As we pass through life on the physical plane, things happen. We contract viruses and we sustain physical injuries, like falling off our bikes as children or experiencing sports injuries. As adults, we may throw our back out or experience a serious car accident, in the process, acquiring bruises, cuts, sprains, infections, lacerations, and sometimes broken bones. Causes of Illness
Some of us may also experience serious illnesses of an internal nature like cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis or hepatitis. Eventually, we pass through old age and the progressive decay and death of the physical body. These things are to be expected as part of what it means to be an embodied, living being. But these are all effects, and what the shaman is primarily interested in is the cause. Causes of Illness
Looking through the shaman’s eyes, the ultimate causes of virtually all illness can be found within the non-ordinary realms – in those same realms from which illness derives its initial power to affect us adversely. It is not enough to suppress the effects of illness with medication on the physical plane – for true healing to occur, the spiritual causes of the illness must be addressed.
From the shaman’s perspective, there are three classic causes of illness, and no, they are not microbes, radiation or bad diet. Rather, they are negative internal states that we experience in response to negative or traumatic life events.
FEAR
The first spiritual cause of the illness is fear. A person who is walking around with a chronic sense of fear gnawing away at them is 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 health system stands. On a metaphysical level, fear weakens our aura – the protective energetic shield, which negatively affects the immune system on a physical level, making one more susceptible to any disease or virus, even just the common flu, cold, and parasites. And when our immune system goes down, we’re in trouble.
It’s not too difficult to see that there is a feedback mechanism at work here. Fear, and the anxiety it creates, produces disharmony. Disharmony generates more fear, and if the two of them are working together, it doubly affects the protective shield of the body’s immune system, as well as the energetic matrix. Illness is the inevitable result.
It is 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.”
Essentially, any fear we have is rooted in the fear of death: it diminishes our divine power, essence, creativity, and freedom, essentially keeping us in a fear frequency prison out of our own manipulated or conditioned ‘free will’, keeping us from truly living.
The solution here is an understanding that we are infinite spirits, that we’re something much more than a physical body, and that with the expiration of the body we will still go on. Reject fear as your reality and stay focused on ideals like love, peace, wellness, and empowerment.
Love eventually finds its way. Even if things don’t go as planned, they go exactly as they should. The Universe truly works in our favor – and unconditional love really does know best.
POWER LOSS
The second classic cause of an illness is a Power Loss. Power Loss or imbalance is what we experience when life suddenly loses its meaning or when we have lost an important connection to life.
Let’s take the case of a mother and her grown child, and suddenly one of them dies. Even if they didn’t have had a perfect relationship, there is a deep bond between them. The survivor may go into crisis upon the loss of their loved one, and within a short time may come down with something very challenging, like cancer.
That’s an imbalance or Power Loss as it is called by indigenous healers.
The state of imbalance that we experience in response to such life events causes a decline in our personal power. This can happen in a slow, deteriorating manner on the one hand, or in a catastrophic, life-changing way on the other like losing a job or entire livelihood. When we experience dis-empowerment or ‘power loss’, it affects our energetic field and renders us vulnerable to illness.
This brings us to consider the third classic cause of illness – the phenomenon known to indigenous healers as soul loss.
SOUL LOSS
Among the indigenous peoples of the world, it is generally understood that traumatic life experiences, when they are serious enough, can result in the fragmentation of our inner, vital essence or soul. Often, these traumatized soul aspects dissociate, resulting in a phenomenon generally known as ‘Soul Loss’.
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 He/she has lost the will to live. Causes of Illness
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 happen around the child’s birth experience such as arriving into life only to discover that they are not wanted, or that they are 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 school, day after day, or when a young person is molested by the one who is 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 Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Viet Nam, Korea and beyond, came home personally damaged because they had suffered terrible soul loss. Our medical specialists labeled their disorders as post-traumatic stress syndrome, but they 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 war.
SYMPTOMS OF SOUL LOSS
Soul loss is easily recognizable if you know what you’re looking for. Here’s 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
– an inability to feel love or receive love from another
– emotional remoteness
– sudden onset of apathy or listlessness
– a lack of initiative or enthusiasm
– a lack of joy
– a failure to thrive
– an inability to make decisions
– an inability to discriminate
– chronic negativity
– addictions
– suicidal tendencies
– melancholy or despair
– chronic depression
Perhaps the most common symptom of soul loss is depression. In the early 1990s, Time magazine did a cover story on depression in America that revealed 60 million Americans, representing about 30% of our population, were taking anti-depressant drugs daily.
Today that number is closer to 80 million, representing about 40% of society at large, and sometimes that number jumps in response to a national trauma. On the Friday following 9/11, a television newscast revealed that 7 out of 10 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 individual 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 inquiring individuals, most everyone has a sense of having lost a ‘part’ of themselves at some time in life, yet virtually no one has the awareness that the missing part(s) could be recovered.
They can. Learn more about Soul Loss here