Spirit Medicine & Physical Medicine
by Hank Wesselman, Ph.D.
& Jill Kuykendall, RPT
 
JK: We live in a time in which the nature and quality of health care
represent major areas of concern within the national and international
community. In response, our view of health care is changing, and
increasing numbers of spiritual seekers and health-care providers alike
are reconsidering the role that the mind — and by association,
spirituality — plays in healing. In the process, society at large is
becoming increasingly aware of complementary and alter-native medicine,
and it's precisely here that the indigenous peoples may have something
vital to offer us.
The traditionals make a clear distinction between physical medicine
and spirit medicine, yet they view them as complementary, as two halves
of a whole. It's important to make this point because many people today
have had negative experiences within the Western medical system, and
some dismiss physical medicine with disdain, branding it as
dysfunctional or even harmful. Yet if someone were seriously injured
in a car accident and bleeding internally, it's quite obvious that this
wouldn't be the moment to pick up the rattle and go into trance. This
would be the time for that person to find him- or herself in an
operating room with a world-class surgeon, anesthesiologist, and
medical team.
In the same vein, if a tribal warrior were carried into camp with an
arrow sticking out of his body, this would be the moment to get the
projectile out of the wound, stem the bleeding, prevent infection, and
promote healing. This would be the time for physical medicine; and all
shamans, in their capacity as healers, know a great deal about it.
In considering the relationship between physical medicine and spirit
medicine, however, let's take a hypothetical case where an individual
discovers that he or she has a life-threatening illness such as cancer.
In the standard Western medical paradigm, that person would be
referred to an oncologist who would go to work with everything
medically available, from chemotherapy to radiation and possibly
surgery. This protocol is much in keeping with our belief that the
primary purpose of the practice of medicine is the avoidance of death
and the prolongation of life.
Among the indigenous peoples, however, treatment for the cancer
might be quite different. Shamans know that everything in existence has
a physical aspect, an energetic aspect, and a spiritual aspect. They
also understand that illness gains much of its initial power, as well
as its meaning, from its spiritual aspect.
Given this perception, the shaman would most likely address the
illness at all three levels — physical, energetic, and spiritual. If the
illness can be addressed at the spiritual level, its energetic
expression will be progressively diminished, shifting the balance
within the sufferer's physical body from disorder and disease toward
harmony and balance — a shift that may be just the medicine required to
allow the body soul, functioning as restorer, to overcome the illness.
The shaman also knows that when your soul cluster is in good shape,
there are no worries. Yet if one or more of your three souls is
diminished or damaged, you've got a problem. This reveals why the
primary purpose of the practice of spirit medicine is to restore,
nurture, and preserve the soul.
As we pass through life on the physical plane, things happen: We
contract flus, colds, and bacterial infections, and we sustain physical
injuries, like falling off our bikes as children or suffering sports
injuries. As adults, we may throw our back out or experience a serious
accident — in the process acquiring bruises, cuts, sprains, infections,
lacerations, and sometimes broken bones.
Some of us may also deal with serious illnesses of an internal
nature like cancer, hepatitis, heart disease, or multiple sclerosis.
Eventually we pass through old age, and the death of the physical body. These are the givens — they're all to be
expected as part of what it means to be an embodied, living being on
Level One. But these are all effects, and what the shaman is primarily interested in is the cause.
In looking through the shamanic healer's eyes, the ultimate causes
of virtually all illness are to be found within the imaginal realms of
Level Three — in those same regions from which illness derives its
initial power to affect us adversely. Because of this, it's not enough
to simply suppress the effects of illness with medication on the physical plane and hope for the best. For true healing to occur, the causes of the illness must be addressed.
From the shaman's perspective, there are three classic causes of
illness, and interestingly, they're not microbes or bacteria or
viruses. Rather, they're negative internal states that appear within us
in response to negative or traumatic life experiences. The first among
these is disharmony.
Disharmony
DISHARMONY is what we experience when life suddenly loses its meaning or when we've lost an important connection to our lives.
Let's take the case of an elderly couple who've been married for a
long time, and suddenly one of them dies. They may not have had a
perfect relationship, yet there's a deep bond between them because of
all they've shared. The survivor may go into crisis upon the loss of
his or her mate, and within a short time, he or she may come down with
something medically challenging, like cancer. Suddenly, they're gone,
too.
That's disharmony.
Disharmony may also result from the sudden loss of our identity, our
sense of "belonging to." Let's take the case of a high-level corporate
executive, a woman in her early 50s who's at the top of her field. One
day, the management executives in her corporation decide to hire
someone right out of business school for a third of her salary, so
they terminate her employment sooner than expected. Now what do you
think her chances are of getting rehired at the same level in her
profession? Remember, she's just been fired.
Six months later, she's still looking for work and is in a deep
state of disharmony. Her debts are mounting and she suspects (rightly)
that she's lost her livelihood and that she's going to have to start
over. One day, she finds a lump in her breast and goes to her doctor,
who does a biopsy and gives her the grim diagnosis.
Now, without making any claims, could it be that the cause of her breast cancer is in some way involved with losing her job?
The state of disharmony that we experience in response to such life
situations causes a diminishment of our personal power. This can happen
in a subtle manner on the one hand, or in a catastrophic, life-shaking
way on the other. When we experience disempowerment, or "power loss,"
it affects our energetic matrix, rendering us vulnerable to illness.
Fear
The second classic cause of illness is fear. People
who are walking around with a chronic sense of fear gnawing away at
them are doubly vulnerable to illness because their anxiety
aggressively and progressively diminishes their sense of well-being,
and this, in turn, affects their feeling of being safe in the world.
This sense of well-being is the base upon which our personal health
system stands. When this foundation is affected negatively, it
diminishes the ability of our immune system to function. And when our
immune system goes down, we're in trouble.
It's not too difficult to see that there's a feedback mechanism at
work here. Fear, and the anxiety it creates, produces disharmony. In
the same breath, disharmony generates fear, and if the two of them are
working together, it doubly affects the protective mantle of the body's
immune system, as well as the energetic matrix. Illness is the
inevitable result.
It's no surprise to Western medical practitioners that disharmony
and fear can manifest themselves in diseases that are recognizable to
science. Almost 500 years ago, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus
observed that "the fear of disease is more dangerous than the disease
itself."
But suppose an individual with a serious, life-threatening illness
lacks fear entirely? Here's a rather thought-provoking example.
In the recent past, medical doctors believed that the mortality rate
for AIDS sufferers was 100 percent — that if you contracted the HIV
virus, then you would be resigned to a death sentence. It was just a
matter of time.
However, an AIDS-related study published in the New England Journal of Medicine
has revealed something quite extraordinary. Researchers at the UCLA
School of Medicine have reported unambiguous evidence of an infant boy
who twice tested positive for the HIV virus, once at 19 days of age and
again one month later. But when this child was tested again as a
kindergartener at age five, he was HIV negative.
The virus was not lying dormant, awaiting some external cue to become active. It had been eliminated from his body, and the child appeared to have been HIV-free for at least four years.
Could it be that the immune system of this infant, completely
ignorant of the fact that he had a terminal illness, remained strong?
Could it be that his body soul, lacking the fear and other negative
emotions that the awareness of having this "deadly disease" would
ordinarily generate in an older individual, simply went to work as it
was programmed to do and killed the virus in the first year of his life?
There's also another possibility here, one that regularly escapes
the notice of the scientific community. This brings us to consider the
third classic cause of illness — the phenomenon known to indigenous
healers as soul loss.
Soul Loss
JK: Among the traditionals, soul loss is regarded as the most serious diagnosis and the
major cause of premature death and serious illness, yet curiously, it's
not even mentioned in our Western medical textbooks. The closest
acknowledged context is that "he/she has lost the will to live."
In Western society, soul loss is most easily understood as damage to
a person's life essence, a phenomenon that usually occurs in response
to trauma. When the trauma is severe, this may result in a
fragmentation of that person's soul cluster, with the shattered soul
parts dissociating, fleeing an intolerable situation. In overwhelming
circumstances, these soul parts may not return.
The causes of soul loss can be many and varied. There may be
traumatic perinatal issues that occur around children's birth
experiences, such as arriving into life only to discover that they're
not wanted or that they're the wrong gender — they've come in as a girl
when everyone was hoping for a boy. Soul loss can also occur when a
child is mercilessly bullied or teased at home or at school, day after
day, or when young people are molested by those who are supposed to be
caring for them. When someone has been raped or assaulted; has suffered
a shocking betrayal, a bitter divorce, a traumatic abortion, a terrible
car accident, or even a serious surgery, soul loss is assured.
Many of the young men and women who were sent to war in Iraq,
Kuwait, Vietnam, and beyond came home personally damaged because they
had suffered terrible soul loss. Our medical specialists labeled their
disorders as post-traumatic stress disorder, but they initially had
little to offer these "walking wounded" in terms of true
healing, and many who survived are still deeply traumatized at the soul
level by what happened to them in battle.
Soul loss is easily recognizable if you know what you're looking for. Here is a checklist of some of the classic symptoms:
• Feelings of being fragmented, of not being all here
• Blocked memory—an inability to remember parts of one's life
• Being unable to feel love or receive love from another
• Emotional remoteness
• A sudden onset of apathy or listlessness
• A lack of initiative, enthusiasm, or joy
• A failure to thrive
• An inability to make decisions or discriminate
• Chronic negativity
• Addictions
• Suicidal tendencies
• Melancholy or despair
• Chronic depression
Perhaps the most common symptom of soul loss is depression. According to a 2003 Harvard Medical School Study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
between 13 and 14 million American adults suffer from a major
depressive episode in a given year, representing nearly 5 percent of
the total population, and sometimes that number jumps in response to a
national trauma. On the Friday following 9/11, a television newscast
revealed that seven out of ten Americans polled were experiencing
significant depression in response to the tragedy, an indicator of soul
loss on a national scale.
Although the term soul loss is not familiar to most
Westerners, examples of it are expressed daily in our language and
descriptions of personal hardships. Media interviews and news reports
include individuals' comments such as "I lost a part of myself when
that (trauma) happened" and "I have not been the same since." When
discussing soul loss with a number of individuals, I found that almost
everyone had a sense of having lost a "part" of themselves at some time
in life, yet virtually no one had the awareness that the missing
part(s) could be recovered.
They can.
Illness Intrusions
HW: When we're diminished by disharmony, when our soul
cluster has taken a major hit, or when we're in a state of stress,
anxiety, or fear, we become vulnerable to intrusions entering our
personal energetic field. When the intrusions are strong enough, they
may take up residence, distorting the pattern of our matrix and
producing the symptoms recognizable as illness.
In spirit medicine, illness is caused by intrusions — by something
that comes into us from without. It could be a virus, a bacterium, an
arrow, or a negative thought form. However, from the shaman's
perspective, the illness intrusion is not the primary issue. The real
problem is the diminishment of our personal power or the holes torn in
the fabric of our soul that allowed the intrusion to enter in the first
place.
Negative thoughts, feelings, and intentions can be directed toward
us like spiritual poison darts by those who hold us in disregard — an old
lover or spouse who just can't let go, a hostile neighbor who spews
forth profanity at us, in-laws who find us unworthy, or a jealous
sibling or co-worker who simply despises us. When this is done with
outright malice, it forms the modus operandi of negative witchcraft and sorcery. The Yoruba people of West Africa call it juju.
When the negative thought forms become frequent, generated by
another's anger toward us, for example, they take on density,
continually fueled by the heightened emotions of the sender. Our body
soul immediately picks them up. Remember, the body soul is the
perceiver of that which can be seen, as well as that which is unseen.
It notices everything, even those things that we're not consciously
aware of.
If our soul cluster is in good shape, these negative intentions may
simply bounce off or pass through, allowing us to continue much as
before. If our soul cluster is damaged or our power is down, however,
the negativity and the anger can be internalized, taking up residence
within us as an intrusion and disrupting our sense of well-being. Over
time, this may cause an increasing sense of dis-ease, which, in turn,
causes a progressive diminishment of our life force.
Individuals may also create their own intrusions through an ongoing
preoccupation with the negative. Medical intuitive Caroline Myss
describes them as energy circuits held within a person's
matrix — knots of coherence that can continually draw from the body's
daily supply of power. Often, these energy circuits represent
unfinished emotional business that we're carrying around like baggage.
As our body soul (subconsciously) or our mental soul (consciously)
focuses on these negative thoughts or memories, the flow of energy
toward them is increased, and they expand, diminishing us on the
energetic level even more.
Such well-established intrusions may accumulate over time, building
up a presence within us much like the clutter that grows in our living
space year after year, including all the stuff we inherited from our
parents that we're not quite ready to let go of yet. It is then that an
unexpected trauma may suddenly tip the scale from balance into
disharmony, from ease into disease . . . with the inevitable result:
illness.
In summary, the energy body is very responsive to thoughts and
emotions. Negative memories, reflections, ruminations, sentiments, or
feelings that are held for any length of time within the energy body
may form intrusions that will distort the pattern of our energetic
matrix. Since the structure, as well as the functioning, of the
physical body is determined by this energetic pattern, distortions in
one will bring about distortions in the other. And once the pattern of
the matrix is distorted, the body soul can no longer function
effectively as the inner healer.
Remember, the body soul is not creative. It needs that energetic blueprint in order to make repairs.
The kahuna healers of Hawaii paid great attention to learning
how to direct their thoughts. They knew that through focused
concentration, they could help restore the energy body to an
undistorted state, and this, in turn, could facilitate the return of
harmony and balance in the physical aspect.
One of the last publicly practicing kahunas, David
Kaonohiokala Bray (1889-1968), dispelled the negative thought forms of
his clients by first leading them toward increased self-awareness. The
source of the thought forms was then sought out, revealing how they
functioned as well as why the client would continue to hold on to them.
The goal was to help clients release the negative, allowing them to
choose another attitude and a new way for being in the world.
Through dialogue, as well as his own expanded awareness, Daddy Bray,
as he was known, analyzed the thought forms of his client, especially
those created by distorted emotions and thoughts during chronic mental
poisoning. He knew that these negative thought forms could become so
dense that they might actually appear as separate beings — as the demons,
dark forces, and evil spirits so prevalent in the world's mythologies.
In the same breath, he understood that once these thought forms
achieved a certain density, they could act as psychic-energetic
"vampires" literally feeding on the client's fears and drawing energy
directly from their vitality. It's possible that many of the documented
cases of spirit possession and so-called spirit attachments may
actually fall into this category.
The kahuna's task is to expose the thought forms for what
they really are — unreal demons or phantoms that have no existence in
themselves, and which cease to exist once released by the sufferer. If
the client continues to feed them, they hang around. But when the
sufferer no longer gives them what they want, they're history.
This article was excerpted from:
 Spirit Medicine
by Hank Wesselman & Jill Kuykendall, RPT.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Hay House, Inc. ©2004. www.hayhouse.com
Info/Order this book.
More books by these authors.
About the Authors
Anthropologist Hank Wesselman, Ph.D., has worked for more than 30
years investigating the
mystery of human origins in East Africa's Great Rift Valley. In the 1970s, while
doing fieldwork in southern Ethiopia, he began to have spontaneous
visionary experiences strikingly like those of traditional shamans. His
experiences are documented in his autobiographical trilogy: Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker. He is also the author of The Journey to the Sacred Garden. Website: www.sharedwisdom.com
Jill Kuykendall, RPT (Hank's wife), is a registered physical
therapist and transpersonal medical practitioner who has worked in the
standard Western medical paradigm for more than 20 years. In addition, she has functioned
as co-facilitator for the Mercy Healing Circle, participated in the
Mercy Healthcare Healing Environment Task Force as a community member
consultant, and has served as a member of the Sutter Healthcare
Wellness and Healing Network. She is now in private practice at the
Center for Optimum Health in Roseville, California (near Sacramento),
specializing in soul-retrieval work.
More articles by Hank Wesselman.
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