In this article I have reflected on my path to self-healing and asked myself how I actually got from A to B. How did I manage to heal my physical pain and change the way I feel about myself so much that I am a completely different person today than I used to be? How did shamanic energy work and working with my mesa produce such a life changing shift? The shamanic energy work is powerful and touches our soul. But how exactly does it initiate change or even physical healing in us? I’ve dived back into my starting point to recall where I started more than eighteen years ago. What a beautiful and sacred moment for me.
In this blog article I share with you what I have found – here are the three most important keys to my personal healing.
Key 1: Stay
How pain arises when we avoid ourselves
Eighteen years ago I had only one primary concern and that was healing my body. My physical pain was visibly and noticeably healed within a few years. Why actually? What was really interesting here was my inner mental state – the part that was not visible to me.
I had completely lost inner contact with myself. I could no longer express myself within my direct experience, but acted all the time with my masks of expectation and inner pain avoidance. I no longer had access to my true feelings and didn’t want to feel them either because I thought they were wrong. I avoided feeling afraid of not being enough. I avoided the pain of rejection from outside and from myself, I avoided my great insecurities and the self loathing that resulted from not being able to cope with all the pressures inside.
I avoided feeling the overwhelm that happened in countless moments because I didn’t know that I was very empathetic and perceptive. I was struggling so much with myself because I was chasing an ideal that I wasn’t even aware of. Instead of meeting myself and my needs, I avoided myself because I thought I wasn’t right the way I was. “Don’t be so sensitive”, “don’t take it so seriously”, “you’re exaggerating”, “there’s no need to be sad”. Yes, all feelings had reasons, and they were clamorous traces to my truth.
I had no interest in life simply because I could not feel joy. However, I was far from my core of joy, from my own heart. When I look at photos from that time, I see an empty body shell from which my soul had distanced itself very far – because I had avoided it. No wonder my body was screaming to get home!
Internal injuries lead to soul loss
In general, I think that each and every one of us develops many and very strong avoidance patterns in the course of our lives. Patterns that cut us off and separate us from ourselves. They are ways we find to avoid uncomfortable feelings such as insecurity, fear, anger, rejection and hatred. We can’t stand to be inward for one simple reason: we take everything that’s going on around us personally.
If our parents are overwhelmed with us children, then we immediately believe that we are not lovable and that we are a burden. When we even experience physical violence, not only is it a traumatizing transgression, but we also believe that we are to blame for causing so much anger. When our first teenage love isn’t reciprocated, we feel like we’re not right and not lovable enough. These original events, from which we draw false conclusions about our lovability and which lead to avoidance behavior, are called “soul losses” in the shamanic tradition.
We move a little further away from our self-love and our soul. We stash a piece of our light that we think isn’t shining under an avoidance behavior. I myself had outsourced countless parts far away from me. Of myself, there wasn’t that much left in my body. We all have swapped out shares. This is a completely natural process of protection at first and inner growth at the moment of rediscovery. The first major key to healing is the ability to stay and reflect on the things that are happening to us. This also means that we feel deep within ourselves what we really feel. This is the only way we can avoid covering up our light.
Key 2: Inner Security
Create security within yourself and you can heal
There are two steps required to reintegrate our energies. On the one hand, through the conscious projection work, in which we discover and discard these avoidance strategies and go through and heal the hurt feelings. This allows the outsourced life force to flow back into the body. The second step is the reintegration of the outsourced life force, the so-called “soul retrieval”. This can happen all by itself when we do our reflection work or it is supported in shamanic healing work. In such a healing, one begins a soul retrieval by looking at the avoidance pattern in a shamanic journey. After that, the lost energy is sought and gently brought back. These two steps are all about safety – is it safe to be in your body? Can I create a space of safety for myself, in which I can begin to treat myself lovingly and to see and feel all my feelings without making fallacies about my worth and loveliness?
Healing the feelings of stability, security and belonging
Shamanic work helps us to create a safe space within us by connecting us to Mother Earth, to Pachamama. Both the Despachos, the shamanic gift bundles, as well as various meditations, initiations and the work with the Mesa, strengthen our connection with nature.
Feeling an intense connection to Pachamama greatly alters our own stability. We are given a reliability and strength that never dries up and is always tangible, memorable and something we can experience again and again.
Hereby we receive a particularly important gift for our further healing journey – the feeling of belonging and acceptance.
“Yes, you belong here.”
“Yes, you are right and desired.”
“Yes, you are loved and lovable.”
This unconditional acceptance that we can feel in the meditations with Pachamama and her powers reveals to us that we have a place in life. It gives us a reason to live and a deep-rooted purpose that motivates us to find out more about our abilities. This feeling of belonging was an initial spark for me to continue my healing work. It is a significant motivation to keep going and not give up. A new identity, a new sense of who I was, slowly and quietly developed within me.
Key 3: Your identity
Change your identity and your whole life changes
Our sense of identity is the starting point for our entire life: our values, our beliefs, our feelings, our actions and our behavior. Our self-image is the basis of all our decisions regarding the environment in which we move. The shamanic exercises and healings help us to rediscover our belonging to the world and thereby we heal our feelings towards ourselves. They promote our feeling of wholeness and completion. They heal our lost sense of belonging, our sense of not being right and not belonging here. They clearly make it clear to us: You belong to Pachamama and to the cosmos! You are part of it!
Thereby we awaken the true identity of our soul and replace our false identity of injuries. When we feel that we belong here, that we are part of something bigger, that we are exactly right, then a beautiful process of changing of our identity begins. Our self-esteem grows and we develop other values and beliefs from it. Of course, this results in completely different behavior than from an injured identity that does not feel its own worth in connection with something larger. A chain of reactions with an unbelievable volume of change is triggered and spreads to all areas of life.
Take your time for your change
Profound changes do not happen overnight. We need a lot of impulses, meditations or initiations to take the necessary steps and we need time to integrate the new feeling towards ourselves after a healing or a soul retrieval. We feel it, are amazed and feel comfortable with ourselves and then it recedes into the background in everyday life, in our patterns, until we activate it again the next time.
In my many years as a coach and bodyworker, I’ve had so many moments where my clients have discovered how good they can feel about themselves without the rest of their lives changing in the past two hours. In order to deeply anchor and strengthen this identity, we repeat these moments countless times. It is very intense work with yourself, which requires a strong inner agreement, a willingness to invest in all possible forms – time, effort, money, patience, perseverance, willingness to practice and trust. Let me tell you that in the first four years of my healing I must have received around 35 healings and have gone through all the initiations of Hatun Karpay.
My world was upside down, so I had a lot to do to make all the changes happen, resolve long-overdue conflicts, and change patterns that other people in my life had already become accustomed to. It is our patience and self-love that prompts us to draw the line out of need, not defense, for the hundredth time. It is the patience and self-love not to give up on yourself, no matter how rocky the path is at the beginning.
Because especially at the beginning we are confronted with all the ugly things inside of us that we have been running away from for so long – that takes courage and a lot of strength. The more we get home, the easier it becomes for us to stay. Our self-acceptance and self-love become a powerful magnet that attracts more and more parts of us.
The shamanic work is not a radical solution and a healing is not a salvation from the outside. Rather, they are a loving way to give yourself the necessary time for changes, not to leave yourself again in the changes, but to stay and with the connection to Pachamama, to experience the feelings that are necessary. It is the opportunity to finally come home, where we feel our weaknesses and negative feelings as well as our strength and our connection to the universe.
Home is where we can feel unconditional self-acceptance (all of our feelings) and where our love can grow.
