The body remembers what happens to us: when we are hurt, especially as children, the body protects us by tensing and holding, and that holding, which the psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich called armouring, can stay with us for life. Childhood wounds also lead us to send parts of ourselves away, which is soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer, and these things can feed dis-ease, though not every illness has an emotional or spiritual cause.
What does “dis-ease” mean? #
Illness and distress in the widest sense. The books sometimes write the word with a hyphen, as in “healing any specific wounds or dis-ease we may have as individuals”.1 It simply means whatever needs healing. It is not a technical term.
How does the body hold our wounds? #
The body keeps a record. The body always knows the truth. As Bessel van der Kolk says, “the body keeps the score”, and as Wilhelm Reich, founder of body-centred psychotherapy, says, “the body never lies.” “Our head is constantly making things up, telling stories, rationalising, explaining, and justifying. The body, however, is incapable of making up stories.”
What is armouring? #
The body’s way of protecting us from pain, as Reich found. “When we experience emotional trauma, our bodies protect us by creating chronic muscular tension. This tension forms habitual patterns that correspond to the unresolved emotions from earlier stages of life.” That armouring can be seen: “Our body, in terms of our posture, patterns of muscular tension, facial expressions, and where we hold weight or don’t, is a physical expression of the armouring we put on it.”
Armouring began, then, as a way of protecting us.
What is body shock? #
A term from Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching for advanced students, where it is explained in full, so it is not described here. What can be said here is that the body holds what has happened to us, and that this needs attention as well as the mind. See What is shamanic healing?
How do childhood wounds contribute to dis-ease? #
By teaching us to cut off parts of ourselves. As children, we learn the conditions others place on their love. If we are told often enough that a part of us is unlovable, “We learn to turn a ‘condition of worth’ from others into a ‘condition of self-worth'”, and “We then learn to repress that part of us and send it away.”2 That sending away is the main modern cause of soul loss, which, with Power-lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer, is one of the two shamanic roots of illness.3 See What is soul loss?
The earliest wounds can be the hardest to reach. The wound from our first relationship with our mother “is an embodied and somatic one, an unconscious one, and so not one that can easily be accessed through language.”4 As the trauma researchers Louis Tinnin and Linda Gantt found, pre-verbal memories “get pushed into the unconscious and locked into the body.”5
How do we begin to heal childhood wounds? #
By facing the truth. “If you do have wounds from childhood, and most people do these days, then the first step in healing them (as is true with healing most things) is to face the truth.” And “even if there were good things, too, on a psychological level the good things really do not cancel the bad things out.”6 Because pre-verbal wounds are held in the body, talking alone may not reach them; therapies that use imagery or the body can help, and so can shamanic journeying, which is “largely non-verbal, and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied.”7
Is all illness caused by emotional or spiritual wounds? #
No. “Not all illnesses have a shamanic cause, and so, shamanic healing is not appropriate in treating all diseases.” A renowned shaman in Peru once asked visiting doctors for medicine for his own fungal foot infection: “That shaman knew when something needed western medicine, and when something needed shamanic medicine.”8 “Some things need shamanic medicine, some things need allopathic medicine, and some things need acupuncture, chiropractic, Bowen and other things.”9
So the body’s memory of our wounds is one strand amongst several, and shamanic healing is only one kind of help.
