Shamanism is a spiritual practice that precedes most established religions. It has a cosmology and symbolism all it’s own and can be found in many worldwide cultures. Many of today’s formal religions came from shamanic ancient roots, but shamanism isn’t a formal ideology or belief system. 

Instead, it’s a group of experiences and activities that shamans share that are adaptable enough to coexist with all kinds of cultures across the globe. Shamanism is practiced and studied as a life path on which the individual seeks to form a relationship with the spirits in everything around them.

Who Practices Shamanic Healing?

Shamanic practitioners can offer solutions to all kinds of everyday problems, including family discord, professional challenges, and illnesses. This is where shamanic healing comes into play. 

A practitioner is shamanic medicine is a healer who has followed the path of shamanic initiation and who can enter an invisible world composed of the spiritual, mental, emotional, archetypal, dream, and mythical worlds, while in an alternative state of consciousness. Shamans use their spiritual relationships to effect changes that manifest within our physical world to heal individuals. 

Shamans from different cultures practice different ways of healing. Some use ceremony and prayer, others sing, chant, dance, or pray, or sacred rattles, drums, and other items of shamanic supply may be used within healing ceremonies. Some shamans will use plant medicine as part of their practice.

Read Also: Alternative Therapies In Health And Medicine

How Does A Shamanic Healer Perceive Illnesses?

In life, suffering occurs in the shape of illnesses. While modern medicine believes that microbes, bacteria, injuries, and viruses cause illness in the physical body, shamans believe that illnesses are effects with a root cause that emanates from the non-physical and internal spirit realm. They believe, therefore, that these effects cannot be masked but should be addressed by dealing with the root cause.

Shamanic healers perceive that there are three causes of physical, emotional, and mental illnesses – disharmony, fear, and soul loss. 

Disharmony – Power Loss

Power loss, or disharmony, will often occur if somebody has lost the meaning in their life, or a connection to the life force. Sometimes, this happens catastrophically, but often it will occur only subtly. Whichever way power loss reveals itself in the individual, the sufferer experiences a loss of life power that directly and strongly affects their energetic matrix causing them to become vulnerable to diseases.

Fear

This is one of the most common causes of disease, being responsible for emotions like stress and anxiety. Researchers and scientists have agreed that stress-producing hormones disintegrate the body’s protective immune system and its energetic matrix, resulting in illnesses. 

Soul Loss

This extreme cause of illnesses is, nevertheless, very common. Often experienced following a traumatic event, soul loss involves the soul fragmenting and dissociating resulting in symptoms such as a blocked memory, apathy, emotional distance, feeling fragmented or not all there, a lack of enthusiasm, motivation and joy in life, addictions, chronic depression, and suicidal tendencies. A shamanic healer can carry out soul healing to reconnect the sufferer with the lost parts of their soul and to help them restore themselves to wellness. 

What Does Shamanic Healing Involve?

Spiritual healing can’t be accomplished on the physical level. Since healing means returning to wholeness, it can only be accomplished from the inside on a spiritual level. Shamanic healers believe that all healing is done by the individual themselves. Their role is to manipulate and move the individual’s energy and to pass wisdom from the realm of spirits. The healing itself takes place in the individual’s spirit. 

Shamanic healing may take two primary forms – shamanic plant medicine healing and shamanic healing. In a plant medicine healing ceremony, the person receiving the healing goes on the spiritual journey alongside their healer, whereas in a regular shamanic healing session the healer acts as the intermediary, merging themselves with the spirit realm to connect with helpful spirits and channel wisdom and energies in order to heal the individual in the physical dimension. 

The shaman’s helping spirits can diagnose the causes of the disease, give their insight, and then work to facilitate the treatment to heal the condition. During shamanic healing ceremonies, the shaman goes alone on the shamanic journey in order to retrieve the information and energy from the spiritual realm, and this forms the core of the healing session. 

Many shamans also perform energy work to integrate the journey’s effects, to locate blockages and release them, and increase the ability of the body to heal itself. 

What Is A Shaman Healer Sage Ritual?

A shaman healer sage ritual is sometimes called “smudging”. This ancient ritual involves burning sage to achieve spiritual healing. Long established as a tribal and Native American practice, smudging can boost your health and overall well-being. There are many benefits associated with burning sage. 

It Purifies

Sage contains antimicrobial properties that can help keep fungi, viruses, and infectious bacteria at bay. It is also believed to clear out impurities of the spirit. 

Relieving Symptoms 

When sage is burned, it is believed to release negative ions which neutralise positive ions. Well-known positive ions include allergens like pollution, dust, pet dander and mould, and this means that people with allergies can get relief from smudging. 

A Spiritual Tool

For centuries, smudging has connected humans to the spiritual realm and helped to enhance human intuition. It has also been used for achieving a state of healing and to enable people to reflect upon and solve spiritual dilemmas. 

Dispelling Negative Energies

Burning sage is an effective ritual tool that helps to eradicate negativity from the immediate environment and from the individual themselves. These negativities may include bad experiences and past traumas among other negative energies. 

Cleansing And Empowering Objects

When sage is burned, the fragrant smoke that is created is vital to the benefits of smudging. It’s possible to smudge yourself or a space, or even a specific object. All items may be smudged and the process eradicates the negative energies attached to them. 

Mood Boosting

Burning sage is known to lift the spirits and to banish all negativities. This makes smudging a perfect tool to help anyone who is suffering from depression, mood disorders, and anxiety. 

Stress Relieving 

Not only can smudging lift the individual’s mood, but it can also help to combat stress. The fragrant smoke that burning sage produces elevates mood levels and reduces stress while even helping to alleviate pain. 

Promoting Restful Sleep

Getting enough high-quality sleep is imperative for overall health and well-being. A lack of sleep can exacerbate existing mental, emotional, and physical health problems, and can even cause others. Smudging is a traditional way of safeguarding against the negative energies that interfere with our sleep.

Boosting Cognitive Powers 

Burning sage can not only dissipate negative energies, strengthen intuition and improve mood, but it can also improve focus and memory, boosting the powers of cognition.

Increasing Energy Levels 

When negative energies are eradicated from the body by burning sage, fresh, new and positive energies are able to be welcomed in. This has an energising effect upon the body, helping to combat tiredness and fatigue. 

How Do Shamanic Healers Burn Sage For Healing?

When Shamanic Medicine practitioners burn sage, they use a smudge stick or sage bundle made up of the traditional types of sage including white sage, salvia species of sage, white prairie sage, or Artemisia species of sage. 

Often, intentions will be set when smudging for an energetic, spiritual, and negativity cleansing purpose. The end of the stick or bundle is lit then blown out quickly so that the leaves’ tips begin to slowly smoulder to release a thick smoke. The healer than directs the smoke around the individual’s body and the space surrounding them with one of their hands, while they hold the sage bundle or stick in their other hand.

The incense is allowed to linger on all the areas of the person’s body that they wish to focus on. It’s also possible to burn sage to cleanse the home and spaces within it to banish the negative energies and evil intentions that lie inside and that can cause people inside the property to become unwell, physically, mentally, or emotionally. 

How Does Shamanic Healing Benefit Your Well-Being And Overall Health? 

People seek out practitioners in shamanic medicine for numerous maladies and problems. Shamanic healing is often just part of the multidisciplinary approach that healers take to imbalances alongside herbal remedies, dietary changes, physical healers, and other types of therapy.

In Shamanic healing, all illnesses could have an underlying energetic or spiritual issue, whatever form the illness may take, whether it be mental, physical, spiritual, relational, or emotional. Even conditions that are manifesting themselves physically in the body could have a spiritual cause. 

First a Shamanic healer will be able to accurately diagnose the unseen and seen energies that are lying at the heart of the person’s problem. They will then get to work to resolve the physical, spiritual, or emotional problem by removing the inappropriate energies that are present or by returning any energies that have been found to be missing from the body. Essentially, the shaman directs and moves energy in order to restore harmony inside the individual.

Shamanic medicine addresses a physical illness’s spiritual component. In the same way that people have a physical body, they also have a spirit and a mind, and these different components of the individual interact with each other and have an effect on each other. The mind is capable of healing the body, while the spirit can affect the mind and the body together. 

When the spiritual elements of human health are addressed through shamanic medicine, the body and mind can heal naturally. Essentially, shamanic healing creates the condition that enables the body to mend itself, returning the power that allows self-healing to occur, bolstering spiritual immunity so the individual can return once more to wholeness. After undergoing shamanic healing, the body is in the best position to begin healing itself from the inside out.