Shamanistic Medicine: Healing and Travels in Peru

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Shamanistic MedicineHealing and Travels in Peru

• Allan Olson, D.O.

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Objectives

• Familiarize
• Inform
• Glimpse of Peru in the process

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• I dont know what you learned in books, but the
  most important thing I learned from my
  grandfathers was that there is a part of the mind
  that we dont really know about and that it is
  that part that is most important in whether we
  become sick or remain well.
• Thomas Large Whiskers
• 100 yr. Old Navaho Medicine Man

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The Concept of Healing Vs Treatment

• True healing involves dealing with the spirit of
  the person not just the body.
• There is more than what meets the eye in dealing
  with human illness.
• Healing for the shaman is a spiritual affair.
• The shaman attributes healing to the spirits
  (power) not to themselves.

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The Mind, Brain, and Body Connection
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History of Shamanism

• 20-30 Thousand years old
• Elements of Shamanism are found in virtually all
  religions today, especially Buddhism.
• Anthropologists invented the word shamanism to
  classify the least comprehensible practices of
  primitive cultures.

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What Is Shamanism?

• A set of tools and techniques used to interact
  with the spirit world and the world around us.
  It has no specific pantheon of gods and is
  attached to no particular culture.
• More a method than a belief.
• A complex of beliefs, rites, and traditions
  clustered around the shaman and his/her
  activities.
• A range of traditional beliefs and practices that
  involve the ability to diagnose, cure, and
  sometimes cause illness because of a special
  relationship with, or control over, spirits.

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What Is a Shaman?

• A psychotherapeutic healer who knows the ways of
  healing and has suffered to acquire that
  knowledge.
• A person who has a charismatic religious role
  involving the mastery or control of spirits.
• A spiritual as well as a physical healer.
• The word Shaman is originally Siberian. In the
  Tungus language a saman is a person who beats a
  drum, enters into a trance and cures people
• Shamans are the keepers of a remarkable body of
  ancient techniques that they use to achieve and
  maintain well-being for themselves and members of
  their communities

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What Does a Shaman Do?

• Uses altered states of consciousness to
  communicate with and influence the forces of
  nature and the universe for the benefit of
  society.
• Plays a role in cultural identity/preservation.
• He/she guides and mediates the group s/he is
  guiding, inhabitants of the spirit world, and
  nature to achieve equilibrium.

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What Does a Shaman Do? (Cont.)

• Lives with a foot in two worlds, the physical one
  that we all know and the visionary spirit
  world, the world of the imagination.
• Learns from visions.
• Helps his/her patient transcend their normal,
  ordinary definition of reality, including the
  definition of themselves as ill.
• In the shamanic state of consciousness learns how
  to metamorphose him/herself into other forms of
  matter.

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What a Shaman Does Not Do

• He/she does not compete with orthodox medical
  care but instead complements it.
• The shamans goal is not to prolong life per se,
  but to balance the spirit and establish
  equilibrium.

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Methods Utilized in shamanistic Healing

• The spirit world is accessed through drumming,
  song, medicinal plants, controlled dreams,
  prolonged fasting, isolation in wilderness
  (vision quest), hypnosis based on a repetitive
  drum beat, near death experience, or combination
  of the above.
• Intense temperature conditions
• Physical or sensory deprivation
• Use of sacred plants
• Auditory aids to altered states
• Spiritual allies (usually animals)

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Beliefs

• Everyone has a Guardian Spirit (Angel?),
  (tutelary spirit in Siberia, assistant totem in
  Australia).
• Plants share knowledge with us through their
  spirit.
• Disease has its origins and gains its meanings
  from the spirit world.
• It is not the tools and rituals that heal, it is
  the power endowed in them by the imagination.
• All of nature has a hidden, no ordinary reality.
• Power animals animal-human unity.

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Elements That Are Common to Shamanism Worldwide

• Access to the spirit world
• Belief that Everything is connected
• Everything is inhabited by a spirit
• Symbol of a serpent or coiled serpent
• Described visions are similar
• Functions fundamentally in much the same way and
  with similar techniques in widely separate and
  remote parts of the planet.

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Orthodox Medical Applications

• Jacques Mabit, M.D.-use of Ayahuasca ceremonies
  and psychotherapy to treat addiction.
• Use of psilocybin to treat OCD-studies at the
  University of Arizona.
• Simonton cancer imagery treatment.

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Is There Scientific Validity to Shamanism?

• No, but there is a good deal of related research
  and many hypotheses.
• Strassman-DMT- theoretical-pineal gland.
• Narby-DNA, the common thread- theoretical.
• Experiential evidence.
• Right hemisphere is more closely connected to the
  autonomic nervous system than the left.
• Hypothalamic/limbic-pituitary-endocrine-autonomic-
  immune system.

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Ayahuasca and DMT

• 80,000 species of plants in the jungle (Amazon)
• MAOIs, i.e.. Beta-carbolines, harmine and
  harmaline.

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Aesculapius

• The Roman name for the god of Medicine Son of
  Apollo and nymph Coronis.
• Snakes were sacred to Aesculapius because it was
  believed they had the power to renew their youth
  by shedding their old skin and growing a new one.

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Caduceus

• In mythology, the wand or staff carried by Hermes
  or Mercury.

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Cosmic Serpents?
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Transformation in Peru

• A brief trip through various areas in Peru and
  some comments regarding my experience with
  shamans.

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What Have My Shaman Friends Said to Me?

• Ayahuasca (the plant) determines what you need.
• Ayahuasca is the great teacher.
• Visions are not produced by the plant (drug). The
  plant allows you to see what is always there
  (another reality).

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• The witch doctor shaman succeeds for the same
  reason all the rest of us doctors succeed.
  Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
  They come to us not knowing this truth. We are
  at our best when we give the doctor who resides
  within each patient a chance to go to work.
• Albert Schweitzer

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