental hospital and had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing was helping. “The parents had done everything—unsuccessfully,” says Dr. Somé. “They didn't know what else to do.”
With their permission, Dr. Somé took their son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal,” Dr. Somé reports. “He was even able to participate with healers in the business of healing, sitting with them all day long and helping them, assisting them in what they were doing what their clients…. He spent about four years in my village.” Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing. He felt “much safer in the village than in America.”
To bring his energy and that of the being from the spiritual realm into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was slightly different from the one used with Dagara people. “He wasn't born in the village, so something else applied. But the result was similar, even though the ritual was not literally the same,” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that resonating the energy worked to heal Alex demonstrated to Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illness is indeed universal.
After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the being had for this world. Unfortunately, the people he was talking to didn't speak English (Dr. Somé was away at that point). The whole experience led, however, to Alex going to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because “he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had been done, and he could then move on with his life.”
The last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in graduate school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less get an advanced degree.
Dr. Somé sums up what Alex's mental illness was all about: “He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying attention to that.”
After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his community in Africa. “Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the proper ritual to help people.”
With bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and addiction (the last three epidemic in the United States and the first on the rise), Dr. Somé has found that the main underlying problem is disconnection from one's life purpose. This disconnection “leaves room for some alien energies to come in that don't have anything to do with the kind of promise the person made before coming into this world,” the promise of what one will fulfill in one's life. Not fulfilling your promise leaves you subject to “mental” disorders. With this come feelings of uselessness or helplessness, a sense of being “completely adrift in a world without purpose.” He believes that 90 percent of the above illnesses have to do with “a perverted purpose, a purpose that has been displaced.”
Bipolar disorder in general “has a lot to do with the nature of the contradiction that the person is living,” states Dr. Somé. “One pole is the personal promise, the other is the reality. These two poles may not like each other because they're not complementary.” The cultural context of the West is often responsible for the contradiction because it doesn't support people in fulfilling their purpose. “They come into a culture that wants them to acquire a certain kind of skill in order to make a living. That messes up a lot of people.”
The shaman can see what a person's purpose is. “The divination doesn't hide these kinds of things,” says Dr. Somé. The shaman's task in this case is to tell people their purpose, but only after preparing them through ritual so they are in a position to understand what is revealed. The ritual used is called a “dupulo” and works to correct the changes done to the original promise. “It's like a disruption of the current path the person is in. It prepares the space for the promise to come alive in the person.” After the ritual, the shaman lets a week or two pass, to let it sink in, and then helps the individuals having undergone the dupulo to become consciously aware of their promise, the specifics of their purpose.
At that point, it is up to them to “take it or leave it,” Dr. Somé says. If they decide not to fulfill that purpose, they will go back into illness. The choice is theirs—they can choose to be ill or choose to be aligned with their path.
Dr. Somé gives the example of a man whose promise before being born, the reason why he came into this world, was to work at providing homes for people. “That's a metaphor for a variety of things. One is the actual physical home, another is helping people to feel comfortable with themselves. The man shows up here, finds out how difficult it is, and winds up working in a factory.” After receiving the information about his purpose, “he can either start looking into the possibility of being a home builder or a healer who brings stability or groundedness to other people, or not.”
Another common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in “mental” disorders is “a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, that finally is coming out in the person.” His job then is to trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with mountains or big rivers, he says.
In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it's a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that is affecting the person caught in it.” What is needed is a merger or alignment of the two energies, “so the person and the mountain spirit become one.” Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring about this alignment.
Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the fabric of this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run from the past, but you can't hide from it.” The ancestral spirit of the natural world comes visiting. “It's not so much what the spirit wants as it is what the person wants,” he says. “The spirit sees in us a call for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and so the spirit is responding to that.”
That call, which we don't even know we are making, reflects “a strong longing for a profound connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious doesn't make any difference.” They respond to either.
As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them. “The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,” notes Dr. Somé. “They receive all kinds of information that they can make use of, so it's like they get some tangible guidance from the other world as to how to live their life.”
When it is the “river energy,” those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as with the mountain spirit.
“People think something extraordinary must be done in an extraordinary situation like this,” he says. That's not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone.
One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking. “The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual viewpoint, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live,” Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. “To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it.”229
Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals from his traditional village could simply be transferred to the West, so over his years of shamanic work here, he has designed rituals that meet the very different needs of this culture. Although the rituals change according to the individual or the group involved, he finds that there is a need for certain rituals in general.
One of these involves helping people discover that their distress is coming from the fact that they are “called by beings from the other world to cooperate with them in doing healing work.” Ritual allows them to move out of the distress and accept that calling.
Another ritual need relates to initiation. In indigenous cultures all over the world, young people are initiated into adulthood when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people are in here, says Dr. Somé. He urges communities to bring together “the creative juices of people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to come up with some kind of an alternative ritual that would at least begin to put a dent in this kind of crisis.”
Another ritual that repeatedly speaks to the needs of those coming to him for help entails making a bonfire and then putting into the bonfire “items that are symbolic of issues carried inside the individuals…. It might be the issues of anger and frustration against an ancestor who has left a legacy of murder and enslavement or anything, things that the descendant has to live with,” he explains. “If these are approached as things that are blocking the human imagination, the person's life purpose, and even the person's view of life as something that can improve, then it makes sense to begin thinking in terms of how to turn that blockage into a roadway that can lead to something more creative and more fulfilling.”
The example of issues with an ancestor touches on rituals designed by Dr. Somé that address a serious dysfunction in Western society and in the process “trigger enlightenment” in participants. These are ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction they are aimed at is the mass turning-of-the-back on ancestors. Some of the spirits trying to come through, as described earlier, may be “ancestors who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to heal what they weren't able to do while in their physical body.”
“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.”230 The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.
Taking a sacred-ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected—and indeed the community at large—the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to a “plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states Dr. Somé.