As
I began reading Shamanic Healing, I was
stunned by the statistics. “the third leading cause of death in America is
hospitals … mistakes and infections in hospital care [contribute] to the deaths
of…between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year … if you live to be
eighty-five years old you will have a 50 percent chance of having diagnosable
Alzheimer’s … one in forty children is diagnosed with autism … Fifty-nine
percent of all Americans…are taking prescription drugs daily…15 percent of all
Americans take five drugs or more each day … 10 percent of Americans are
depressed and 18 percent suffer from anxiety.”
To the contrary, when Dr. Alberto
Villoldo, a medical anthropologist, searched the rain forest of central Peru to
find “the next big cure for cancer or dementia” for a Swiss pharmaceutical
giant, he found no incidence of cancer, heart disease, or dementia.
Western medicine is a “sick-based model,
profit-minded assembly line, speed-dating-like, impersonal” system that uses
medicine “by trial-and-error methods.” Some treatments simply mask symptoms,
and some medications cause toxic side effects that require more medication. As
one doctor said, Western medicine “is treating the smoke, and not the fire.”
Western doctors won’t ask “Where you are
from, your emotional state, your lifestyle, your social and cultural beliefs,
or what you eat…” They weren’t taught that the body is more than one symptom.
Shamanic medicine “sees the sick person
as a whole complex environment and makes an effort to reinstate the person’s
overall health.”
We need to balance Western medicine with
Shamanic methods. As Brazilian shaman Ipupiara explained: “Calming and
balancing the physical and emotional bodies creates less opposition for the
medicine, which allows it to work better.” This is called integrative medicine.
One thing Shamans do is tell stories,
and Beery tells his story very well. I was so engrossed that I didn’t realize
how much time had passed as I read.
Shamanic Healing is broken into four
sections: 1) Beery’s journey and those who guided him; 2) What Is Shamanic
Healing; 3) Healing Teachings, Ceremonies, and Techniques; 4) Healing Stories.
Beery’s journey is interesting, and
meeting his teachers seemed somehow preordained.
An Ecuadorian shaman told Beery that
“…the three most important principles of shamanic healing [are]: (1) be in
balance with yourself, (2) be in balance with your family and community, (3) be
in balance with Mother Earth … It is all about being in balance.” Simple, yet complex. I encourage you to pay
close attention to this section of the book, as it explains where blocks to
balance may come from and diagnosing and removing them so your energy once again
flows freely.
In Part 3, Beery explains what a healing
might entail, though each one is individual and geared to the client. He then
goes over tips for self-healing.
Part 4 contains healing stories that are
riveting. Although shamanic healing does not assign labels, the stories are
organized in Western categories. It’s interesting how clients become their
disease, as in “I am schizophrenic” rather than, “I am in an imbalanced state
and want to change.”
Shamanic
Healing – Traditional Medicine for the Modern World is an easy to read,
easy to understand book. I have recommended it to a few people who have
imbalance in their lives and are finding no solutions in Western medicine. I
have also begun using some of the self-healing techniques.
Thanks to Destiny Books for sending this
book for review, and thanks to Psychic-Magic
for selecting me to review it.
- M. Lenahan
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