Announcer 0:28
Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.
John Moore 0:47
Hello, everybody.
as I record this, it is early morning, mid February is that I'm recording this on February 13. It's the day before Valentine's Day, the feast day of St. Valentine, a martyr, who was killed in I think around two to the 260s ad
by the Roman Emperor Claudius the second. Anyway. Enough about that, today, we're going to be exploring the power of spiritual healing. I'm going to talk about spiritual healing. It's a little bit of my bread and butter as I teach and practice shamanism. And healing is a really important part of that practice. Particularly when I work with clients, but also as I'm teaching, and I, I'm teaching students healing practices and self healing practices. And I'm working on myself. And I want to talk today about the nature of spiritual healing. And I realize this may sound like a bit of a contradiction, and it isn't a way. But I'm a very scientifically minded spiritual person. In that, not that he necessarily use scientific method to explore spiritual healing. I think there are people who are starting to do that, who know more than I do. But I read a lot of scholarly articles, not just stuff that's published in online or in pub, you know, popular magazines and things like that, I guess, when do people even read magazines anymore? But I read journal articles, I read books published by academics, I read peer reviewed studies of things. And there's, you know, there are some interesting studies that have happened, surrounding practices that one would consider spiritual. For example, there are a ton of studies of meditation 1000s, of studies of meditation. Now, you know, before that, maybe I don't know, I wasn't alive really before that, but before that, you would have people who, you know, attributed the benefits of meditation to, you know, completely to spirit and some people who would contribute it to this, you know, placebo effect or whatever we know that the mind and the body are intimately linked one affects the other in a significant way. And I'm going to talk about that I'm going to talk about going even beyond the mind, how can quieting your mind reducing the noise in your consciousness, have such a profound effect on physical health? And mental health, and even psychosocial health, right? Meditation has proved to enhance relationships between people. How could that be if we're just these machines? Were just these material machines that work like clockwork and you turn you know, you turn the spring? So one of the things we know and not necessarily know why. But we know placebo effects works. Right? you hand somebody a sugar pill. And, you know, it alleviates a certain amount of disease, discomfort, whatever. Not that you can sell a sugar pill and say this will cure your disease. You can do that. But we know that it happens in clinical trials. else. And so, you know, they thought, Well, geez, you know, maybe the mind does affect the body and there's a power of expectation. And even in some studies where they told people, we're just giving you a placebo, it still worked. It's pretty significant how consciousness affects the body. And so I want to present a model for understanding the nature of spiritual healing, and for exploring the connection between mind and body. And, you know, along the line, oh, I'll talk about some specifics. You know, and I'm a shamanic practitioner. So I'm looking through a lens of shamanic healing, where somebody who is a faith healer, or somebody who does energy, healing of some kind, they're going to be looking at things through a different lens. It doesn't mean my way is true and your way is false, or vice versa. It means you have different perspectives. This is something I think we've lost sight of in this world, where we think that our experience of things is objective truth. We never, ever, ever experience quote, unquote, objective truth until the point in which you achieve permanent enlightenment. And you unite your consciousness with the, the consciousness of the universe, and you just experience things as they are. But before that moment, we are human. And we, everything we see here do evaluate whatever, we're making judgments based on our experience, and our teaching, and the culture we grew up in the family grew up and and none of that is the same given to people given any two people. And it's really interesting, because I have, I have identical twin daughters. So I have, you know, genetically identical daughters. And they could not be more different personality wise, they're very different personalities. I mean, they share a lot of stuff in common, they're both 16 year old girls, they like a lot of the same music, they like a lot of the same movies, they also dislike things, one person, one of the my daughters will dislike significantly, something that my other daughter likes. And food choices are really different. They don't like the same foods. And they are, you know, their personalities are incredibly different, even though they were, you know, genetically identical, raised in essentially the same environment. They are very, very individual. So that's always interesting to me, that whole nature nurture. thing. And anyway, I'm gonna get into this, understanding the nature of spiritual healing. And to talk about this, I'm going to present a model and I may have presented this before. I'm going to present a model of human beings, right, a way of explaining like a map of human beings. Now all maps are fake. Map is not the territory, right? That's a famous, I don't know who came up with that. But is a famous saying and the map is not the territory if I have a map of my hometown, it is not my hometown. The question is, is the map useful? Am I trying to find out where the town hall is in his does it show up in the map? And can I get to where I'm going? If I can, then the map is useful, even though the map the map suffers from two main problems are not problems, but these are actually features of any map or model. One, it deletes information. Right? I don't have a map that shows every grain of sand in my town. That will not be useful. So it deletes a lot A lot of information, and I might delete it might not have all of the buildings in the town, all of the addresses. But if I can get from my home to the town hall, then that kind of solves that problem. Now, if the other part of the what models are is they are, there is a level of distortion, right? If I have a map of my hometown, it first of all is going to be smaller than my hometown, the comedian Steven Wright had a joke back in the day, he said, I have a, I have a full scale map of the United States. It says one mile equals one mile,
it's very difficult to fold, you know, he, we can't have a full set, you know that we also wouldn't be useful full scale map. So we delete a lot of information. And it's distorted. And, you know, most maps you're going to look at are going to be 2d, right. And so 3d maps to get around. So I'm going to present a model of human beings, which is going to be useful for studying the nature of spiritual healing. But is going to delete a whole lot of information, it's going to distort information, and it's going to be presented through the lens that I view it through. So other people will have other models, they will use other terminology. And you just have to evaluate whether this is a useful model for you. This model is useful for me to teach the stuff he's about to think, really hard about how to present this information. So the model that I'm going to use sort of blends from the way things are described in some spiritual practices, in that human beings have many, many bodies. We have a physical body, right? We have an energy or a theoretic body. I'll describe some of these things in a little more detail. Second, we have an astral body, we have a mental body, we have a causal body. And we have a spiritual body. And the differences between these bodies are like the differences between our organs, I have a heart, I have lungs, they do different things. But they are necessary, they have to work together. I could not live without either a heart or lungs. If I didn't have a heart, my lungs wouldn't work. If I didn't have lungs, my heart wouldn't work, things work together. But there are also some differences between them that are subtle. Now the main difference between the main difference not the only difference, but the main difference between the bodies that humans have. And not just humans, but all living things. But I'm going to focus on humans at this point. The main difference, or the level of subtlety. And we go from what's called gross to subtle bodies. Now the grossest body at least the grossest body we can perceive, not gross, like disgusting, but gross, like heavy, more material. Right, has mass has weight has, you know, takes up space. The most grossest the physical body. Right, we have a physical body, you have a physical body, you are not a physical body, you have a physical body. Your physical body has a size and a weight and takes up space and you know, exists in location. And it's challenging. To change the shape of the physical body, as anyone who works out knows, you can change it a little bit, but you can't grow a third arm out of your back or suddenly turn into a bear shape shift into a bear, Although who knows, maybe some people can at a certain level of spiritual development. But because this physical body is sort of locked in, it's hard to change its shape. Now one body kind of removed from the physical body is the energy or etheric body. And just like the physical body, this body kind of takes up space, it's less gross, it can't really weigh it. You know, solid objects can pass through it. But it has it has organs and energy channels and things. And this is the level of, we could call it a spiritual body. It's an energy body otherwise known as the etheric body. And this is the level at which things like acupuncture and Reiki and other kinds of energy healing work. And this, this layer of what it is, this body is very close to the physical body, right in subtlety grossness and it can't really leave the physical body, and they rely on each other like the the lungs and the heart rely on each other. If you're if you were, if your energy body were somehow completely removed from you, you would you would die. Because it's so it's intertwined with your physical processes. And your physical body strongly affects your energy body, your energy body strongly affects your physical body, we can affect the energy body, through movement, which is what you know, tai chi, chi Kong, any sort of, you know, movement can affect the energy body significantly. And then the energy body can also affect movement. So, when some people go through, like what we call kundalini awakening, or they have energy passing through their system, they get what are called Korea's, which are sometimes shaking in the body, a part of the body or the whole body might start shaking. This happened to me. Years ago, I didn't know what was going on. And, you know, I was meditating every night and doing some very deep meditations, and my body would start involuntarily shaking, like what is going on? Am I having, you know, some sort of seizure? Or what is it No, it's it's it's feedback, it's you know, energy from your energy body pumping into your physical body and affecting the nerves which can certainly happen. And we can do vice versa, we can affect the the nerves and the muscles, and that in effect to the energy body, now, there's different layers to the energy body. There's a layer that is very, very close to the physical body and follows the physical body, like if you've ever sort of seen auras, and you see this layer of energy that's you know, an inch or two outside the body and generally in the shape of the human body, this Some people refer to this as the etheric double. And then out beyond that, is sort of this a amorphous blob of energy roughly, egg shaped, changes, shape changes, size changes color, less tied to the physical body more subtle than the etheric body. And this, you know, some people refer to as aura, but it's part of your energy, body or bodies, we could, you know, in a different model looking through different ones, we could separate those out. We could create all these different layers to the or I know there are systems that do that. Another layer that is more subtle, and this is a layer that shamanic healing, does significant work on is what's called the astral body or the soul body. Now, this body is essentially formless. So it's kind of challenging to think of a formless body. But you know, you can think of it as you know, sort of formless energy that can take different shapes and is shaped by the consciousness it's shaped strongly by the emotions, it's shaped by thought. So we know that this body interfaces with the mind interfaces really strongly with emotions. And you can split off in you know, it's strongly linked to consciousness, and so you can split off part of this body and traveling this is what astral projection and shamanic journey Learning and some spiritual by location right when high level saints and Yogi's and things appear to be in more than one location at a time. It's usually their astral body but there's so much so much ability or power in their astral body that it actually people perceive it to be physical. And this astral body can be can be wounded, it can be fragmented parts of it can get lost. This is where a lot of shamanic healing takes place.
This is where we do ceremony called Soul Retrieval. Where we're getting parts of this fractured soul. And this happens primarily but not completely, primarily due to trauma, we all have traumas, some minor, some major, anything that scares us, that frightens us significantly, that causes us to fear for our safety, or existence is trauma. And can cause we call soul loss parts of ourselves get fragmented and if you have soul loss, most of us have some degree of soul loss, some people have significant soul loss. You get things happening, you know, usually a lot of the symptoms of soul loss appear first. In consciousness in you know, with emotional things, we see anxiety, depression, we see PTSD, we see tremendous amount of dissociation. Many of my clients report a strong sense of disconnection, disconnection from the self disconnection from the world. But soul loss because all of these bodies affect each other, can also cause physical problems. Right. And so sometimes soul retrieval, you know, people with chronic illness can get some relief. Now, let me say up front, that if you have any sort of illness do not simply rely on spiritual healing, we want to, we want to work with all the bodies as well as we can, right. So if you have, if you break your arm, go to the doctor, get the bone set, get a cast on and then Then afterwards, if you are interested in spiritual healing, go to a spiritual healer which will create the conditions spiritual conditions under which you might heal more readily. Now, I think I, you know, I make the statement that all healing is self healing. Now, that sounds weird, maybe because people come to me for healing services or people go to the doctor or whatever. What happens the way that I describe shamanic healing and the way that I even describe physical healing is I'm working to create the conditions under which you heal. So you have soul loss, you know, that is a cause it's not the condition. I work with helping spirits to repair the soul loss, so that you can incorporate, you can, you know, you can sort of bring that soul essence back into your normal, everyday reality, and you can heal from whatever it is that you've got going on. Your depression can get better over time, but you're healing you are doing the healing. If you break your arm, and the doctor sets the bone and puts a cast on, the doctor hasn't healed your bone. Right, the healing your bone heals itself, but the doctor is creating the condition for your bone to heal properly. Right. If you have an infection, that's causing all kinds of problems, you know, the they're going to give you medication, perhaps antibiotics or antivirals or something that are going to create conditions that will help your body heal itself. Right and might kill off bacteria or no virus or whatever. And after that happens, your body's immune system can go back to normal and You can achieve a state of health. So all healing, in my mind is self healing. But we get help along the way we get help from spirit, we get help from doctors, we get help from who, you know, nutrition from massage therapists, all of these things can help us in different different ways in different levels. And if you have a some kind of condition, particularly a chronic condition, you want to use as many available options, as makes sense for you to heal from that. So don't askew medicine, if it can be helpful. You know, I just want to get a meditation I just want to go to you know, and I understand some people go through yours. You know, I know a lot of people up here where I live with chronic Lyme disease. Because Lyme is really bad, it's very hard to diagnose in certain circumstances. And people go sometimes, you know, people go 510 20 years without getting a diagnosis, so they haven't been treated for it. And by that time, it's so embedded in their system, that it causes so many problems, tons and tons of problems, and even the medications that they give you. They cause, you know, I'm not an expert in line, but they cause the, the parasite that causes Lyme disease to die off in large quantities, which releases neurotoxins in your system. And that can, you know, that can kill you if it gets bad enough. So, you know, I know a lot of people in the shamanic community who started out because they were working on treating chronic Lyme. And they still go see doctors or naturopaths or whatever, but to get a handle on, some of its to build their system up. They work with shamanic healing. Now, at the most subtle level, and there are all kinds of talking going back to this body, model, multiple body like, think of those Russian nesting dolls, right? You open up one and there's another one inside, there's another one inside, there's another inside, it's a little bit like that. At our core level, at our most subtle level, is what we in my shamanic tradition called the Spirit. Some people swap the way they use soul and spirit is the spirit of the spirit body, the spirit body is completely formless. It cannot be injured, it cannot be corrupted by what happens in your life, it's unaffected by what happens in your life it is. It never needs healing. You can access it to perform healing because it has a healing effect on all of the other bodies. But it does not need healing. You don't have to heal your spirit, it is whole complete. It is also because it is completely subtle. Meaning there's no sense of mass, or size or shape or taking up space. It is outside of time and space. It's unaffected by time and space. So it is unborn and Undying. It is in essence, in any words, I used to describe it or kind of inadequate but it is an essence, your Divine Spark, the part of you that is connected to all there is to God, the universe source whatever, whatever, whatever term you want to use to describe all there is now the interesting and nice thing in shamanism is you know, we experienced that. We have a conscious experience of that. But we also have a conscious experience of that divine spark in everything. That divine spark exists in the chair, I'm sitting in the the the tree I'm looking at the cat that's, you know, causing a disturbance in my kitchen right at the moment. Now he's, he's okay, he's staring at me. Now. He hears me talking about him. He's craning his neck looking at me. You heard me say cat even though it's not his name, you know. But that same Divine Spark is in everything. It's our connection to Source. It cannot die. It cannot be wounded, injured, broken, affected at your core. to you our whole complete, infinite, undying, immortal. And, you know those words hardly describe the truth of that, but, and sort of awakening or enlightenment or whatever. Whatever, again, terms, terms or models, they're, you know, they oversimplify things they very reductionist, but awakening is about awakening to the truth of that matter. Spiritual Awakening is about awakening to the truth of who you really are. At your core.
Most of us catch glimpses of that while we practice. Some people who are considered Enlightened Masters reach a permanent state of identification with that divine spark. That's what we call enlightenment. You can get there, because we all have that we all have that capacity, even the cat. Even the cat at its core is enlightened. Even the chair that I'm sitting on at its core is enlightenment. So, we have different types of different flavors of consciousness. Right, my consciousness is different than your consciousness. Or, I'll take that back a little bit. The, the field, the capacity to be conscious consciousness itself is is the same everywhere in the universe and for everyone. But the experiences that we have that arise in consciousness are different. But the quality of consciousness, the cont the body, that is consciousness. Now, this is the body that contains everything. And there is only one, this is where non dual it non dualistic thinking, not to go too too far down this path, because this is kind of a topic for another episode of the podcast, but under underneath it all. What we describe as consciousness is a field or a body. That is everything there is. Now we might describe it as God or source or the universe. But this is another body but it is so subtle, that is completely undifferentiated.
Meaning, the field of consciousness that I am, that I when I say I this individual body, mind is experiencing is the same field of consciousness that you are experiencing in this moment. And the thing that makes us feel different is what we in spirituality called ego. The sense of individual i, and the stories that we tell about ourselves to ourselves, right? When I say I am a shamanic teacher, that's a story. The truth or falsehood of it doesn't matter. It's a story that I tell about myself. I hold it to be true.
But it implies a difference and implies that I am a shamanic teacher implies that there are people who are not shamanic teachers. Or, you know, there are separate consciousnesses that implies that my cat the consciousness that differentiates itself as my cat is not a shamanic teacher. But underneath it all, is this layer of reality. That all is one, everything is the same. All consciousness is the same consciousness. I'm I the individual i the sense of I as an individual, this ego this ego body mind, is just experiencing one slice of that consciousness. But that consciousness holds everything there is in all of the universes everywhere. Okay, back to healing. So let's talk about the need Share of spiritual healing a little bit using this body model. Now when we'll talk about spiritual healing in the context of working with someone who is doing some work with you, but again, all healing is self healing and you have the ability to do spiritual level healing energy body healing on yourself. You have the ability to learn shamanic practice, it takes a long time. So going to shamanic practitioner, and there are certain things that for me, I find it easier to go to another practitioner for like, I don't do Soul Retrieval on myself. I haven't tried that. Maybe I could, but it's just a lot easier to have somebody else do that. So I go to another shamanic practitioner for that kind of work. For that level of healing. Sometimes it's good to get another perspective. So you go to someone who is some sort of healer, some sort of spiritual healer, some sort of, we'll start with energy healing. Okay. And I don't know a lot about different systems of energy healing, but I know a little bit about Reiki I've, you know, I did you know, I was empowered to give Reiki I'm not a Reiki Master, or, you know, and I know there's like 1000 flavors of Reiki these days. I've seen shamanic Reiki and Kundalini Reiki and all kinds of stuff, tantric Reiki, and I don't know the differences. But what's happening in this case is, one becomes a channel a conscious channel for energy coming from somewhere and Reiki it might be universal energy. In other types of energy healing, it might be coming from angels or some other source of energy. And one uses that energy, it goes into the body with intention to unblock energy pathways add energy to places that need energy, take energy away from, you know, parts that that need energy taken away, and helps restore balance to the body so that the body can heal. Also, the mind the mind and the body are connected, it's really hard to separate them. And so what's happening is affecting people on the energy body level, the energy body, in turn, touches, influences affects the physical body, the emotional body, these are other bodies I haven't really mentioned, because we get super complicated and break them down. And the thing is, you know, there's not, there's not a clear boundary between all of these bodies. So we could say there's an emotional body, right? There's a body that holds all our emotions. And I get scared, right? I have an emotion I get scared. How do I know that I'm scared. So it's having an emotion. Cognitively knowing Oh, I'm scared of that bear over there that's running at me. I know because that emotion affects the physical body and I get physical sensations. I get adrenaline in my system, my heart rate goes up my blood vessels in my limbs constrict, my my blood starts pumping to my larger muscles, my legs might start to shake as the adrenaline gets them ready for me to fight or flight or freeze. Right. So there's a reaction in my body, there's something I feel in my body I feel sad, I might get a lump in my throat, I may get a pit in my stomach. I get a knot. So it feels like there's a knot inside me. Right there's there's energy stuff happening that's affecting the physical. So you know this, there's energy work also with the you know, shamans also work at that level. The shamans work on multiple bodies. This is one of the reasons I like shamanic healing. So there is work that shamans do on the energy body, right. Some shamans will work with the chakra system and the energy channels you know, I know of you know they work with this in Andean shamanism, for example, When Mayan the Mayans recognized energy centers in the body, it's not just I mean, don't call them chakra as they call them something else. But you know, these things are not unique to Vedic studies from India, they were independently discovered everywhere because they exist at a level that can be perceived spiritually, can be felt can be seen, heard. So, there's, you know, there are shamans that work on these energy bodies. And there's work that I do frequently called extraction work, which clears things out of the energy body, I've had clients with physical issues. And, you know, again, I don't like to talk too much too much about the stuff, I still think that if you have a physical thing, you need to rule out organic issues, physical issues, right. But, you know, I had a client with a shoulder injury injury couldn't move her shoulder it was frozen, and hadn't had a lot of success getting that to move. And they did what's called an extraction ceremony with her and she could move her shoulder after that. And what it appeared to me is that there were energy blockages there that were affecting the nerves in her shoulder, causing the muscles around the shoulder to seize up and preventing significant movement of the shoulder. So there's work on the energy body, and that will filter through to the physical body and it will filter through relatively quickly usually you might feel even instantaneous healing because the energy body overlaps interpenetrates interacts with the physical body
so shamanic healing and some other forms of healing I'm not all that familiar with also work at the level of the astral or soul body. This is where shamanism really shines because shamans have been dealing with trauma for 10s of 1000s of years, if not longer. And so when we have trauma, and certain certain, you know, certain other things can can cause us but trauma is the number one, we have a certain like there's a fracturing of the self. And what's interesting to me is talking to some modern psychotherapeutic practitioners about what happens to people who undergo severe trauma is we use very similar language. We're talking about things very similarly when we talk when I talk about soul loss and you know, some psychotherapist talk about a fracturing of the self and leading to you know, dissociation and depression all these things. We're talking about the same thing through different lenses. This is what I'm talking about these lenses, these perspectives, okay. And a lot of you know, a fair number of psychotherapist, I have, I have psychotherapist as clients and I have had clients referred to me by psychotherapists and, you know, I've had psychotherapist, tell me, you know, trauma, you know, they worked with trauma for years and they're like, trauma is a disease of the soul. I'm like, Okay, well, now you're speaking my language. You know, however, there are components of trauma that show up in the body. And there's a lot of research about this. You know, the vagus nerve is implicated in a lot of traumatic response and, and, you know, there's a, there's a really famous book out there called the Body Keeps the Score, and there's a lot of trauma, healing, going on somatic trauma, healing through using the body to heal trauma. And I think it's all fantastic. I really do. I think trauma is such an insidious problem because it is the cause behind a lot of disease behind the disease of chemical dependency very frequently, right? A lot of addiction out there, comes out of trauma. A lot of depression, anxiety, PTSD, all kinds of stuff. physical problems come out of, you know, traumatic experiences. You know there are doctors who are starting to realize this that you know certain physiological things like there was a doctor I think his name is Sarno I think he wrote some a book about, I'm not an expert in this. So forgive me if this is wrong, but it was a doctor who's treating a lot of people, I think he's probably still out there practicing, as far as I know, treating a lot of people with back pain and finding they were having like the weird muscle tension in their back or other parts of their body, like what's going on here. And when he probed into it, he found that they were doing what's called armoring holding tension there as a response to trauma. So if you're about like, if somebody were about to punch you in the stomach, for example, he would tighten up your stomach muscles to protect your internal organs. So when people experience trauma, sometimes there is a chronic tightening to protect the body. And because the body is traumatized, the spirit has, you know, you've got soul loss happening, you've got nervous stuff happening, you've got all these things happening. The body is armoring to protect itself. And so I know you know, I know people who have things like chronic constipation, no matter what medications they take, or dietary changes they make or you know, whatever. And then they do something like do some shamanic healing or do you know ketamine therapy? Right? So ketamine is now being used to treat anxiety and depression with fantastic results, by the way, both low dose ketamine and ketamine infusion. Again, I'm not an expert, I'm not a medical practitioner, but I've I've read a lot of things and seen a lot of things. But I, you know, I know people who have had chronic constipation their whole lives, and they do ketamine therapy, and it the condition improves significantly. Now there, you know, there isn't anything new the result is physical, there is a physical cause there but what's happening is, it's allowing the person to feel relaxed enough to disarmer the muscular tension that's going on in the abdominal region that's causing the constipation it's, it's pretty amazing, right? Because, you know, ketamine doesn't affect everyone that way doesn't give everybody diarrhea or, you know, whatever if you're not constipated, but so it's kind of interesting how those things can affect each other. So, shamans will work on multiple levels of the body, right in some Shamans in indigenous cultures will work with herbs, right? So work with the physical level. They'll work with spiritual level, they'll call in helping spirits to make repairs the energy body or take energy away that shouldn't be there. They'll work on the soul body for soul loss, they'll work on other levels, if there are, you know, possessing beings or other sort of spiritual problems happening. Again, one of the reasons not I'm not trying to push shamanic healing on anybody, it's not my I'm not really here to promote shamanic healing. Again, it's the lens that I look at things through. And it's one of the, you know, the reasons I really love shamanic healing, is that it addresses the person as a whole, and looks at them through different lenses and affects them in different places. So here's the thing. Here's the thing with Soul level healing. So a lot of people, almost 100% of my clients come to me, needing soul retrieval. Most people come to me with some level of trauma. Trauma is so common, we don't even know. I don't think there's adequate research out there to show how many people in this world are affected by trauma. You know, we're on the tail end of a global pandemic, we were all traumatized by that. I don't care if you're one of these people who are like, well, I've got an immune system and I don't need to wear a mask in public. And, you know, I don't care if you're one of those people who thought that way. And told yourself you weren't scared of getting sick or you weren't scared of loved ones dying, wherever you were affected. We were all affected. We all have soul loss from the pandemic. And in on the collective level, we have soul loss from the pandemic. You know, I think there should be a big collective healing at some point. But I actually argued for I'm doing soul level on a global basis. But so retrieval for, you know, for the entire club, I don't know how that would work, I haven't tried it. Like to try it with a group of shamanic practitioners at some point, but hey, you know, whatever. You can do Soul Retrieval for a group or an organization or even a building in animals, animals don't. Animals can get traumatized, it has to be pretty extreme. What will happen with animals, particularly mammals, if you watch like a dog or a cat, you're traumatized, you'll see them shake real quick, and then trot away. Usually, usually, for an animal to be strongly affected by trauma, it has to be repeated, ongoing, there has to be this sense of learned helplessness, like an animal that is abused or neglected for a long period of time. But I've seen I've seen them, if you watch wildlife specials, where they, you know, have to tranquilize a large animal out in the wild, you know, to, to tag it, or treated or study it or whatever they're doing. When the animal comes out of the anesthetic that they've given it, you'll see it instinctively shake there shaking out the trauma. Much like when we get scared, and we shake, there's kind of a different reason for that. But
shaking is one of the somatic treatments for trauma. But so when we, when we meeting people who practice shamanism do Soul Retrieval for people, there's an integration period. And I usually tell people, you know, plan on up to six weeks of integration work with this particular session, this particular work. Why is that? Well, again, the Soul Retrieval is isn't really the healing, the healing happens from the integrant. Like it, it is creating the conditions under which the person heals. Sometimes, this is not the norm, sometimes there's sort of this instantaneous, miraculous healing. And that's what people want. And, gosh, I understand that. Who would not want that to happen? Right. And if I could do that, for every single person in this world, I would just be hanging out in cancer, you know, pediatric cancer wards, carrying everybody with their cancer. But unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. And for most people, most people feel something, they feel some sense of relief. You know, sometimes dissociation can go away pretty quickly, or, you know, depression can be lifted, people can feel, you know, I had one of my first clients ever, I still remember a young gentleman who came in and he was complaining, I just feel dead inside. And I asked him, I said, Do you ever get dissociated? Oh, no. I mean, well, do you ever feel like the world isn't real? Or do you feel like you're just kind of Oh, yeah, all the time. I'm like, Okay, well, that's dissociation is like, Okay, well, I don't have any trauma. That's what you're talking about. Like, okay, well, you know, I know that not to be true, but some people have repressed their trauma so much, but not my, not my place to make somebody relive their trauma or to accept that they've had trauma or you know, whatever. But, um, after doing work on this person, this, which involved soul retrieval, he got up and he smiled, and he hadn't smiled the whole time I was with him. And he said, I feel joy inside for the first time that I can remember. Now, that's a beautiful result, that's about as good as a result as I could ever hope for. But that's to me, that's not the end of it. Right? So for now, he feels joyous inside, but how does he carry that through into the rest of his life? And so there would be an integration period, in which I would expect things to over time get better and better until there was sort of this normalized state where he would have more positive emotions, he would feel more things, he would be less disconnected from his feelings. And I've seen that happen with clients over and over and over again. So again, in my view, the nature of spiritual healing is not always that it's instantaneous and miraculous like you read in stories of miracles where people are instantly healed from being blind or are you know have some some sort of disease where they can't walk and then they can walk and you know that sort of thing those things are few and far between they do happen I fully believe that stuff happens. I've seen it happen I've had it happen in my own practice, but it's not the norm. And so I tried to set reasonable expectations with clients and you know, tell them you know, you can expect some relief today and then some overtime and you might need more than one session. It's up to you, you know, but I'm gonna make you wait a while before you have another session with me because I want this integration to happen I want you to see experience a new baseline and give your body time to heal itself. So anyway, this has been a little bit on the nature of and the power of spiritual healing. I hope that you are happy and healthy yourself and I will talk to you real soon.
Announcer 56:31
You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to maineshaman.com That's maineshman.com