5 Insightful African Shamanic Healing Keys
Understanding the Ancient and Traditional African Shamanic Techniques of healing.
African shamanic healing, when compared to other shamanic practices, is somehow similar because they deal with unseen supernatural forces. And most of the time the shamans are people who are on their path, a path of inner awakening. As they advance they become aware of spiritual realities. Finally, they can see how the interaction of these spiritual realms affects physical matter. So then they can help people along their path.
You will be surprised that the terms might be different but they are more or less talking about the same things. The fundamentals of African shamanism to deal with:
· Your ancestors,
· Your deities,
· And your Celestial STAR and Shadow.
· Plant Medicine.
· Animal spirits.
Ancestral healing in African Shamanic healing.
It is interesting that the further back you dive into the wisdom of the ancient the closer you find yourself dealing with cutting-edge and new discoveries in modern medicine, that most of the things that we are discovering are things that the ancient people knew about them.
Social problems are addressed by ancestral healing. The ancient Africans noticed that if there are unresolved conflicts among members of a family, that energetic pattern represents itself on the physical level in many different ways. So maybe if a woman is married, she might have problems getting pregnant or a woman might get a lot of miscarriages.
A man might get attacked by the same animals twice, or a certain accident might lurk around a certain person over and over. They would sit down and ask themselves why such things happen. They would trace it back to a conflict between family members, and if they solved it, then everything went smoothly.
In some cases, the conflict is overdue, and the person has passed away long ago. Therefore, you might notice that a particular family has certain problems that occur from father to son to grandson. They then seek out the shaman who dives into the ancestral tree to find out the root cause of the problem. To me this is like surgery, because they operate on microscopic levels to locate the viruses and germs that are causing the problem. You will find that most of the diseases are overdue issues that never got resolved.
Usually, these ancestral trees extend up to a certain generation, when they reach a certain generation down the family tree. Here, the problem is then shifted from social problem to physical illnesses, which means it has been ignored for a couple of generations. It is unusual for this to have happened in the past, so you will not find people with chronic diseases because they deal with problems at an earlier stage. It would take a couple of intense ceremonies in modern-day times to identify the root cause of the problem, and perhaps as the shaman dives into one’s spiritual realm the ancestral hosts will not let him pass. As a result, the patient has no other option but to remove these malignant physically or to deal with modern medicine, which deals with the physical realm.
Aside from diseases, there is a concept known as pleasing your ancestors. This means whoever you choose to marry or where you decide to live and in general the things that you choose to do must align with your ancestors’ will. If you move to a house that doesn’t please your ancestors you might not get enough protection. Your ancestors might have disliked a place because of what already exists in the spiritual realm of that place. They don’t mingle with your ancestors.
In addition to having DNA from your ancestors, your ancestors are always with you in an unseen realm. You can interact with them anytime, you can piss them off, make them laugh, and such. So this implies that you are not as free as you imagine that you can do whatever you like. But it somehow must adhere to their morals. In the case of the modern world, people have been abandoned. What this means is they have severed their connection with their ancestors, so whatever lingers around these unseen forces, most people are not protected from them. So people could be kidnapped, abused, manipulated without any protection. But establishing connections with your ancestors would have warned a person of oncoming dangers.
A shaman can establish one’s connection to the ancestors whenever permitted and also if there are no elders left in one’s family to establish that connection. The biggest damage religions have done to people is disconnecting them from their ancestors.
Shamanic deities.
Rather than believing in one God, the Ancient Africans believed in many gods who assisted a person to accomplish something. And that these deities dwell on trees, large stones, a river, the ocean, and such. These deities correspond to certain animals, plants, bugs, etc. So for example, if someone is a warrior they would evoke a black panther. This is a deity that either manifests or dwells inside a panther.
So every deity is a skill set that can be channeled to assist one with that specific skill. Many trades and skills were believed to be born in connection with these deities. This can assist someone to accomplish a certain task. Ironsmiths, woodworkers, healers, medicine-men and so on were born of certain bloodlines that they believed their blood was attuned to deities of these specific skills.
If an ancestry tree is traced back beyond a certain generation, the older ancestors become deities. In this case, you may find that a tribe has a deity who was their grand ancestor. However there are higher deities that are responsible for personal matters. There are situations where other people have a connection with deities greater than their ancestral deities. This means that when they have certain problems, it’s caused by these higher deities.
People today are more likely to have this connection. This is why ancestral connections are not practiced as much. In addition, people have adopted modern religions and doctrines of spirituality in place of old ways of doing things.
A family member might have a connection to ancestral deities and might have made a contract with them. Accordingly, if they violate the contract, their life begins to wither away.
To the ancient African, every skill and knowledge is associated with a certain deity, and in a way that knowledge is a deity, so what a shaman does is to reveal these deities so that an individual can nurture them. Most mental illness comes from messing around with these deities. Because a person comes with these deities from birth and as they grow, these deities grow with them. Modern life has done a good job, suppressing these deities so that they can train people into different sets of skills.
Celestial luminary/Star & Shadow.
In African shamanic philosophy, a person’s Celestial STAR consists of virtue and character. A Celestial Star is something believed to be given by God. It is something that makes a person unique. It is also known as the Spark of Life because it is the driving force that powers one’s life.
The Celestial Star is the result of ancestor deeds that have accumulated over a certain amount of time. So, for example if in my ancestral tree, there was a mighty warrior that fought a big battle and won, he gained a lot of respect at his time. Each member of that family shares these virtues down the lineage. An individual’s celestial luminary/star records and accumulates this information. People might like someone for no reason, but the real reason is because of the unseen deeds done by their ancestors. Additionally, once a person dishonors their ancestors, then these virtues are disconnected, so you will find someone with admirable virtues, but they are suffering because of dishonoring their ancestors.
A person’s life, success, marriage, misfortunes, and many other factors are affected by this star. And that this star cannot really be modified or changed. However, an African shaman can do things like cleaning it, aligning it properly, and also determining if it is being misused.
The celestial STAR of a person can become polluted, misused, or even stolen by someone else. When you find an abusive boyfriend who benefits from his girlfriend, the boyfriend cheats, abuses his girlfriend, and doesn’t work. However, this girlfriend believes that she loves him and hopes he will change. There are other situations where the person might be earning a substantial income, but can’t save any money. Therefore, he ends up spending all the money on destructive behaviors, like drugs, casinos, or prostitution. All of these things have underlying spiritual causes.
This star has been linked to a horoscope or a star sign in modern African shamanism. In other words, the use of someone’s star is like the situation where you find a person very intelligent, but they fail to achieve success in life. They cannot enjoy the fruits of their labor. A series of misfortunes follows them, and they fail to progress in life.
It’s like a woman has a Ph.D. but she ends up becoming a miserable housewife. In some other cases, you will find that an employer benefits from his or her employee without knowing they are doing it. You will find that sales accelerate when this individual is there.
Some employers in some parts of Africa take advantage of this star by blinding and binding their employees so that they cannot walk away.
According to eastern philosophy, this celestial star corresponds to your chakras, but in African shamanism, this celestial star produces a person’s shadow, which is partly seen as their aura. This shadow is how you appear through the eyes of society, the trail you left in people’s hearts, the products of your work, etc. I have detailed more about a person’s shadow in the article, the powers of your shadows.
This shadow is also you, but an independent entity. When initiated in occult practices, a person can call out to their shadows, ask for protection, ask them to go to places on their behalf and many other things.
Because most ordinary people are unaware of its presence and its potential. Most of the time, their shadows are contaminated with parasites, or they may be living under someone else’s shadow, which hinders or stifles their personal and spiritual growth. All of these could be detected in a shamanic session.
Plant Medicine in African Shamanism.
Traditionally, herbalism in African shamanic healing is not used to treat physical illness, but rather to assist in cleansing the spirit, gaining power, and protecting the person. The shaman views plants in a holistic way, they treat plants as sentient beings and as a world, so in any plant, there is an existing ecosystem, there are bugs, animals, and types of environment that corresponds to a specific plant.
When they fetch medicine, it is like they are entering a certain town or world. Therefore, they ask first if they are allowed to take it, and if it can make a specific potion. Following that, they proceeded to fetch medicine. Sometimes they ask if the people of that town, the town being the residents that live within the ecosystem of that plant, which are the birds, the bugs, animals, etc., intuitively receive a message if they want anything specific from a shaman then the shaman will promise to bring it if he doesn’t currently have it. He offers them what he has if he has it. Most of the time, they carry these offerings with them so they can offer them.
Spirit Animals & Animal Spirits in African Shamanism.
Let’s first clarify the difference between spirit animal and animal spirit. Spirit animal means the energy behind an animal, the essence of that animal, and in most cases, it is the indwelling energy and forces behind a living animal.
Animal Spirits is a disembodied animal that represents itself as an animal for symbolic meaning, and Animal spirits are associated with totems. In most cases, these are also deities that can protect a person from unseen forces. They can represent a clan, family, or a person and this is where the compatibility issue occurs.
Spirit Animal.
There seems to be a thin line between energy and spirit. While the word spirit can have different meanings, here it refers to the essence of something, everything has a spirit. For example, the essence of a vehicle is transportation. However, its attributes that set it apart from other instruments of transportation are how it is structured and how it works. So it would differ from other modes or instruments of transportation.
So it is not different from other spirits, so even a rock, a tree, a house, or a chair has spirits. Back to the animals, so animals have spirits as well, the essence of those animals. So when cultivating or using the animal spirits a shaman is utilizing the essence of a specific animal to do a certain task. A cat, for example, has the spirit devoted to clearing all house infestations and protecting the house from small animals that may bring destruction to the house. For instance, a mouse may come and eat or damage your food storage, so humans use cats to prevent this from happening. Additionally, if other unwanted animals try to enter your house, the cat would keep them out. It is a similar thing to dogs. You keep dogs for protection so they can alert you to invaders.
Noting these essences in animals a shaman taps directly into these essences of an animal and utilizes them to remove unwanted things or entities from a person’s life. For example, the essence of the cat can be used to remove parasitic entities from one body. In the West now they have auric cleansing or chakra cleansing. Nevertheless, one might not wonder how those things got there in the first place.
Animal spirits.
This is one aspect of shamanic healing through an animal spirit, but there is also the issue of compatibility. Instead of using Astrology or zodiac signs, every person’s spirit has a behavioral pattern that aligns with a certain animal, something I won’t get into detail about. But for a shaman, this is a way of identifying how to deal with a person based on their ‘Animal Spirit.’
During a shamanic session a shaman might notice that a client’s animal spirit doesn’t match with their environment and their surroundings and the people around them. They have to warn them and convince them to switch places or add another “catalyst” whose animal spirit will neutralize that conflict.
5 Insightful African Shamanic Healing Keys
Understanding the Ancient and Traditional African Shamanic Techniques of healing.
African shamanic healing, when compared to other shamanic practices, is somehow similar because they deal with unseen supernatural forces. And most of the time the shamans are people who are on their path, a path of inner awakening. As they advance they become aware of spiritual realities. Finally, they can see how the interaction of these spiritual realms affects physical matter. So then they can help people along their path.
You will be surprised that the terms might be different but they are more or less talking about the same things. The fundamentals of African shamanism to deal with:
· Your ancestors,
· Your deities,
· And your Celestial STAR and Shadow.
· Plant Medicine.
· Animal spirits.
Ancestral healing in African Shamanic healing.
It is interesting that the further back you dive into the wisdom of the ancient the closer you find yourself dealing with cutting-edge and new discoveries in modern medicine, that most of the things that we are discovering are things that the ancient people knew about them.
Social problems are addressed by ancestral healing. The ancient Africans noticed that if there are unresolved conflicts among members of a family, that energetic pattern represents itself on the physical level in many different ways. So maybe if a woman is married, she might have problems getting pregnant or a woman might get a lot of miscarriages.
A man might get attacked by the same animals twice, or a certain accident might lurk around a certain person over and over. They would sit down and ask themselves why such things happen. They would trace it back to a conflict between family members, and if they solved it, then everything went smoothly.
In some cases, the conflict is overdue, and the person has passed away long ago. Therefore, you might notice that a particular family has certain problems that occur from father to son to grandson. They then seek out the shaman who dives into the ancestral tree to find out the root cause of the problem. To me this is like surgery, because they operate on microscopic levels to locate the viruses and germs that are causing the problem. You will find that most of the diseases are overdue issues that never got resolved.
Usually, these ancestral trees extend up to a certain generation, when they reach a certain generation down the family tree. Here, the problem is then shifted from social problem to physical illnesses, which means it has been ignored for a couple of generations. It is unusual for this to have happened in the past, so you will not find people with chronic diseases because they deal with problems at an earlier stage. It would take a couple of intense ceremonies in modern-day times to identify the root cause of the problem, and perhaps as the shaman dives into one’s spiritual realm the ancestral hosts will not let him pass. As a result, the patient has no other option but to remove these malignant physically or to deal with modern medicine, which deals with the physical realm.
Aside from diseases, there is a concept known as pleasing your ancestors. This means whoever you choose to marry or where you decide to live and in general the things that you choose to do must align with your ancestors’ will. If you move to a house that doesn’t please your ancestors you might not get enough protection. Your ancestors might have disliked a place because of what already exists in the spiritual realm of that place. They don’t mingle with your ancestors.
In addition to having DNA from your ancestors, your ancestors are always with you in an unseen realm. You can interact with them anytime, you can piss them off, make them laugh, and such. So this implies that you are not as free as you imagine that you can do whatever you like. But it somehow must adhere to their morals. In the case of the modern world, people have been abandoned. What this means is they have severed their connection with their ancestors, so whatever lingers around these unseen forces, most people are not protected from them. So people could be kidnapped, abused, manipulated without any protection. But establishing connections with your ancestors would have warned a person of oncoming dangers.
A shaman can establish one’s connection to the ancestors whenever permitted and also if there are no elders left in one’s family to establish that connection. The biggest damage religions have done to people is disconnecting them from their ancestors.
Shamanic deities.
Rather than believing in one God, the Ancient Africans believed in many gods who assisted a person to accomplish something. And that these deities dwell on trees, large stones, a river, the ocean, and such. These deities correspond to certain animals, plants, bugs, etc. So for example, if someone is a warrior they would evoke a black panther. This is a deity that either manifests or dwells inside a panther.
So every deity is a skill set that can be channeled to assist one with that specific skill. Many trades and skills were believed to be born in connection with these deities. This can assist someone to accomplish a certain task. Ironsmiths, woodworkers, healers, medicine-men and so on were born of certain bloodlines that they believed their blood was attuned to deities of these specific skills.
If an ancestry tree is traced back beyond a certain generation, the older ancestors become deities. In this case, you may find that a tribe has a deity who was their grand ancestor. However there are higher deities that are responsible for personal matters. There are situations where other people have a connection with deities greater than their ancestral deities. This means that when they have certain problems, it’s caused by these higher deities.
People today are more likely to have this connection. This is why ancestral connections are not practiced as much. In addition, people have adopted modern religions and doctrines of spirituality in place of old ways of doing things.
A family member might have a connection to ancestral deities and might have made a contract with them. Accordingly, if they violate the contract, their life begins to wither away.
To the ancient African, every skill and knowledge is associated with a certain deity, and in a way that knowledge is a deity, so what a shaman does is to reveal these deities so that an individual can nurture them. Most mental illness comes from messing around with these deities. Because a person comes with these deities from birth and as they grow, these deities grow with them. Modern life has done a good job, suppressing these deities so that they can train people into different sets of skills.
Celestial luminary/Star & Shadow.
In African shamanic philosophy, a person’s Celestial STAR consists of virtue and character. A Celestial Star is something believed to be given by God. It is something that makes a person unique. It is also known as the Spark of Life because it is the driving force that powers one’s life.
The Celestial Star is the result of ancestor deeds that have accumulated over a certain amount of time. So, for example if in my ancestral tree, there was a mighty warrior that fought a big battle and won, he gained a lot of respect at his time. Each member of that family shares these virtues down the lineage. An individual’s celestial luminary/star records and accumulates this information. People might like someone for no reason, but the real reason is because of the unseen deeds done by their ancestors. Additionally, once a person dishonors their ancestors, then these virtues are disconnected, so you will find someone with admirable virtues, but they are suffering because of dishonoring their ancestors.
A person’s life, success, marriage, misfortunes, and many other factors are affected by this star. And that this star cannot really be modified or changed. However, an African shaman can do things like cleaning it, aligning it properly, and also determining if it is being misused.
The celestial STAR of a person can become polluted, misused, or even stolen by someone else. When you find an abusive boyfriend who benefits from his girlfriend, the boyfriend cheats, abuses his girlfriend, and doesn’t work. However, this girlfriend believes that she loves him and hopes he will change. There are other situations where the person might be earning a substantial income, but can’t save any money. Therefore, he ends up spending all the money on destructive behaviors, like drugs, casinos, or prostitution. All of these things have underlying spiritual causes.
This star has been linked to a horoscope or a star sign in modern African shamanism. In other words, the use of someone’s star is like the situation where you find a person very intelligent, but they fail to achieve success in life. They cannot enjoy the fruits of their labor. A series of misfortunes follows them, and they fail to progress in life.
It’s like a woman has a Ph.D. but she ends up becoming a miserable housewife. In some other cases, you will find that an employer benefits from his or her employee without knowing they are doing it. You will find that sales accelerate when this individual is there.
Some employers in some parts of Africa take advantage of this star by blinding and binding their employees so that they cannot walk away.
According to eastern philosophy, this celestial star corresponds to your chakras, but in African shamanism, this celestial star produces a person’s shadow, which is partly seen as their aura. This shadow is how you appear through the eyes of society, the trail you left in people’s hearts, the products of your work, etc. I have detailed more about a person’s shadow in the article, the powers of your shadows.
This shadow is also you, but an independent entity. When initiated in occult practices, a person can call out to their shadows, ask for protection, ask them to go to places on their behalf and many other things.
Because most ordinary people are unaware of its presence and its potential. Most of the time, their shadows are contaminated with parasites, or they may be living under someone else’s shadow, which hinders or stifles their personal and spiritual growth. All of these could be detected in a shamanic session.
Plant Medicine in African Shamanism.
Traditionally, herbalism in African shamanic healing is not used to treat physical illness, but rather to assist in cleansing the spirit, gaining power, and protecting the person. The shaman views plants in a holistic way, they treat plants as sentient beings and as a world, so in any plant, there is an existing ecosystem, there are bugs, animals, and types of environment that corresponds to a specific plant.
When they fetch medicine, it is like they are entering a certain town or world. Therefore, they ask first if they are allowed to take it, and if it can make a specific potion. Following that, they proceeded to fetch medicine. Sometimes they ask if the people of that town, the town being the residents that live within the ecosystem of that plant, which are the birds, the bugs, animals, etc., intuitively receive a message if they want anything specific from a shaman then the shaman will promise to bring it if he doesn’t currently have it. He offers them what he has if he has it. Most of the time, they carry these offerings with them so they can offer them.
Spirit Animals & Animal Spirits in African Shamanism.
Let’s first clarify the difference between spirit animal and animal spirit. Spirit animal means the energy behind an animal, the essence of that animal, and in most cases, it is the indwelling energy and forces behind a living animal.
Animal Spirits is a disembodied animal that represents itself as an animal for symbolic meaning, and Animal spirits are associated with totems. In most cases, these are also deities that can protect a person from unseen forces. They can represent a clan, family, or a person and this is where the compatibility issue occurs.
Spirit Animal.
There seems to be a thin line between energy and spirit. While the word spirit can have different meanings, here it refers to the essence of something, everything has a spirit. For example, the essence of a vehicle is transportation. However, its attributes that set it apart from other instruments of transportation are how it is structured and how it works. So it would differ from other modes or instruments of transportation.
So it is not different from other spirits, so even a rock, a tree, a house, or a chair has spirits. Back to the animals, so animals have spirits as well, the essence of those animals. So when cultivating or using the animal spirits a shaman is utilizing the essence of a specific animal to do a certain task. A cat, for example, has the spirit devoted to clearing all house infestations and protecting the house from small animals that may bring destruction to the house. For instance, a mouse may come and eat or damage your food storage, so humans use cats to prevent this from happening. Additionally, if other unwanted animals try to enter your house, the cat would keep them out. It is a similar thing to dogs. You keep dogs for protection so they can alert you to invaders.
Noting these essences in animals a shaman taps directly into these essences of an animal and utilizes them to remove unwanted things or entities from a person’s life. For example, the essence of the cat can be used to remove parasitic entities from one body. In the West now they have auric cleansing or chakra cleansing. Nevertheless, one might not wonder how those things got there in the first place.
Animal spirits.
This is one aspect of shamanic healing through an animal spirit, but there is also the issue of compatibility. Instead of using Astrology or zodiac signs, every person’s spirit has a behavioral pattern that aligns with a certain animal, something I won’t get into detail about. But for a shaman, this is a way of identifying how to deal with a person based on their ‘Animal Spirit.’
During a shamanic session a shaman might notice that a client’s animal spirit doesn’t match with their environment and their surroundings and the people around them. They have to warn them and convince them to switch places or add another “catalyst” whose animal spirit will neutralize that conflict.
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