I was talking with a good friend yesterday about facing the truth. I believe that facing the truth is required for healing. The plant medicines help us to face what we are hiding from ourselves. As far as shamanic healing ceremonies....perhaps they are a shortcut for integrating our own truth back to us.
For years I was in denial of something traumatic that had happened to me as a child. The shame was too much. I could not even write the event down. I could not bear to even let myself think about it.
Then, back in 2010, I started coaching with a woman who had a shamanic bent. I didn't believe in shamanism then, but I believed it when, a few years prior, she disclosed having very profound spiritual experiences.
During one our coaching sessions, we focused on lingering low-grade depression that I was having. There was no known reason behind it. It was just there, and it was not going away. So she suggested that I do a fire meditation in which I focused on a candle and asked the spirit of the fire to cleanse and clear my psychic body.
I was open to it. I did this meditation for about 5 minutes a day for a couple weeks. I connected strongly to the image and feeling of this fire spirit. I felt my body being cleared through as I imagined the fire burning through my limbs and veins and emotions and mind. I started to feel better and figured that the symbolism of this practice must have been powerful enough to clear something emotionally. I stopped doing the practice and thought little of it after that.
Then a few weeks later, something incredible happened. I realized that I could think about the traumatic childhood event without any shame attached to it. In my mind, I stared the event straight in the face. It was as if for the first time, I was able to really look at the event. Really look at it. It was as if the act of really facing the truth of what happened cleared any sense of shame away. Instead of hiding from the event, I now completely owned what happened.
Somehow, I had become bigger than what had happened to me. Therefore the event no longer had power over me. My self concept had shifted. I had grown. I'm not sure how this happened. Was it from the fire meditation? Perhaps it had something to do with this shift.
To sense this emotional clearing was so amazing and powerful that my mind had to catch up to the fact that I no longer felt shame. So I started writing in my journal, something along the lines of This thing happened to me but I feel don't feel bad about it anymore. And then I started writing exactly what happened to me, and this helped my mind process things even more.
After writing a few pages, I decided to email my coach and tell her. This would be my first time disclosing what had happened since the event first occurred as a child. It would another year before I was able to talk about it out loud. I told my husband and also a therapist. I didn't pursue the therapy because sessions could only be held 6 weeks apart. But eventually I was able to heal the anger by processing it on my own. But I still could not forgive.
Finally, I was able to get to a point of forgiveness and letting go through the ayahuasca ceremonies.
The point of this story is that I don't believe it is necessary to force people to talk about traumatic events in order to heal. Sometimes we just need to grow stronger to face the truth. We need to feel empowered, to know our own power, before coming face to face with the demons of our past.
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