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Shamanic Healing
Traditional Medicine for the Modern World
By Itzhak Beery
Foreword by Alberto Villoldo
Published by Destiny Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
A story-based guide to the techniques of shamanic healing
• Details indigenous medicine tools and soul healing techniques, including diagnosis and energy cleansing with plants, stones, fire, flower essences, and sound
• Offers protection and self-defense techniques for confronting negative energies such as spirit attachment and possession
• Shares healing stories that each address a specific condition, such as panic attacks, PTSD, depression, cancer, chronic pain, grief, and relationship problems
Shamanic healing is making an astonishing comeback all over the modern technology-driven and consumerist world. Millions of people have felt called to integrate both ancient and modern healing systems into a new model of healthcare. But what makes shamanic healing so powerful? Why have indigenous healers kept it alive for thousands of years?
Revealing his personal journey and stories from his more than 20 years as a shamanic healer, Itzhak Beery explains who a shaman is and how he or she works, demystifying and destigmatizing the shamanic healing worldview. He shares shamanic wisdom from two of his teachers: a Yachak from Ecuador and a well-known Brazilian Pagé. He details indigenous medicine tools and soul healing techniques that you can practice with your own clients or in your own personal healing, including diagnosis and energy cleansing with plants, stones, fire, rum, eggs, flower essences, and sound. He shares protection and self-defense techniques for confronting negative energies, such as spirit attachment and possession. Sharing healing stories that each address a specific condition, such as panic attacks, PTSD, depression, cancer, chronic pain, grief, and relationship problems, Beery explains how a shaman is not responsible for curing everyone and will consult with the patient’s soul to determine its needs, which sometimes includes learning from the illness experience.
By sharing these healing methods, Beery reveals the importance of shamanic practices in resolving our 21st-century emotional and physical problems and their importance to the future of humanity and the planet.
• Details indigenous medicine tools and soul healing techniques, including diagnosis and energy cleansing with plants, stones, fire, flower essences, and sound
• Offers protection and self-defense techniques for confronting negative energies such as spirit attachment and possession
• Shares healing stories that each address a specific condition, such as panic attacks, PTSD, depression, cancer, chronic pain, grief, and relationship problems
Shamanic healing is making an astonishing comeback all over the modern technology-driven and consumerist world. Millions of people have felt called to integrate both ancient and modern healing systems into a new model of healthcare. But what makes shamanic healing so powerful? Why have indigenous healers kept it alive for thousands of years?
Revealing his personal journey and stories from his more than 20 years as a shamanic healer, Itzhak Beery explains who a shaman is and how he or she works, demystifying and destigmatizing the shamanic healing worldview. He shares shamanic wisdom from two of his teachers: a Yachak from Ecuador and a well-known Brazilian Pagé. He details indigenous medicine tools and soul healing techniques that you can practice with your own clients or in your own personal healing, including diagnosis and energy cleansing with plants, stones, fire, rum, eggs, flower essences, and sound. He shares protection and self-defense techniques for confronting negative energies, such as spirit attachment and possession. Sharing healing stories that each address a specific condition, such as panic attacks, PTSD, depression, cancer, chronic pain, grief, and relationship problems, Beery explains how a shaman is not responsible for curing everyone and will consult with the patient’s soul to determine its needs, which sometimes includes learning from the illness experience.
By sharing these healing methods, Beery reveals the importance of shamanic practices in resolving our 21st-century emotional and physical problems and their importance to the future of humanity and the planet.
Excerpt
3
Healing Teachings, Ceremonies, and Techniques
SOUL HEALING
Across shamanic traditions soul loss--the wounding or fragmentation of a person’s soul as a result of trauma, abuse, war, conflicts, and so on, especially as suffered at an early age--is seen as a leading cause of illnesses, immune-system deficiencies, and all-around dysfunction of physical, emotional, and mental well-being. If not treated, soul loss can result in permanency of these conditions, avoidance of life opportunities, and a repeating of negative life patterns.
What is a soul? No one can tell you for sure. But we think of soul as the energetic essence that makes you uniquely you. You might think of soul healing as trying to find and fit lost pieces of a thousand piece puzzle together to discover the complete, whole, beautiful picture. There is nothing more satisfying than that.
How can you tell if you have suffered a soul loss? You may feel detached, empty, devoid of purpose, unable to concentrate and aimless in life. Some people experience deep depression and suicidal thoughts. Many simply suffer memory loss of crucial years from early childhood. Some say that their hearts are closed and they can’t feel love. One of my clients once said, “I feel as if there is a hole in my heart.”
Usually the symptoms are the result of unconscious impulses to deaden one’s feelings to avoid the unbearable pain of a trauma and still be able to carry on with life’s challenges. It is nature’s sensible survival strategy for the psyche. But it takes its toll on our liveliness and health.
There are many shamanic approaches to healing soul loss. The most well-known is journeying into the spirit world with the help of a spirit guide to witness the trauma, track the lost soul part, communicate and convince it to return, and retrieve and reintegrate it back into the energy body to return to wholeness. Each culture (or individual shaman) finds its own unique way to perform soul retrieval, and no one way is better than another. Some societies perform a special healing ceremony during certain times of the day, such as at noontime or midnight, when they believe the cosmic portals are open. Sometimes soul retrieval can be experienced spontaneously, with or without the direct help of a shaman. Spontaneous retrieval sometimes happens during cleansing ceremonies. It can also happen in the midst of a remarkable landscape, such as on a mountaintop, or when experiencing art as the detached soul part feels safe enough to reconnect and be seen.
In the aftermath of a successful soul retrieval ceremony, people feel more grounded, full, happy, content, and courageous, ready to pursue their lives. As one of my clients said, “I experienced a second, joyful childhood. One that I was never able to know before. I finally found the child who is loved.”
Soul Integration
To fully benefit from soul retrieval work, you must a go through a conscious process of integration to unify that lost part of the soul with your whole being. This can be achieved through additional shamanic journeys to meet and welcome back your soul part as well as to conceive specific ways to heal old wounds. It also helps to be aware and acknowledge the changes that happen in your life in the aftermath of a soul retrieval. It can be helpful to have a supportive group of people who can be with you as those changes happen and to consult with a shaman about how to make true physical changes in your everyday life that will reflect and honor your newly recovered soul part.
I received the e-mail below from a client beautifully describing her soul retrieval experience.
“ . . .I was amazed that you saw in the candle’s flame a deep trauma from around the time I was three years old. At first I could not remember it. Then it hit me.
“I was only three years old when my parents came to the United States from Israel. My mother was depressed and realized she needed help. She checked herself into a hospital and put my sister and me in an orphanage. I felt abandoned and alone. I told you I felt that I left a part of me at the orphanage when I left. I have always felt like a part of me was missing but couldn’t figure out how to become whole again.
“You had me close my eyes, and you led me to meet myself as that little girl in the orphanage. It was very sad as I remembered many of the details. By the end I adopted my little girl self and promised to love and protect her.
“Then we did another exercise that brought me to when I was around five years old. I introduced the three-year-old orphan me to the five-year-old me. We hugged, kissed, and cried. You asked five-yearold me if I wanted to leave the orphanage with her, and I said yes. We held hands and walked to a park where we played. We were very happy and carefree. From the park, the two of us traveled through the years until the present, where I put both these little girls in my heart and we hugged and cried. We became one, a whole person.
“I told you I was never able to have a regular childhood. Before I left your office, you asked me to buy a small doll that looked like me as a child, carry it with me for two weeks, and do all the things that I missed out on doing as a child. ‘Take the doll everywhere,’ you said. At first it felt strange, but in a good way. By the end of the two weeks, I noticed a big change in myself. I was happy and at peace. It was fun. Even my husband went along with it and enjoyed having ‘little me’ with us. He understood this was something I needed to do.”
Healing Teachings, Ceremonies, and Techniques
SOUL HEALING
Across shamanic traditions soul loss--the wounding or fragmentation of a person’s soul as a result of trauma, abuse, war, conflicts, and so on, especially as suffered at an early age--is seen as a leading cause of illnesses, immune-system deficiencies, and all-around dysfunction of physical, emotional, and mental well-being. If not treated, soul loss can result in permanency of these conditions, avoidance of life opportunities, and a repeating of negative life patterns.
What is a soul? No one can tell you for sure. But we think of soul as the energetic essence that makes you uniquely you. You might think of soul healing as trying to find and fit lost pieces of a thousand piece puzzle together to discover the complete, whole, beautiful picture. There is nothing more satisfying than that.
How can you tell if you have suffered a soul loss? You may feel detached, empty, devoid of purpose, unable to concentrate and aimless in life. Some people experience deep depression and suicidal thoughts. Many simply suffer memory loss of crucial years from early childhood. Some say that their hearts are closed and they can’t feel love. One of my clients once said, “I feel as if there is a hole in my heart.”
Usually the symptoms are the result of unconscious impulses to deaden one’s feelings to avoid the unbearable pain of a trauma and still be able to carry on with life’s challenges. It is nature’s sensible survival strategy for the psyche. But it takes its toll on our liveliness and health.
There are many shamanic approaches to healing soul loss. The most well-known is journeying into the spirit world with the help of a spirit guide to witness the trauma, track the lost soul part, communicate and convince it to return, and retrieve and reintegrate it back into the energy body to return to wholeness. Each culture (or individual shaman) finds its own unique way to perform soul retrieval, and no one way is better than another. Some societies perform a special healing ceremony during certain times of the day, such as at noontime or midnight, when they believe the cosmic portals are open. Sometimes soul retrieval can be experienced spontaneously, with or without the direct help of a shaman. Spontaneous retrieval sometimes happens during cleansing ceremonies. It can also happen in the midst of a remarkable landscape, such as on a mountaintop, or when experiencing art as the detached soul part feels safe enough to reconnect and be seen.
In the aftermath of a successful soul retrieval ceremony, people feel more grounded, full, happy, content, and courageous, ready to pursue their lives. As one of my clients said, “I experienced a second, joyful childhood. One that I was never able to know before. I finally found the child who is loved.”
Soul Integration
To fully benefit from soul retrieval work, you must a go through a conscious process of integration to unify that lost part of the soul with your whole being. This can be achieved through additional shamanic journeys to meet and welcome back your soul part as well as to conceive specific ways to heal old wounds. It also helps to be aware and acknowledge the changes that happen in your life in the aftermath of a soul retrieval. It can be helpful to have a supportive group of people who can be with you as those changes happen and to consult with a shaman about how to make true physical changes in your everyday life that will reflect and honor your newly recovered soul part.
I received the e-mail below from a client beautifully describing her soul retrieval experience.
“ . . .I was amazed that you saw in the candle’s flame a deep trauma from around the time I was three years old. At first I could not remember it. Then it hit me.
“I was only three years old when my parents came to the United States from Israel. My mother was depressed and realized she needed help. She checked herself into a hospital and put my sister and me in an orphanage. I felt abandoned and alone. I told you I felt that I left a part of me at the orphanage when I left. I have always felt like a part of me was missing but couldn’t figure out how to become whole again.
“You had me close my eyes, and you led me to meet myself as that little girl in the orphanage. It was very sad as I remembered many of the details. By the end I adopted my little girl self and promised to love and protect her.
“Then we did another exercise that brought me to when I was around five years old. I introduced the three-year-old orphan me to the five-year-old me. We hugged, kissed, and cried. You asked five-yearold me if I wanted to leave the orphanage with her, and I said yes. We held hands and walked to a park where we played. We were very happy and carefree. From the park, the two of us traveled through the years until the present, where I put both these little girls in my heart and we hugged and cried. We became one, a whole person.
“I told you I was never able to have a regular childhood. Before I left your office, you asked me to buy a small doll that looked like me as a child, carry it with me for two weeks, and do all the things that I missed out on doing as a child. ‘Take the doll everywhere,’ you said. At first it felt strange, but in a good way. By the end of the two weeks, I noticed a big change in myself. I was happy and at peace. It was fun. Even my husband went along with it and enjoyed having ‘little me’ with us. He understood this was something I needed to do.”
Product Details
- Publisher: Destiny Books (May 25, 2017)
- Length: 240 pages
- ISBN13: 9781620553770
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Raves and Reviews
“Itzhak Beery beautifully describes an extraordinary personal journey that upends our conventional understanding of medicine and healing. Like a scientist on a deep quest he presents the shamanic model for healing and how effectively it has worked over the ages. This brilliant book expands our possibilities for health and healing. A must-read to be prescribed to all seeking healing as well as for their health professionals.”
– Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D., cofounder of the Omega Institute and creator and director of Blue Spir
“This intriguing book is a call to action and a challenge to integrate shamanic knowledge about health care with modern science. Itzhak’s latest contribution to this body of wisdom guides us along that path. I highly recommend it.”
– John Perkins, author of the New York Times Bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
“Shamanic Healing is an important book for the times we live in, as so many people in the Western world are searching for alternative ways of healing. This book provides a wealth of shamanic healing methods from indigenous cultures that can be integrated into anyone’s life and/or their work with clients. Itzhak Beery did a brilliant job bringing this work to us.”
– Sandra Ingerman, M.A., author of Soul Retrieval and Speaking with Nature
“Belief structures tend to put a fence around our consciousness, as Itzhak Beery shows in his new book on shamanic healing. He creates a bridge between ideals that no longer serve us and the ancient, yet current, practices of ancient shamanism up until today. Beery’s book offers a new model to transform our sick care into holistic health care.”
– Lynn V. Andrews, author of Coming Full Circle
“In Shamanic Healing, Itzhak Beery has created an extraordinary book that records generous teachings brought to life through his accounts of adventures and healing stories from which readers may extract techniques and insights that may enrich their lives. Itzhak is a medicine man, and he has created very good medicine indeed. ”
– Hank Wesselman, Ph.D., author of the Spiritwalker trilogy
“Shamanic Healing supports the ongoing revolution in health, as the modern world discovers alternative methods can be effective for many types of maladies--physical, psychological, and even spiritual. Itzhak Beery’s book provides a clear, coherent introduction and overview of these ancient practices, which are evermore popular.”
– Daniel Pinchbeck, author of How Soon Is Now?
“Through crisp narrative and excellent storytelling, Itzhak Beery takes on the timely and powerful subject of shamanic healing and its relevance in our modern world. In a world where we find our medical model bankrupt and too often causing illness and death instead of healing, people are seeking alternatives, including the ancient, effective ways of shamanism. Here you will find an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the world of shamanic healing based on South American traditions. His book is a real contribution to shamanic literature.”
– José Luis Stevens, Ph.D., author of Encounters with Power
“Izhak Beery’s passionate love of shamanism gives us a glimpse at how rich and fulfilling shamanic work can be in one’s life. He writes with an urgency to embed shamanic healing practices into our Western world, so we may align all our senses harmoniously with the supportive energies of the Earth and assure the survival of our species. An excellent book for all who seek to deepen their understanding of shamanic healing practices.”
– Tom Cowan, author of Fire in the Head
“Itzhak Beery has written a spectacular book. This honest, nonlinear journey into the very heart and soul of shamanism rekindled my heart’s flame and strengthened my commitment to the shamanic path that we share.”
– Linda Star Wolf, Ph.D., coauthor of Soul Whispering
“Itzhak Beery’s heart and compassion encompass all of his teachings, and his fierce commitment to the integrity of this work is an inspiration to all who come in contact with him. His brilliant writing will open you to the beauty and elegance of walking the shamanic path.”
– Michael Stone, teacher, activist, writer, and radio host
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