The Performance of Healing

Mondolian woman shamans holding up their sacred bundles

Endorphins and other endogenous chemicals generated in the human brain are released into the bloodstream during healing. Pharmacologists and biochemists believe that these natural substances are as effective as Librium or Valium in their tranquilizing effects, controlling pain and anxiety as well as releasing joy and inducing other altered states of consciousness. The reduction of anxiety creates beneficial immunological effects that enhance the body’s capacity for resistance and recovery. Entry into an altered state of consciousness gives a person an intimate contact with the spiritual world and in so doing reinforces a shared worldview, which alleviates mental and psychological suffering.

A shamanic healer would nevertheless refer to what happens in quite different terms. Nearly thirty years ago I met Essie Parrish, a Native American healer from the Pomo tribe of northern California. She was a woman of simple dignity with a warm, entrancing voice and a penetrating, insightful stare. She wore her long black hair pulled back loosely, flowing over a forest-green sweater on top of an ankle-length purple dress. I asked her how she had become a healer and how she knew what made people ill. In response, she recounted a dream from her youth.

In her dream, she said, she heard singing. As she slept, the song entered her and began singing itself inside her. When she woke up, the song kept singing itself inside her chest until she sang it out loud and found that it was beautiful.

In a later dream she sang the song as she walked in sunlit hills and valleys that were not of this world. She came to a crossroads and turned east along a narrow path between sparkling multi- colored flowers covered with monarch butterflies. When she reached the end, she saw silken strands woven into a web filled with tiny gemstones. As she looked closer she saw bits of turquoise, abalone, and jet swirling around a central white light. Then she heard a raspy noise, something like a cricket, and realized it was the sound of illness.

“Dangerous beings we call ‘in-dwellers’ are living inside our bodies like insects, like ants,” she whispered. “When I sing I can see where they’re hiding in their nests. I massage that area and scatter them in all directions.”

Essie then went on to describe in detail the way she worked:

My middle finger is the one with the power. When I work with my hands it’s just like when you cast for fish and they tug on your bait. The pain sitting somewhere inside feels like it’s pulling your hand toward itself—you can’t miss it. No way. It even lets you touch it!

I don’t place my hands myself. It feels like someone, the disease perhaps, is pulling me. It’s something like a magnet.

When power touches the pain you gasp. Your throat closes. You simply can’t breathe. When your breath is shut off like that it feels as if your chest were paralyzed. If you should breathe while holding that pain, the disease could hide itself.

As you quiet your breathing you can feel the pain and your hand can take it out. But if you are afraid and your breathing is not shut off, you can’t lift out the pain.

When I take it out you can’t see it with your bare eyes. But I can see it. The disease inside a person is dirty. I suppose that’s what white doctors call “germs,” but we Indian doctors call it “dirty.”

The palm of my hand also heals. But it doesn’t work just anytime: only when I summon power. If there are people who are sick somewhere, my hands find them. Whenever someone thinks toward me, there on the tip of my middle finger it acts as if shot. If you touch electricity, you’ll know what it’s like.

Well, so that’s my hand power. Now, for my throat power. I used it first for a young woman. I found the pain with my hand and sucked it out. Something like a bubble came up out of my throat. Just as it would if you blew up a big balloon, that’s how it came from my mouth. Everyone there saw it. It had become inflated quite a lot when it floated from my mouth, like foaming soap bubbles.

Ever since then I’ve been sucking out illness. This place right here [pointing to the midpoint of her neck] is where the power enters my throat. The disease acts as fast as a lightning bolt striking a tree. It acts in a flash, shutting off the breath. One doesn’t notice how long one holds one’s breath. It’s like being in what white people call a trance.

While the disease is coming to me, I’m in a trance. It speaks to me firmly saying, “This is the way it is. It is such and such a kind of disease. This is why that person is sick.” But when I come out of the trance I no longer remember what the disease told me. So I ask my patients to bring along a friend to remember what the disease said to me.

Well, so there you have my throat power and my hand power.

Healing, although it is extremely important, is only one part of a shaman’s work. To understand how it fits within shamanic traditions, let’s take a closer look at how shamans think, what they do, and the wide range of roles they play in cultures around the world. These roles are hardly unfamiliar to us, though in modern society they are performed by many different kinds of specialists: natural scientists, who study the environment and its flora and fauna; astronomers, who plot the movements of the stars and planets; historians, who chronicle the deeds of our forebears; and politicians and community leaders, who maintain the social order. And, of course, there are doctors, midwives, and psychologists, who attend to our bodies and minds, and priests, who minister to our spiritual needs.

(continue with Shamanic Roles and Perspectives)