As a psychotherapist, I became disenchanted with "talk therapy," because of its ingrained tendency to view a person as wounded and in need of fixing. The emphasis is on weeding the garden but ignoring the flowers. Seeking an approach that focuses on dreams rather than diagonses, I studied shamanic healing. Soon I learned that what can take years of psychotherapy can be accomplished in a limited number of shamanic healing sessions.
Shamanic healing works on the energies that surround the human body and inform the body in the same way that the energy fields of a magnet organize iron filings on a piece of glass. If you extended your arms outward, you can feel the edges of this energy field surrounding you. It may feel like a finely spun web of vibration, warm in some places, cold in others, strong in some, weak in others. This Luminous Energy Field is linked energetically to our physical body at seven funnel-shaped vortexes of energy (chakras) located at key points along our central nervous system. If you move your hand over the front of your body, following the central axis and a few inches above it, you may feel differences in heat, for instance at the heart and the solar plexus areas. These vital centers of energy are as essential to our health and well-being as is the oxygen we breath.
The Luminous Energy Field also contains a record of our personal and ancestral memories, including all the traumas we have suffered in this lifetime and past lives. Our emotional, genetic, and karmic history organizes this energy, often leaving dense imprints in our luminous field, which impact negatively on our nervous system via our chakras, and compel us toward behaviors, relationships, accidents, and illnesses that mimic the original wounding.
Shamanic healing cleanses these dense energies from our chakras and then illuminates them with light energy, thereby re-patterning the body and soul energetically back to physical and psychological health. It works both at the energetic and archetypal levels. Energetically, it shifts energy that has become stuck in habitual, reactive patterns and constricted emotions. For instance, if you are feeling stuck anywhere in your life – a relationship, work, therapy, your spiritual journey – it acts as a catalyst to generate profound shifts in energy and awareness. Then, building on your experience of this expansive, joyful release of energy and awakening of awareness, it helps you dream a new reality into being at the archetypal level - the soul level of images and vision.
Additional processes also promote profound healing. Soul Retrievals restore and then integrate back into our lives the vibrant soul parts of ourselves that were spilt off as the result of a wounding. Destiny Retrievals counter the momentum of inertia towards predictable, dysfunctional outcomes based on our wounds (fate) and allow us to create a new dream and live our true creative potential (destiny).
Flynn Johnson, MA, LCMHC, founder of The School of Natural Wonder, has been leading Vision Quests for the past sixteen years. He is a certified Core Energetic Therapist, a long-time meditator, and trains in shamanic energy medicine at Alberto Villolldo’s Healing the Light Body School. He is the author of the forthcoming book Journey to the Sacred Mountains: Awakening Soul in Nature (Findhorn Press).