Shamanic Healing For A Soulful Journey

Today I went to Donna Schmid, the massage therapist and meditation group leader who gave me my first Swedish massage last month, for a Shamanic healing session.

I had heard tell of Shamanic healing three or four times right before she mentioned it to me… and both of us knew that meant I was supposed to do it.

If you haven’t heard of it before, this video from the Holistic Shamanism blog gives a half-decent quick overview of Shamanic healing in general, although some audio would help the presentation:

Before beginning the session, Donna cautioned me that if I wrote about it, I had to be clear on the fact that the experience is different for every person.

There are many ways to perform Shamanic healing, and a good practitioner lets the client guide the session, which means no two sessions are alike.

I wish I could tell you it would be though, because my session was one of the most profound and soul-revealing journeys of my life.

Here’s an article I found on the Shamanic Healing Institute‘s website, which gives some more detail of what the process is, or can be:

A Process to Healing

There are perhaps countless methods or processes to heal. In the article “Why We Cling to Our Wounds”, Dr. Carol Myss offers her own intuitive awareness on this subject, which I am going to expand upon. Healing is a day to day process, an attitude, a method to relive ourself from the pain and suffering from past trauma, programming and wounds.

Of course, the healing I am speaking about is the healing we manifest in the spiritual body, also known as our “etheric body”. We have the capability to cause a change in the etheric body that will result in a corresponding change in our emotional, mental and physical bodies.

Dr. Myss describes the first step to healing as forgiveness. I do not think we can overemphasize the importance of forgiving someone that has hurt us. When we are able to forgive from our hearts with integrity, we experience a release of condemnation of others and sometimes ourselves, too. The result is an awareness of empowerment and wholeness.

I have felt this awareness myself and many of my patients describe this phenomenon as a freeing or uplifting (emotional or spiritual) experience during or after a healing session. Sometimes the forgiveness experience is the first tangible outcome to their healing process.

Another important aspect of the healing process requires an amount of trust. You need to have trust and faith in the process that you are going to be well and happy, a sometime foreign concept to an individual who has lived in (and with) their wounds for many years.

My suggestion to patients who struggle with their cycle of repeating their woundedness is to create a vision of who they want to become. I ask the patient to clarify their values, beliefs, goals and make a plan for success. Sometimes the hardest decision is to identify what you want when you are not bound to the legacy of your woundedness.

My work as a shamanic practitioner is to provide to the patient a healing in their etheric body which causes a corresponding shift in their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. This change in attitude can sometimes trigger fear as well as relief and happiness. The fear that is triggered is often viewed by the patient as a failure on their part and the healing process they are using.

It is vital to remember that you must commit yourself to he healing process and continue to apply it as “deeper wounds” are revealed. Dr. Myss stated, “have people witness your wound no more than three times”. Remember, you are constantly changing. Healing your body, mind and spirit is a process that goes on throughout life on an everyday basis. I send peace and wellness to you in your pursuit to be whole.

by Paul M. Sivert

For me, the process unearthed feelings of love, peace, acceptance, an awakening of my intuition, and a reframing of my perceptions, rather than forgiveness; but I definitely felt the “freeing or uplifting (emotional or spiritual)” phenomenon as described in the article.

Donna and I sat on cushions on the floor in her regular meditation room for this process; she was about three feet away from me, to my left, and guided me through a series of questions as I got in touch with my subconscious mind and meditated.

She’s extremely intuitive, and was able to push me to dig deeper (or “unwrap” myself) if she sensed there was more to the story than what had been revealed to me so far.

The closest I’ve come to this experience before is Wendi Friesen’s hypnosis CDs, which are very good and prompted me to see similar imagery to what Donna guided me through; the difference, of course, is that live you can have an interaction with the healer and address specific things that come up, whereas with a recorded hypnosis the questions have to be more generic.

To start off with, Donna had me scan my body and see what part stood out for me. My attention kept getting drawn to my lower abdomen, so we started the session with that.

Then, like Wendi, she had me ask that body part some questions, and for me (since I’m visually oriented) the answers came in pictures and shapes.

I got a lot of pyramid imagery throughout the session, and I was told it represented divine cleansing, spiritual growth and intuition.

I also got pictures of our newest cat, Jupiter, with a healing purr and the offer of unconditional love, and Barry offering that same unconditional love.

I was surprised that I was shown Jupiter, and not our other cat, Mercury, who came with me from Toronto and is connected to my soul.

But Barry revealed to me later that to him, Jupiter represents mutual love and appreciation, since we chose her together. She also represents perfect synchronicity, because of the way she came into our lives.

And finally, she represents acting from the heart instead of the mind, which is “coincidentally” a message I got during my session; and the ability for Barry to let go of preconceived notions about what having another cat would be like, which in turn allowed him to grow… again, “coincidentally”, a lesson that Barry himself has taught me about letting go of what we think we know.

After my unconditional love portion of the Shamanic healing session, I was shown a beach at sunset, with the waves rolling in, which inspired a feeling of awe over the earth’s abundance. Donna pointed out that the ebb and flow of the water, which never took away its power, was like unconditional love that only appears to be conditional; it may ebb and flow too, but the power remains.

Then I saw a goldfish in a small bowl; a picture that made me sad for its lack of freedom, and yet on further examination, the fish was happy with his existence. So my perception was projecting emotions onto the situation that didn’t exist, like we all do in our day-to-day interactions with people.

At the end of the session, my heart opened up and I was overtaken by a free, uplifting feeling, combined with extreme happiness over the lesson I had learned.

This was by far the most powerful healing session I’ve been to in my explorations of late. It wasn’t one of those “blind man can now see” or “wheelchair-bound woman walks” types of experiences (which may or may not actually exist), but it deeply affected my soul, which is even more inspiring.

I also got messages about the type of work I need to do to complete my mission on this planet, which includes more writing. So if you stick around, I’ll be sharing a lot more with you. 😉

Keep Unwrapping the Mysteries of Life!