In the shamanic view, signs of mental illness indicate "the birth of a healer, " explains Patrice Malidoma Somé. Therefore, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and should be considered as such, to help the healer be born.
What from the Western point of view is seen as mental illness, Dagaralo people consider it " good news from the other world ." The person in crisis has been chosen as a means for a message to the community, which needs to be communicated from the spiritual kingdom. "Mental disorder, and behavioral disorder of all kinds, is a sign of the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field, " says Dr. Somé. These disturbances occur when the person does not receive help, to deal with the presence of the energy of the spiritual kingdom.
One of the things that Dr. Somé found, when she first came to the United States in 1980 for postgraduate studies, was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to " nervous depression " and Dr. Somé went to visit him.
“I was so surprised. That was the first time they brought me face to face with what is done here to people who have the same symptoms that I have seen in my town. ” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to these symptoms is based on the pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that has to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way their culture considers such a situation. As he looked around the patients' marking room, some with straitjackets, some divided into areas with medication, others shouting, he said to himself: “ This is how healers who are trying to be born are treated in this culture . What a waste! What a loss that a person who is finally aligning with another world power is wasting! "
Another way of saying this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that in the West we are not trained in how to treat or even teach to recognize, the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When the energies of the spiritual world emerge in a western psyche, that individual is fully equipped to integrate them, or even recognize what is happening. The result can be scary. Without the proper context for assistance that allows dealing with the advancement of another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is crazy. A heavy dosage with anti-psychotic medications aggravates the problem, and prevents the integration that could lead to the development of the soul, and the growth of the person who has received these energies.
In the mental room, Dr. Somé saw a large number of "beings" hanging around patients, "entities" that are invisible to most people, but that shamans and seers are able to see. "They were causing the crisis in these people, " he said. It seemed to them that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of people's bodies, that the beings were trying to merge with them, and increased the pain of the patients in the process. “The beings were acting almost like a kind of excavator in the energy field of people. They were really fierce with that. The people who were doing that, just yelled and yelled, ”he said. She could not stay in that environment and had to leave.
In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person to reconcile the energies of both worlds: "the world of the spirit with which he or she merges, and the people and the community." That person is then able to serve as a bridge between the worlds, and help the living with the information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer. “The relationship of the other world with our world is one of sponsorship, ” explains Dr. Somé. “Very often, the knowledge and skills that are derived from this type of fusion are knowledge or skill that is provided directly from the other world .
The beings that were increasing the pain of the inmates in the mental hospital, were actually trying to merge with the inmates, in order to get the messages through this world. The people who had chosen to merge were not receiving any help in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds, and the attempts of the beings to merge were frustrated. The result was the maintenance of the initial disease of energy, and the abortion of the birth of a healer.
Western culture has systematically ignored the birth of the healer, says Dr. Som . Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying, with as many people as possible, in an attempt to get someone's attention. They have to work harder. Spirits are attracted to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. Sensitivity is more or less read as an invitation to come in, he says.
Those who develop the so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is seen in Western culture as hypersensitive. Indigenous cultures do not see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people do not see themselves as too sensitive. In the West, it is the overload of the culture in which they are, which simply destroys them, observes Dr. Som. The frantic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture, can overwhelm sensitive people.
Schizophrenia and external energyWith schizophrenia, there is a special receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled, said Dr. Som. When this type of avalanche occurs at a time if you have chosen it, and in particular when it comes to images that are scary and contradictory, the person goes into a brake.
What is required in this situation is, first, to separate the energy of the person, from foreign foreign energies, through the use of the champanic practice (the which is known as a sweep) to erase external factors from the aura of the person. With his clean energy field, the person no longer picks up an avalanche of information, and therefore has no reason to be scared and disturbed, explains Dr. Som .
Then it is possible to help the person to align with the energy of the spirit that is trying to reach through the other world, and give birth to the healer. The blocking of that birth is what creates problems. "The energy of the healer is a high-voltage energy, " he observes. “When locked, it only burns the person. It is like a short circuit. The fuses blow. This is why it can be really scary, and I understand why this culture prefers to confine these people. Here they are screaming and screaming, and they are put on a straitjacket. That is a sad image. "Once again, the shamanic approach is to work on the alignment of energies so that there is no blockage, " the fusion " is not happening and the person can become the healer he is destined to be.
It is necessary to point out at this point, however, that not all spiritual beings that enter a person's energy field are there for the purpose of promoting healing. There are negative energies, which are undesirable presences in the aura. In those cases, the shamanic approach is to eliminate them from the aura, instead of working to align the discordant energies.
Alex: Crazy in the US, healer in Africa
To prove her belief in the Western world that the shamanic vision of mental illness is true, as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mentally ill back to Africa with him, to his people. “I decided on my own curiosity to know if there is any truth in universality, which indicates 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 suffered a psychotic outbreak when he was 14 years old. He had hallucinations, was suicidal, and went through cycles of severe depression dangerously. He was in a psychiatric hospital, and he had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing helped him. “The parents had done everything without success, ” says Dr. Somé. "They didn't know what else to do."
With her permission, Dr. Somé took her son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal, reports Dr. Somé. He was even able to participate with healers in the healing business; Sitting with them throughout the day and helping them with what they were doing with their clients, he spent four years in my town. "Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing." He felt "much safer in the town than in America."
To put his energy and that of the spirit sphere into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was a little different from that used by the Dagara people. “He was not born in town, so something else applies. But the result was similar, although the ritual was not literally the same, ” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that the alignment of the energy worked to heal Alex showed Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illnesses is in fact universal.
After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the spirit had for this world. Unfortunately, the people I was talking to didn't speak English (Dr. Somé was absent at the time). However, the experience led Alex to go to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because "he discovered that all the things he had to do had been done, and then he could move on with his life."
The last thing that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in the graduate school of psychology at Harvard. No one would have thought that he would be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less obtain an advanced degree.
Dr. Somé summarizes that Alex's mental illness was that: “He was emerging. It was an emergency call. His job and purpose was to be a healer. He said nobody was paying attention to that. ”
After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spiritual beings are both a problem in the West and in her community in Africa. “However, the question remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way abroad to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little attention goes beyond the pathology of all this experience, and leads to the possibility of finding the right ritual to help people.
Longing for Spiritual ConnectionA common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in "mental" disorders in the West is a "very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, which is finally coming out in the person." Your job, then, is to trace again and go back in time to discover what the spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially in mountains or large rivers, he says.
In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it is a mountain spirit that is walking next to the person and, as a result, creates a distortion of space-time that is affecting the person trapped in she". What is needed is a fusion or alignment of the two energies, "with which the person and the spirit of the mountain become one." Once again, the shaman performs a specific ritual to carry out this alignment.
Dr. Somé believes that she encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the plot of this country is made up of machine power, and the result of this is disconnection and break from the past. You can run away from the past, but you can't hide from it. The ancestral spirit of nature comes to visit. It is not so much what the spirit wants, but what the person wants, ”he says. " The spirit sees in us a call to something big, something that will make life more meaningful, so the spirit is the answer to that ."
That call, which we don't even know we are making, reflects “a strong desire for a deep connection, a connection that transcends materialism and the possession of things, and moves in a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this yearning is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious, it makes no difference. ” They respond to anyone.
As part of the ritual of merging 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 to call them. They bring that stone with them for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; Some even take it with them. "The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptual capacity of the person, " says Dr. Somé. "They receive all kinds of information that they can use, so it's as if they get some concrete guidance from the other world as to how to live their lives ."
When it is the “energy of the river”, people are being called to go to the river and, after talking with the spirit of the river, find a stone of water and return to receive the same type of ritual as with the spirit of the mountain .
"People think it's something extraordinary that should be done in an extraordinary situation like this, " he says. That is not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as looking for a stone.
A Sacred Ritual as an approach to mental illnessOne of the gifts a shaman can bring to the western world is to help people rediscover the ritual, which is sadly lacking. “The abandonment of the ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual point of view, the ritual is inevitable and necessary if you want to live, ”Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing and community. “To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is a euphemism. I have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a healthy life without him. ”
Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals of her traditional people could simply be transferred to the West, so with her years of shamanic work here, she has designed rituals that meet the needs, so different from this culture. Although the rituals change according to the person or group involved, he found that there is a need for certain rituals in general.
One of them is to help people discover that their anguish comes from the fact that they are being called by otherworldly beings, to cooperate with them, to do a healing job. The ritual allows them to get out of the anguish and accept that call.
Another necessary ritual refers to initiation. In indigenous cultures around the world, young people begin in adulthood, when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people have here, says Dr. Som . Communities are urged to gather creative people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to reach some kind of alternative ritual that, at least, begins to make a dent in this type of crisis. .
Another ritual that is mentioned on several occasions to those who come with the need for help, involves making a bonfire, and then putting in the bonfire articles that are a symbol of problems found inside people, could be the problems of anger and frustration against an ancestor, who has left a legacy of murder and slavery, or nothing, things that the descendant has to live with, he explains . If these are blocking the human imagination, the purpose in the life of the person, and even the opinion of the person of life, as something that can improve, then It makes sense to start thinking in terms of how in turn unlocking that road can lead to something more creative and more satisfying.
The example of problems with an ancestor needs rituals designed by Dr. Som Som that address a serious dysfunction in Western society, and in the process of firing the illumination. in the participants. These are the ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction that lead to the mass of inflection on the ancestors. Some of the spirits that try to pass through, as described above, can be beforehand who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to cure what they were not able to do, while They were in his physical body.
"Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos will arise, " he said. The Dagara believe that if there is an imbalance like this, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors do not heal, their diseased energy will chase the souls and minds of those who are responsible for helping them. The rituals focus on the healing of the relationship with our ancestors, both the specific issues of an ancestor and the larger cultural aspects contained in our past. Som has seen an extraordinary healing happen in these rituals.
Taking a sacred ritual as an approach to a mental illness, more than seeing the person as a pathological case, gives the affected person, and indeed the community in general, the opportunity to start looking from this point of view, which leads to endless opportunities and the ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial for everyone present, says Dr. Som .
By: Stephanie Marohn and Malidoma Patrice Somé
Source: http://lamenteconectada.com/lo–que–ve–un-chaman-en-un–hospital-psiquiatrico/
What a shaman sees in a psychiatric hospital
