In this series of posts, I am exploring the world of energy and how the shaman works with energy to change the world and assist us to evolve consciously as human beings to become children of Light. Or perhaps better said, to remember that we are children of the Light. We all have an inner shaman, a part of us that remembers that we are all one, a part that remembers that we are all interconnected and interdependent and that all life is sacred.
Shamanic healing uses energetic and spiritual techniques to restore balance and well-being in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms. As shamans and lightworkers, we act as a bridge between the physical and the spiritual worlds to access healing energies and guidance from spirits. This practice involves channeling healing energy into a patient to restore energy balance and promote well-being. It is based on the idea that the human body has a vital energy that flows through it and that healing can come from balancing this flow of energy. The goal is to remove blockages and restore balance, harmony and vitality within the body. The practices of shamanism help people shed emotional traumas, blockages, burdens, old beliefs and baggage that keep them from being the best version of themselves.
As discussed in my previous posts, shamans see the world of energy on a continuum from light, compatible, ordered and refined energy that empowers us called sami in the Andean traditions to dark, heavy, disordered and incompatible energy that disempowers us called hucha. One of the practices of the shaman is to track the quality of energy in terms of sami or hucha and cleanse the hucha, the dark, heavy, incompatible and disempowering energy for the good of individuals, families, communities and the world.
As we bring into consciousness our inner shaman we must first become aware of the hucha in us—that dark, heavy, incompatible and disempowering energy that carries the pain of our trauma wounds and the disempowering and victimizing stories of our families and culture. We must do our own work to clear and upgrade our energy bodies with the light and ordered refined energy of sami so that we have the power to become cocreators with the living energy of the divine to develop a moral, caring and compassionate world for the good of all.
Our work today as shamans and lightworkers is to continuously monitor our own energy interactions and to make the ordered, refined divine light the dominant energy in all that flows from us and to us. I find labeling disordered energy as “heavy” instead of “bad” helpful in being able to be open and receptive to the energies of others and the natural world. When we make contact with energy that we perceive as negative we are likely to react from a place of defensiveness, self-protection or judgment. In that process we close ourselves off and run the risk of turning our energy bodies into heavy, disordered, incompatible energy, reinforcing that dark and heavy energy field. Withdrawing into defensiveness, self-protection or judgment is seldom beneficial. Rather, when we are in a sacred reciprocity of equality and justice, we are able to handle any quality of energy we contact. When we shift our perspective of energy as heavy, rather than as bad or negative, there is nothing to protect ourselves from. We simply recognize that the energy is incompatible with our own. Our awareness of this incompatibility allows us to make a choice to transform the energy, to lighten it by ordering the flow of the energy between the other and ourselves so that it either becomes compatible for us or simply does not affect us.
According to Andean mysticism, energy has no moral category. But certainly, one can use energy in immoral and hurtful ways. The shaman and the sorcerer both work with energy but the they interact with the energy in different ways, according to their moral system. One does good by creating harmony and unity; the other can do evil by creating division and disharmony. This is where the accumulation of personal power comes into play. Personal power is not about domination, but about command of our energy. Where will we place the focus of our energy? Our fundamental task as shamans and lightworkers is to maintain at all times the ecology of our energy environment. If our energy environment is not ordered and light, then it must be cleansed until it becomes filled with pure light, pure energy devoid of the dark, heavy disempowering energy. Then we can use that energy to move the energy in the world. When I think about being empowered by light energy, I am reminded of the Biblical assertion of “. . . greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world, 1 John 4:4.”
In the shamanic traditions, there are many ways to cleanse hucha. Last week I shared a simple practice for moving hucha and downloading sami into your energy field. Shamans also use sacred stones called khuyas to remove the energy. Those who have gone through a shamanic initiation and have developed a medicine bag or Mesa can use the Mesa to clear the energy field. They can feed their hucha to the Mesa where it is transformed into sami by the power of the objects in the medicine bag or if working with another person, the shaman moves the Mesa through the energy field of the person to pull the dark, heavy energies out. In Peru, coca leaves and other herbs can be passed over the body trapping the hucha and pulling it out. I often have my clients collect objects from nature and blow the energy of their painful stories and trauma histories into these objects and place them in a sacred circle on Mother Earth, letting the elements or wind, water, sun and earth mulch the energies, turning them into light. In some traditions, they use rattles or drums to clear the energy field. The shaman locates the dark energy, rattles in, around and through it and then with the rattle and her intention, moves the energy to Mother Earth or may call in jaguar to come and mulch the energy. The shaman may drum over the body which clears the energy field. There is now significant research on drumming as a way to alleviate depression and anxiety. You can read a research article, Effects of Group Drumming Interventions on Anxiety, Depression, Social Resilience and Inflammatory Immune Response among Mental Health Service Users at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4790847/ . From the shaman’s perspective, I would say that the drumming helps to release the dark, heavy, disorganized energy that is contributing to the depressed and anxious state and the rhythm of the drum changes brain waves and raises the vibration of the energy body, making it lighter.
However, the two main ways of releasing dark, heavy, incompatible and disorganized energy require no instruments. The simplest is to release the hucha from the energy body as explained last week. You can revisit that process here. https://shamanshalley.substack.com/p/living-in-the-world-of-energy-part. A more intensive technique involves digesting the heavy energy. In this process, the shaman opens his or her spiritual stomach and “eats” the hucha. The shaman begins by connecting intentionally and energetically to his own energy field or with another person’s field and draws any hucha into her field. There, the energy is split into two streams, the dark, heavy, disordered and incompatible energy goes down into the earth and the light, ordered, refined energy moves upward through the shaman’s body to the head or crown chakra. During this cleansing process the shaman actually extracts sami from the hucha just as your physical stomach is able to extract nutrients from food. [1]
No matter what technique a person uses, we always feed the energies that we are releasing to the earth. According to the Andean mysticism, Mother Earth loves the hucha. It empowers her. To her it is food, not waste. In fact, she needs this living energy for it empowers her. In return for her energetic meal, she returns sami, the refined, light energy to the person doing the cleaning. As we release the heaviness, we increase our lightness. [2]
Wilcox points out in her book, we should always be cognizant of empowering ourselves by drawing in the light, refined, organized sami energy whenever we need it or whenever an especially powerful source is availble to us. Other people may be potential sources of sami such as spiritual teachers from the many traditions, the mystics, spirit guides, shamans and others who are advanced the spiritual path. Another source of this light and empowering energy is Nature itself. We can source sami from the mountains, from the trees, from the rivers and from the Earth herself.
Sometimes life provides us opportunities to move and heal our heavy energies. Judy regularly ordered soy milk to be delivered to her house. On three separate occasions, the delivery person dropped the milk, making it undeliverable. Judy was developing her shamanic sight and wondered if there might be some hidden or symbolic meaning in the undeliverable milk since it happened three times. Judy decided to meditate on that question and what came to her was the saying, “No need to cry over spilled milk.” Judy decided to journey to understand what that saying might mean. Judy reported,
Judy reported, “I was told that I carried shame for something I was accused of when I was sixteen. My parents told me that I had given my baby sister rheumatic fever and almost killed her. I was not allowed to be near her ever, and my family shunned me. That happened 66 years ago when there was no google, and I was afraid to ask anyone because then they would know what I did. Years later, I knew in my head that I was not responsible, but my body still carried the shame. Getting rid of the shame will allow me to live a more transparent life.”
Judy had been on a healing journey for some time. She shared that holding on to that shame for so long had caused her to become very shy, eroded her confidence, caused her to shut down and become invisible. She felt a need to hide herself so no one would know her. It was only after this experience of getting the message of the “undeliverable and spilled milk” that Judy realized what a heavy load she had been carrying, an example of hucha, hucha that she had been carrying for years. It was as if Spirit knew it was now time to heal this part of Judy’s story and provided an avenue for healing the shame from the past and setting her free.
If we are paying attention and open our eyes to the messages from spirit, we have the power available to us to transform our heavy and disempowering energies into power and light.
[1] Wilcox, Masters of the Living Energy, 52.
[2] Ibid.
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