Shamanism can offer IEMT a wider map of where hurt goes and what heals it: a part of us may not only carry the charge of an event but may have left altogether, and can be found and brought home. Beneath the beliefs about who we are lies a Soul to grow into, wounds from before we had words can be reached in journeys, and healing also means mending our relationship with the living world.
What if a part of us has left? #
IEMT works with the emotional charge that a memory carries, and with the emotional map it has laid down in us.1 Shamanism adds another possibility. From a shamanic point of view, much of what we call trauma 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. When something is more than we can bear, a part of us leaves, and very often it stays stuck in the time and place where it happened, frozen in that moment.
Lowering the charge of a memory and bringing that part home are different pieces of work. The second is soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer, in which a practitioner, with the help of their GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, finds the lost part and brings it back. IEMT does not set out to do the second, and shamanism does. See What is soul loss? and What is soul retrieval?
Who are we beneath our stories about ourselves? #
IEMT works with identity, with “who I am” as well as “how I feel”, and can loosen the painful beliefs about ourselves that grew out of what happened to us.2 Shamanism offers something for the space that opens up. In Therapeutic Shamanism, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is constructed from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. The Soul is different. It is our truest self, our true nature, wild and free of the domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and baggage of the human middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer. It is who we are deep down, and the blueprint for what we are meant to grow into, and the middle-world self is meant to be the vehicle through which it is expressed.3
So where IEMT can help a person stop believing “I am worthless”, shamanism can help them find out who they are instead, by meeting their Soul in the Lower-World. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Can a wound from before we had words be healed? #
Shamanism has a way in to the deepest wounds, those from before we had words. They happened in infancy, before we had language or the kind of memory we can call up as adults. When our first bond with our mother was not a healthy one, the wound is embodied and somatic, and hard to reach through talking.4
Two researchers in trauma treatment and art therapy, Louis Tinnin and Linda Gantt, hold that the memory of those pre-verbal times is kept in the right hemisphere of the brain, locked into the body, and best reached through physical and symbolic expression. Their work may back up how well shamanism can work with this kind of wound, because journeying is largely non-verbal and symbolic. In a journey to the Lower-World, a person can have the experience of being nurtured as a baby, and of feeling a secure attachment to a Mother, protected, cared for and loved. Because this is non-traumatic, somatic and sensory, it can begin to gently release the earliest wounding patterns held in the body.4 See What are the mother wound and the father wound?
Is all hurt personal? #
Not in the shamanic view. IEMT, like most therapies, works with what happened in one person’s life. Shamanism holds that we also become ill through 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, which happens when we are disconnected from nature, from the interconnected web of life and our place in it, and that this disconnection weakens us.5 Healing a person’s own history does not, by itself, mend their relationship with the Animal, Plant and Stone People and with Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, and much of shamanic practice is about mending that relationship. See What is Power-loss?
