Shamanism is, among other things, an understanding of energy and how it flows, what keeps it from flowing, and what to do to reclaim lost and dysfunctional energy.
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Let’s imagine ourselves bopping along with the moments extruding behind as a line representing the wake we leave in this life. Lets step away from our bodies and watch ourselves, like cartoons, going through our days, leaving that line or thread behind us as we go, as if we were leaving twine to find our way back. In the thread we leave behind us, we can see the story of our life. We can see tangles–moments, events, or traumas we were faced with in which we got lost for a time, our life thread becoming tangled, our minds going over the event again and again, or avoiding thinking about it altogether. Maybe it was a sibling jumping out at us from behind the snack food aisle, which caused us to scream then laugh, releasing that fear and leaving the thread fuzzed but uncluttered. Maybe it was an unkind and judgemental comment someone made about something we can’t help, triggering the fear that we are helplessly flawed, sparking a simple but strangling knot. Maybe it was a fundamental loss, leaving us with that Root Chakra feeling of Abandonment. That tangle is an intense one that causes some of us to be lost forever, and others to believe we have only ourselves, and that we must protect ourselves from relationships, so it won’t ever happen again. Maybe it was a physical threat that left us with a relentless feeling of fear, one where we trust no one, we keep our backs to the wall, and we perform rituals to protect ourselves. Maybe it was a heartbreaking betrayal, and we’ve been left with a Sacral Chakra inability to trust, keeping ourselves hidden behind the dense, tall thicket of briars that that kind of tangle forms. Maybe it was a familial pattern of angry silence caused for us by an ancestor: a soul contract made by a foreparent, or an earlier life of our own, that manifests the same issue in every generation, until someone seeks an energy healer to help heal the energy and take down the thorny barrier.
All of these tangles, and more, can be healed.
A Shaman 1)examines our energetic field, helps us focus on the issue or pattern that is troubling us the most and release it, 2)clears our energy fields of the bad feelings– those false detours that siphon our energy into The Tangles,– 3)clears our chakras of the sludge and crud of life that slows down our energy, and 4)cleans up the energetic slings and arrows that we accumulate during our lives (current and past ones), because of that pattern. The shaman will also 5)journey to find the soul contract that started the issue, and destroy it, removing the tangle so our energy won’t get bound up in it anymore, freeing it flow to the thread that brings it back to us.