Lydi and I learned astrology and tarot card reading years ago when we studied the Kabbalah. Around the same time, we also studied Hebrew and Arabic at the University of Cairo in Egypt, but it wasn’t until a decade later when we began to really use shamanism, shamanic tools, and especially the sacred medicines, that we learned that we had an ancestor known as “Rashi” had assisted in the writing of the sacred texts of the Kabbalah. Our interest in astrology and tarot cards (both Lydi and I were interested in these things though our studies were often along slightly different paths) was certainly fueled by the ancestry even though we weren’t conscious of our Jewish lineage at that time.
Lydi and I research and write about cures for diseases. There are never magic-bullet cures, so we use that word “cure” with a nod to the fact that curing a disease takes time and effort and usually multiple types of treatment. We write about cures and we use the word “cure” in part to make it possible for people to find us when they put the word “cure” into a search engine. In today’s world, word choice is crucial if we want to find information via the Internet. In any case, Lydi and I are not naive about what it takes to cure a disease. We know that if the mind refuses to believe that a treatment will work, this can get in the way of having a successful treatment. On the other hand, if the mind believes that a treatment is a cure, this belief can, indeed, produce excellent results (the placebo effect).
Back in the day when Lydian and I were studying Hebrew and Arabic in Egypt along with tarot cards and astrology, we noted that a negative astrology or tarot reading was hard to fix, but we also didn’t have the same level of expectation that there’s a cure for every disease. As we started working hands-on with clients and also our own family members to overcome serious health or mental health problems, astrology and tarot readings began to get in the way. If we could forecast difficulty but there was no way to fix it or remediate the problem, then sometimes it seemed better not to use medical astrology or tarot cards to look for potential roadblocks in the first place.
But around the time that Lydian and I started putting this astrology-tarot-card-problem into words, we started studying under a curandera in Mexico. We didn’t call it shamanism, but that’s what we were learning about. And as it turned out, after years of working with shamanism, we found that shamanism is a way to potentially remediate forecasted problems in the horoscope and in tarot readings.
Some History
When the ancient Chaldeans evolved from tribal hunter-gatherers to an agricultural civilization, attention to the seasons took on a new level of significance. Shaman who had been primarily concerned with using their intuition involving a nomadic lifestyle (e.g. where to find good prey for hunting and where to locate food and medicines in the wild), suddenly were in a position where they could settle in one place and observe the plants and animals in a very different way and from a very different perspective.
Over the course of just a few generations, there was a shift from regular (or sometimes near constant) movement of a nomadic tribe in search of food sources to the development of more sophisticated forms of architecture and tribal culture that began to take shape around a stationary lifestyle. Nomadic grandparents with shamanic wisdom lost their voice as the Old Ways were replaced by a new system that allowed for there to be a surplus of food and specialization of knowledge and skill.
Similar transitions have happened more recently in history when Columbus (or the Vikings, depending on what story you believe) discovered that the earth was round instead of flat. During this era of major transition, we can see how the worldview changed with the discovery of the New World and the realization that the world is round and not flat. Artists who had been portraying the world and the humans in it in two dimensions developed the vanishing point to portray the 3 dimensional world on 2 dimensional surfaces. This transition in art allows us to see and experience this change in worldview that took shape over the course of just a few generations. The vanishing point in art revolutionized the visual arts and it allowed artists to portray the entire world and human beings in a hyper-realistic way, but we can assume that humans evolved with the art and the sciences, including astrology and astronomy during the Renaissance and later the Scientific Revolution.
When the camera was developed, 3-D hyper-realism in art went out of vogue and instead, abstract art became more important as a way to express emotions. The most recent transition has involved technology and our ability to portray ideas in hyper-realistic ways visually and symbolically.
Whether you have any knowledge of or interest in art doesn’t matter. It’s easy to see and even feel the transition that took place in society through the arts and these changes impacted everyone. Art, after all, is meant to be experienced. The best artists are able to create works of art that are hard to talk about in words.
But going back in time again to tribal society, when tribes were transitioning from a nomadic to an agricultural way of life, shamanic ways of healing began to be replaced with paganism. While shamanism tends to be oriented toward the ancestors, paganism is oriented more toward anthropomorphic gods and
goddesses and mythology. Today, we rarely talk about things like shamanism or paganism outside of a university class or a formal curriculum that explores ancient history. But the distinction between shamanism and paganism is important, so let’s discuss that here.
Shamanism vs. Paganism
Shamanism is the oldest medical system on the planet. Though people do can talk about shamanism as a “religion” to portray shamanism in this way is inaccurate. Over the years, I’ve heard people describe shamanism as “nature-worship” and I’ve heard it described as “witchcraft”, but shamanism is not either of those things. Shamanism is medicine. It is a method of working in the gray areas between life and death in order to bring parts of us that have died (or that are sick) back to life as well as to escort the soul to the other side doing psychopomp work if a person wishes to or must cross over.
“Nature-worship” as a definition of shamanism suggests a duality between humans and nature, where the human is not natural. In nature-worship, a human worships nature. But shamanism, first of all, is not a doctrine. We might say that the laws and methods of shamanism are written inside of all of us and they’re based on the experiences of the (hopefully healthy) ancestors to whom we have access when we enter into certain brainwave states (a bit like tuning a radio). Shamanism is about a human accessing the wisdom of the past using the body and various tools that exist to “hack into” the somatic mind’s natural resources.
For example, our bodies naturally and automatically produce Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep cycles when we’re asleep at night. At the time when REM sleep takes form in the overall “sleep architecture”, our bodies naturally stop producing insulin. We become temporarily diabetic for a short period of time and cells go into a state of dormancy (the cells also go to sleep). At the same time, growth hormone is released as one of the most important hormones for growth and repair. We might think of growth hormone as the architect that builds and repairs the body based on these REM dream-states. If growth hormone were an actual architect he or she would use the stress / trauma that needs to be processed in the sleeper’s waking life through dreams in order to build and fortify the body so it can adapt to the trauma / stressors. Stressors are like earthquakes and blizzards that are used to create “code” for building safe houses in different regions of the world, but emotionally, our bodies use stressful experiences in our waking lives to create “code”, like a blueprint for cellular growth, repair, and apoptosis as well. Growth hormone is released when we are dreaming and processing our stress and trauma – or when we’re failing to process stress and trauma. Growth hormone brings back the blueprint that insulin uses as the “general contractor” to build and repair cells in the body.
During REM sleep, the body goes into a “diabetic state” of very low insulin levels and we might say that the spirit or the soul of the body is able to come and go at this time without any harm happening to the body. As the cells go into a dormant state, the body is not “open” to other spiritual intrusions that might cause it harm. So the lack of insulin during these sleep cycles is necessary to protect the body. We can think about insulin as the general contractor that’s normally knocking on the cell’s doors to bring more supplies to the cell (amino acids, glucose, fatty acids) for building and repair. Insulin works with growth hormone to take materials and supplies where they need to go in the body. Without proper levels of insulin or in cases of insulin resistance (a state that happens both in alcoholics, in many types of addiction, and in diabetics), cells go into a state of dormancy that resembles Resignation Syndrome (also known as Traumatic Withdrawal Syndrome).
Resignation Syndrome happens when a person is emotionally or biologically traumatized and their cells go into a state of dormancy. When I worked in nursing homes, I saw a number of people go into this twilight, comatose state. We had to keep feeding these people with a feeding tube. One woman remained in this near-death state for many months and her toes shriveled up and started to fall off. Eventually she died, but in cases of refugee children who have received news that their family must return to the dangerous country-of-origin , when parents begin to tell their comatose children that they can remain in the safe country, children start to wake up. Children who awaken from these states report that they felt like they were “underwater in a glass cube” and if they move or shift at all, the glass will break and they’ll die.
Sleep and dreams have been used for centuries by shaman to learn about the universe, to find cures for disease, to locate food, and to generally use the “felt sense” or the “third eye” in order to survive. Shaman were most often “wounded healers” who had a disease themselves that today would resemble epilepsy or even autism. Some shaman were “handicapped” (according to the words we would use in the developed world) in other ways, but always, the dis-ease or the handicap gave the shaman greater access to other worlds and other dimensions of our human experience.
We might say, for example, that epileptics, are able to send all or a part of their soul away during a seizure and then bring it back. Diabetics also have this ability although they don’t always send all or most of their vital force away. Those with Resignation Syndrome send their soul parts away and survive in a dormant, comatose state until a traumatic experience is resolved – at that point they can bring their soul back into their bodies. People with autism / ASD are often experiencing brainwave states and patterns that involve sudden bursts of theta or delta waves – unconscious material – that pops into their alpha or beta states of waking consciousness. Essentially, they have bursts of “dream content” that overlays their experience of the present-tense, waking lives. In the modern world, we regard these health issues as pathological, but in the ancient past, in shamanic societies, these “diseases” were regarded as “gifts”.
There are many “hacks” that people throughout time, have learned to use in order to accomplish amazing things in terms of what the body can do. The author and anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda explored quite a few of these hacks with his real-life teacher, Don Juan. But even in today’s world there are mundane therapies and practices that can make it possible for people to overcome seemingly impossible situations.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR is one of the trauma-informed therapies that offers an excellent example of ways to use the body to hack into and reprogram ourselves. EMDR involves a very simple right-to-left eye movement that accomplishes several things all at the same time. When you focus, in your mind, and in your body, on an uncomfortable, felt emotion, a bad memory, or a troublesome, repetitive thought and at the same time do EMDR, you use the same “human tech” that produces REM sleep states. EMDR is something that you can do in a conscious, waking state to process material that has gotten stuck in the body. It’s a modern form of shamanism that uses the body’s built-in technology to solve major mental and physical health problems.
When you do EMDR, the right and the left hemispheres of the brain are able to talk to each other about the thought, memory, or felt emotion that is hijacking normal, healthy bodily functions in order to process it. While the left hemisphere of the brain is the logical part of the brain that knows the rules of different institutions such as the rules of the church, the rules of the state, the rules of the school, and the rules of the family, the right hemisphere of the brain is the creative part of us that feels the correct decision or answer to a question. When we talk about the right hemisphere of the brain we are talking about the body, but also the emotions. The right hemisphere is the wild, untamed part of us that knows how to survive in nature even though most people in the modern world are buffered from an intimate relationship with nature.
The logical left-brain, in contrast to the right-brain, is the part of us that knows the rules of different cultural institutions and it knows how to follow the rules so as to blend into a social group. The logical left brain will (illogically) switch from following one set of rules (let’s say, the rules of the church) to another set of contradictory rules (that might have to do with, for example, going out to dinner with family after church). While you might sit quietly in church and give tithes of a certain amount, when you go out to dinner with the family, you may or may not give money for the dinner depending on your age and your stage in life. Institutional rules are often complex and contradictory, but modern humans have developed the ability to dissociate into different personalities or soul parts in order the meet the requirements of different social groups.
The logical, rule-oriented left-brain tends to be over-developed and overly extolled in modern society while the emotional and creative, problem-solving right-brain is downplayed and even demonized. The left-brain is “domesticated” and “tame” while the right-brain is “wild” and “untamed”. The left brain and the right brain thus, are often in conflict with each other especially if a particular social group requires us to follow rules that the wild part of us is averse to.
Sexual abuse, for example, goes against what the wild part of the brain will readily accept. In situations involving sexual assault or abuse, the right brain ultimately decides whether to fight or to submit based on what will be the most likely thing to maintain our survival. But after sexual abuse occurs, if the left-brain lacks the data and information to accept and process what’s happened, the event may remain within conscious awareness, but the victim might suffer from toxic thoughts. The left-brain might be judgmental toward the right-brain / body about the abuse and blame the victim through a toxic inner dialogue. On the other hand, if sexual abuse occurs in a context that the left-brain cannot process or understand (because the victim is too young or if the victim lives in a culture or family that does not educate members about sex), the part of the soul that experienced the abuse can be “sent away” such that the abuse is no longer a conscious part of the victim’s inner narrative.
Sexual abuse is just one example of a trauma that can produce dissociation. There are an infinite number of different stressful or traumatic experiences including a lack of love or neglect in the family-of-origin that also produces dissociation.
The sphinx from ancient Egypt embodies this right-brain/left-brain riddle. Like cats, humans are always a bit wild. You can never fully tame a cat and you can never fully tame humans either. Humans and cats are both unpredictable, no matter how domesticated we become. Dogs are easier to train to a state of total domestication (which doesn’t make dogs better or worse than cats – it’s just an example to illustrate a point). Nonetheless, the psychology of humans involves an ability to dissociate into two basic parts: the creative, wild right-brain part and the logical, narrative left-brain part.
Shamanism uses a different set of terms to talk about dissociation and depersonalization. While we might talk about people with multiple personality disorder (also known as dissociative identity disorder / DID) as people who have multiple “personalities” or “sub-personalities”, in shamanism we’d refer to the multiple personalities or sub-personalities as “soul parts”. We could use Reiki or other systems of energy-healing and refer to the lost soul parts instead as a loss of vital energy. In any case, humans are designed psychologically, to be able to dissociate into different “parts” or “personalities” in order to belong to different social groups.
In shamanism, soul parts can come and go. We can send a part of the soul (or vital energy) away as the carrier of a major trauma that we can’t consciously process at the moment when the trauma occurs. Through dissociation, we can send the traumatic experience away and save the act of processing this trauma for a time in the future when we have the tools and the wisdom to be able to tolerate the emotions involved. In hypnotherapy, when a “sub-personality” is reintegrated into the Core Self, it is welcomed back and reminded of the body’s chronological age. As we get older, we obtain more information with which process and release the trauma that we suffered when we were younger.
Lydian and I regard this act of dissociation or soul loss as part of our “human technology”. Dissociative states can be used with intention for various reasons, but until a person learns how to steer dissociation and dissociative states intentionally, dissociation happens reflexively and it is outside of a person’s control. Most people begin any trauma-informed therapy with a sense of nervousness, fear, anger, shame, or embarrassment. These are emotions from the past when the trauma occurred and once the soul part that carries the trauma is re-integrated, the feelings of the past have to be felt in the body. Sometimes people feel these feelings from the past for 15 minutes or longer on a mushroom trip. Sometimes the feelings are brief. As a general rule, once the feelings are given words and narrative arc, they’re released and the body stops feeling this negative sensation of anger, fear, nervousness, etc. The feeling IS the soul part. The feelings are how the lost soul part communicates its story to the left hemisphere of the brain so that the left brain can put the feeling into words that make sense.
In other words, the left-brain observes the right brain and acts as a witness to validate the experience of the right brain. This might be compared to a situation in which a child experiences sexual abuse. One of the biggest wounds that children can experience after sexual abuse happens if the parents don’t validate the child’s experience for one reason or another. When the parents listen to the child and accept what’s happened, the child is once again protected and loved. The parents can protect and care for the child if the parents know what’s happened – once the parents are conscious of the sexual abuse. But if parents are not available, if they would not or could not accept the abuse, then the child has to send away a part of their soul in order to continue to belong to the family. Without the family, a child feels unsafe and unprotected, so this internal negotiation is done in order to protect the child’s survival.
When people become adults, if they’ve lost soul parts as a result of a lack of parental validation of some form of abuse, the left-brain of the victim themselves can act as an Inner Parent to validate the experience of the body (the right-brain) instead. When the right-brain / body tells the story of a trauma to the left-brain (during a mushroom trip, for example), it feels like a painful emotion in the body that lacks a normal “arc” (it has no beginning and no end – it therefore feels eternal). Trauma-based emotional content that pops into normal waking consciousness is called a “flashback” in psychology, but a flashback is experienced as an emotion that isn’t connected to anything that’s happening in the present tense. There is no narrative or memory attached to this emotion-that-has-no-arc. The emotion seems to grip the body very suddenly and it is experienced as a feeling that has always existed and that will never go away. That’s because, for the soul part that carries the trauma, the emotion does not have a normal arc. It’s a feeling that that part of the soul must carry until the left-brain can find a way to release and integrate it.
When soul parts take control over the body, we call this “embodiment”. It feels negative and uncomfortable to have a traumatized soul part take control of the autonomic nervous system during a flashback, but when we’re open to feeling the feelings that we’ve exiled from our conscious awareness so that the left, logical brain can bear witness and give words to the feeling, the feeling and the soul part is released from the hell of reliving the past. We get to have our vital energy back so that we can heal ourselves, be more creative and more productive in our lives, and more present with our loved ones. When we confront these lost soul parts through the intentional use of the sacred medicines, we learn not only how to re-associate the lost parts of ourselves, but also how to use dissociation as a tool that’s useful at times in the practice of healing.
Depersonalization is another term in psychology that describes an inner experience in which the soul part of a person leaves the body to look back at itself. Though this can be negative when it occurs without the person’s intention to steer the experience, depersonalization can also be used with intention to accomplish different types of healing for the self and for others. MDMA, for example, as well as San Pedro, give people the ability to depersonalize and have empathy for themselves and other people.
Shamanism uses the natural, inborn technology of our bodies to accomplish various goals in terms of healing or to find food, or to locate lost items or even to find children who have been lost or kidnapped (among other things). But paganism takes shamanism to another level wherein a group of people can produce a god through story-telling and a shared culture. The gods and goddesses that are given life through active worship by a multiple people over time are like an anthropomorphic warehouse of certain types of energy with certain personality traits. Gods and goddesses are worshipped to confer human energy to these entities and then people endeavor to ask these humanized energies for assistance.
Paganism developed around the same time as agriculture and the technology of paganism, namely our ability as humans to create and maintain gods and goddesses through worship, is a type of dissociation that can, at times, be useful to us. Like any type of dissociation that is not well-understood or that’s wielded without intention though, god and goddess-worship, paganism can have unpredictable outcomes and it can be used in a negative way to hurt other people.
While paganism has the flavor of religion and, in fact, represents the first iteration of organized religion that humans developed, shamanism is not exactly a religion. Shamanism is accessed through humans, by humans for the purposes of survival and healing. In the ancient world, shamanism was usually practiced by one person in a tribe (read: family or community) on behalf of the others. Today, when we work with clients, our goal is not to heal the client ourselves, but to empower the client and/or family to heal themselves and their lineage using the same techniques that we’ve learned to use. Clients also learn new techniques in the process that pertains to the specific wisdom of their ancestors.
When Lydi and I work with people to heal a disease, disorder, injury, mental health issue, etc. we always regard the disease or infirmity as a pattern that needs to be expressed and understood in words. The sick person is the one who carries the disease on behalf of the family / community so as to tell a story. The story always involves some kind of trauma that was too difficult to put into words at the time when it occurred.
What is trauma?
Stories are the basic unit of human understanding. Though we may try to memorize data or attempt to understand a body of material in any discipline (i.e. psychology, medicine, law, theology, astrology, tarot cards, etc.), without stories, our understanding is severely limited. Stories give us suspense, they teach us about beginnings and endings, and character development and “arc”.
One definition of trauma offered by Dr. Peter Levine, is that trauma is a story that is too horrific to be told. So trauma is anything that happens to us that’s too difficult to put into words. Trauma can include chronic, ongoing stress, neglect, and situations in which the body felt like running away and hiding while the left-brain chided the body to stay still. Most people would agree that being involved directly in a war is traumatic, but one of the most important traumas that helped me understand the concept of trauma better was a mere dental appointment. Click here to read more about this trauma affected me and how it taught me about trauma in general.
The right-brain, which we regard as a representative of the body’s felt sense, experiences whatever happens to us in the world. The right brain produces symbols or rather, it experiences life as symbolic, but it relies on the left hemisphere of the brain to put the symbolic experience into words. We put things into words both for ourselves and for other people so that we can tell a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But trauma is something that’s too horrible for us to describe to ourselves or to other people. What we regard as big and traumatic in terms of the felt sense of the body and the right brain might be something seemingly small to another person. Trauma is subjective and trauma can take shape as a result of having too little of certain nutrients that allow the right brain and the left brain to communicate with each other. Dopamine, for example, helps us connect the right-brain and the left-brain material in a positive way such that trauma doesn’t get trapped in the autonomic nervous system. In order to produce dopamine, we have to consume plenty of B vitamins and L-tyrosine or L-dopa amino acids in the diet. The tight correlation between trauma and addiction is mediated at least partially through a dopamine deficiency which is often caused by nutrient deficiencies initially.
When you have trauma in your body / autonomic nervous system (represented by the right hemisphere of the brain), your body will try to tell you the story of what happened to it (of the emotions or pain that it felt) through any means necessary. Some people develop “itchy” thoughts. Other people go into a deep, dark depression while others still develop serious diseases in order for the body to try to get the attention of the left-brain. Sometimes people develop trauma because they have a nutritional deficiency while other people develop a backlog of trauma because they live in a family or a community that won’t allow them to process trauma.
Trauma is soul loss and it involves a dissociation of the person’s Core Self into multiple soul parts so as to survive the trauma. The soul part or sub-personality is dissociated from the present-tense of our daily lives and we might say that it goes to live in a realm, or a reality where the traumatic moment is constantly happening. We dissociate from this soul part because we lack something in terms of resources (nutrients? emotional support? cultural containment?) that would make it possible to process the trauma successfully and release it. To be able to send a part of ourselves (a part of the soul, or the vital energy) away in this manner so as to deal with trauma makes it possible for us to survive in the modern world. Once processed though, our traumas become our wisdom.
Tribal life is much more communal than life in the modern world. Modern humans have to learn the rules and we have to “dance” the different dances of different institutions in order to belong and be included socially. To some extent, we’re required to be dissociated. Lydi and I look at dissociation as a type of “human tech” and though it’s a negative thing that’s generally experienced as painful or at least uncomfortable when a person lacks control over their ability to dissociate, we’ve evolved to be able to dissociate because psychological dissociation can also be useful when properly applied and as long as the dissociation is within our control.
A shaman for a tribe that’s suffering, for example, due to a lack of food and resources, would attempt to access other planes of reality to get help and guidance through intentional dissociation. If the shaman knows his or her way around in different planes of reality, he or she could go out in search of another person’s lost soul parts to heal that person.
Depersonalization, is similarly a type of “human tech” but depersonalization gives us the power to have empathy towards ourselves and other people. Through conscious attempts at depersonalization using the sacred medicine and shamanic tools, we can zoom in and zoom out in order to see patterns that are not immediately apparent to us in our normal waking consciousness. For example, if you put a piece of loose fabric over your head, you might be able to see through the weave to what’s behind the fabric. But if depersonalize from the fabric, you’ll see that the fabric has a pattern woven into it and then also that the fabric is, let’s say, a scarf and that it has edges that give it an identity and definition (in this case “scarf”). Certain sacred medicines like Salvia divinorum sometimes put people into a world of paradox where the human becomes a piece of gum on the sidewalk, or the sheet on a bed so as to view a situation from a different perspective. Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) also works with some of this material to help people move out of a stuck position in the memory of a traumatic event and depersonalize so as to see the overall pattern of what produced the trauma in the first place. Depersonalization can be a valuable shamanic tool, but only if a person has some control and intention toward depersonalization.
Shamanism, Paganism, and Organized Religion
Over time, a shaman from a tribal society could specialize and become an astrologer, priest, or healer who could take their knowledge of animals, both prey and predators, and apply their inner wisdom to the agricultural seasons. The evolution from shamanism to paganism and then to organized religion took shape over the course of centuries and as this transition from a focus on the family/tribe to a focus on the nation-state happened, people began to lose the stories of their ancestry. The cultural container for trauma-release was lost and rather than working directly with ancestors, people began to pray to impersonal gods and goddesses for help. God and goddess-energy is anthropomorphic, but is not necessarily wise. God and goddess energy might be powerful and awe-inspiring but it does not necessarily have morality. So paganism felt dangerous and it was, at times dangerous when people used it for negative ends. Paganism took shape when relatively primitive, uneducated people, non-shaman, began to have extra time on their hands and they wished to have power. While a shaman submits to power, pagans don’t have to submit in order to worship a certain god or goddess.
When organized religion began to take shape as a way for nations to grab power, not only over the lands and territories, but also over the collective conscience of the people, paganism was a real threat. It had to be subdued. We all know the story of how paganism was subdued through witch-burnings and other forms of torture. It’s an important distinction that we wish to point out here because astrology and tarot cards are another octave lower than shamanism in the cosmology that we follow. Astrology and tarot cards are highly refined vestiges of paganism and they can be used in a negative way. They can also be used as a positive interface that makes information more accessible in terms of medicine and healing. Nonetheless, we use these tools with great care.
Lydi and I work as healers for our family and for our own lineage and then we also teach people how to become healers for their tribe. We don’t call ourselves shaman because that title has to be bestowed by a tribe on the shaman. We are not shaman to people outside of our tribe and our lineage we don’t regard ourselves as shaman. That identity doesn’t serve us and would only be used by a community. We would not and should not ever call ourselves shaman because to do so would be a sign that the ego is not integrated into the Core. Rather, as we see it, we’re modern people who were born into an industrialized, technology-centric world. We’re educated people and we have powerful left-brain logic and capability and our personal work has focused a great deal up to this point on putting the left-brain into a position where it works for the right-brain and the felt-sense rather than the other way around. If you are working with us directly face-to-face either online in the “Internet Realm” or here in Mexico in person, then one of the most important rules of engagement that we have with our clients is that we are not your healers. We provide the tools for healing and whatever wisdom that comes to you derives from the family tree. Most people have everything inside of themselves that they need in order to heal and be healers. We can help provide a cultural container and a model that people can use as a launch-pad to find their own personal model, but every lineage has a unique body of wisdom that is inherently valuable and functional. The search for that model and the search for health and happiness are embodied in the same journey.
Though it’s likely that shaman throughout the world evolved to notice patterns specific to their environment (and different shaman from different tribes worked in many different environments over time), the constellations and the zodiac were common to everyone throughout the world. The zodiac constellations are indicative of the seasons and the seasons, of course, are indicative of food resources both in pre-agricultural societies as well as post-agricultural societies. There are many ways to connect the idea of astrology and the zodiac to the astrological remediation methods of shamanism, but for now, it’s important for readers to simply understand that you can’t memorize wisdom…you feel wisdom. So wisdom always comes from an internal teaching, usually from a healthy ancestor or from soul parts that are brought back and released from a state of hell-ish looping of a traumatic moment.
When we work with people face-to-face, our goal is always to help people create an internal model that is functional to cure a disease. We start by presenting our model, but each lineage has its own specific wisdom. For example, a person with a so-called “attachment disorder” as a diagnosis from a psychologist or psychiatrist, has no remediation according to the model of psychology / psychiatry that’s used in the modern world. There’s no way to overcome an attachment disorder in modern psychology as a model of the human psyche, so those who ascribe fully to this model believe and feel that there’s no cure. But using shamanism and the sacred indigenous medicines, Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP and hypnotherapy, EMDR, and various “human technologies”, it is possible to overcome attachment disorder. It’s a lot of work, but we’ve watched people overcome attachment disorder. Disbelief is always a problem, at first no matter what the health or mental health issue and Lydian and I can’t modify your belief. To modify your beliefs is a deep type of internal work that requires connection with guides and the ability to steer your inner experience and take responsibility for it intentionally. When you first begin working to develop intuition and the ability to heal yourself or other members of your family, you won’t know logically what you’re doing. You won’t know logically how to do what you’re going to do. You won’t be able to understand with the felt sense any of the logic that I’ve presented here. You’ll only be able to open and submit to the sacred medicines and allow them to work with you, if that’s what you truly want.
Most people begin work with the sacred medicines with a lot of resistance. That’s normal.
The left-brain, which is highly developed in modern people today, requires a model that functions logically in order for the right-brain to be able to speak its truth. We provide that. The social milieu around this work requires a sense of safety in order for big changes to manifest in the overall pattern of your daily life. We provide that also. But clients have to take responsibility for their journey with the sacred medicines as though responsibility were the steering wheel of a car that they can, in time, learn to drive themselves.
How We Use Astrology and Tarot Cards
Lydian and I see the practice of astrology and tarot card divination as a practice that sits on top of shamanism. Shamanism is a type of remediation that includes work with the sacred medicines ideally. In medical astrology for example, there are several authors who have attempted to come up with astrological remediation, or ways to overcome the energies of the planets and negative things that are forecasted for the future, but in our view, there is a major difference between working with African Dream Root or Iboga to talk directly to dead ancestors versus submerging the body in a bath of water during a major eclipse. Astrological remediation can be superstitious or it can be based on actual information derived from an inner experience with an altered state of mind and communication with the ancestors who knew a great deal about shamanism and astrology / tarot cards.
As students of psychology, hypnosis, trauma-informed psychology, and especially NLP, both Lydian and I are aware that horoscopes can tell a negative, scary prophecy. While an untold prophecy for the future may or may not manifest, the telling of stories is a powerful thing that can both release people from trauma-loops and being stuck in a self-created hell, or it can bind people to trauma-loops that may have never existed before the astrological “telling”.
What’s the point of diagnosis if there’s no treatment for the disease? In modern medicine, diagnostics like PET scans involve the administration of radioactive forms of iodine and other substances that kill the thyroid gland. A person with thyroid cancer might have a PET scan done to diagnose the stage of the cancer, but if there’s no cure for thyroid cancer according to that model (there is a cure for thyroid cancer in other models), then what’s the point of the diagnosis especially if the diagnostic tool produces additional harm?
Lydian and I use astrology and horoscopes as well as tarot cards to communicate with people who are marinating in a culture of organized religion because horoscopes and tarot readings are fairly well-known and commonplace in these cultures. Lydian’s husband, Naing Naing is from Myanmar and through him, we’ve had the opportunity to learn about Burmese astrology and the kind of damage that this system can create. In Myanmar, people have very few resources with which to solve problems and heal disease, so Burmese astrology seeks to resolve major diseases and relationship issues through the production of spiritual contracts. To understand how this can be productive in the short-term but dangerous in the long-term, a basic understanding of Bert Hellinger’s Constellations Therapy is helpful. In Constellations Therapy, practitioners work to dissolve unhealthy spiritual contracts. Burmese astrology works with the creation of spiritual contracts to remediate poor astrological forecasts. Unfortunately, this type of remediation can solve the problems in the short-term but create strange ancestral traumas through metaphorical “marriages and divorces, adoptions, and forged deaths” (spiritual contracts) in the long-term.
So, if you’re working with us to heal a major disease, disorder, mental health issue, or addiction in yourself or in a family member, or if you’re working with us to learn shamanism, astrology, or tarot, it’s important to understand that Lydian and I orient our therapy toward shamanism, especially the teaching of shamanic principles to our clients so that they can apply those principles to heal their loved ones in their “tribe”. In other words, for our own family, we submit ourselves to the sacred medicines or we use tools that involve tuning our brainwave states to certain frequencies so as to access information on other planes of reality. We use medical astrology and tarot cards at times to create an interface between us, the Ancestral Guides (your Guides and our Guides) and you. The power to change something in your life that seems to be unchangeable is in the wisdom and technology of the human body and our goal is to help people gain access to this inner wisdom themselves. Our goal is not to demonstrate that we have power, but that everyone has this power inside of them if they’re willing to confront their own trauma with the guidance of the sacred indigenous medicines specifically.