Healing and Shamanistic Wisdom: A Brief Encounter

Native American Shamanism has held a great fascination for me so long as I can remember. I have used a couple of shamanistic exercises in modified forms in some of my training programmes. Here is something I just read in Tony Samara’s Shaman’s Wisdom: Reclaim Your Lost Connection with the Universe. The brief passage made me think about the way we habitually react to misfortunes and those who are victims of misfortunes, and I thought of sharing it with the readers of the blog.

Before we go on to the passage, here is something about Tony Samara from his website.

After living for several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, Tony Samara ventured to the jungles of South America - to the Amazon and to the Andes – where he lived and studied among a community of Shamans.

After many years he was initiated in the sacred healing ways of these ancient peoples, and left South America to teach and share this deep wisdom with the world.

Tony Samara is now visited by people from all parts of the world and from all walks of life, seeking spiritual guidance or simply the experience of being in his presence.

He is a mirror of what is possible, a shining reminder of the endless potential of being human.

The completely natural state of joy and wisdom experienced as the heart opens to life is the remarkable path he expounds. The path that is free for everyone to experience.

Verbal dialogue is not the essence of his teachings, but he explains in a direct and simple way that everyone can understand, how each individual can practically integrate greater acceptance, peace and joy into their daily lives.

Tony teaches with humour, humility and with infinite patience, empowering the individual with courage, trust and inner strength to continue on this journey back into wholeness, a path that leads towards real freedom.

Like many spiritual teachers, Tony Samara is concerned with practical inner work and liberation. He teaches by personal example and instruction, guiding the seeker to realise bliss here and now, through growing spiritual awareness rather than mental effort.

Part of Tony's teachings remind us that food and eating are fundamental to our inner well being, as well as to our physical health. He explains in his many programmes that the body is our temple and that the food we eat helps us to create a strong foundation that allows inner work and transformation to take place. He also explains that food is not just a physical substance which nourishes the body but that it also contains spiritual and emotional energy. Hence the importance of being conscious and taking the time to be present when we are eating and to become more sensitive to what will nourish our body, our temple rather than eat only what we feel like eating.

Tony also encourages a balanced vegetarian diet which includes organic products that are full of life force.0o0

Here is the passage from Tony Samara’s Shaman’s Wisdom:

My first intense experience of the Amazon, in this dimension and in another totally extraordinary dimension of consciousness, took place a few days after my arrival. I was in a canoe, which was going down a river. There were many people staring at me and I had many thoughts going through my head. Time appeared to have come to a standstill. It rained a lot. The sounds of nature were everywhere. I was full of fears and doubts. I thought I was very well prepared for the rainforest. I had spent six months improving my physical fitness at a gymnasium. I had immersed myself in the Spanish language with the help of books and language tapes. I had bought a machete, a hammock and a compass but oh, how the mosquitoes constantly bit me. Our canoe had been a tree a little time before and, in order to avoid sinking, we had to bail out the water continuously. Every time we hit a rock or a log I felt it was going to tip over. I began to wonder if this was the sanest thing to be doing at this time of my early twenties.

My westernized mind was full of fearful thoughts: “What if I have to go to hospital? How would I get there? Why are these people so satisfied with their life? Is this the paradise that I envisioned?” While I was seeking thousands of excuses to leave the Amazon and to return to “civilization,” a man at the front of the canoe pushed a tree branch away and was stung by a swarm of vicious bees. My initial reaction was to think “How lucky that it was not me,” a feeling accompanied with pity and concern for the man who was suffering. The other people on the canoe laughed and behaved in a way that was incomprehensible to me. I was in a culture very different from all that I had known before. I asked my fellow travellers: “Why laugh at suffering?” (If they were not all shamans, they lived in a shamanic culture.) They answered my question with another question: “Can true compassion be understood through feelings of fear, negativity and doubt?” It was explained to me that the energy body of the man mortally stung by the bees was already in fear and pain and that my own fears and doubts brought only more negativity to his energetic body; that true compassion consists in helping the person to free himself from pain.

“By laughing, we helped to pull the fear out from the body of this man who was already in a state of shock and in danger of dying. If all of the passengers in the canoe had reacted as you did, their egocentric thoughts would have fed this negativity and the man would certainly have died,” said one of my companions.

I realized that each one in the canoe except me had been present to the situation from a healing point of view rather than from the ego. Their laughter was an expression of this healing energy. My cultural programming had been different and from that moment, I seriously began to question my beliefs about this culture that the Western world would describe as “primitive.”

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As I finished reading the passage, I thought how a group of children would have reacted to the situation. In all probability, they would have laughed out spontaneously. Later their reaction would have been different – they would realize the seriousness of the situation and become serious. But the initial reaction would have been laughter.

Just as they do in the shamanistic culture.

I also wondered how a group of school children of today who have had their lessons in moral science would have reacted. They would have reacted exactly as Tony Samara reacted. They would have suppressed the laughter even if it arose in them because they have been taught it is cruel to laugh at another person’s misfortune. They would have gone and expressed their solemn concern to the stung friend.

I am not saying such behaviour is not appropriate. But there seems to be a different kind of wisdom in the light laughter of the Native Americans.

True, the stung man might even feel hurt by the laughter. But there is a possibility he would have able to handle his pain better when his friends took it so lightly.

Of course, we are talking of light-hearted mirth and not cruel laughter. We are talking of laughing at life’s misfortunes.

And I am sure the man’s Native friends would have been as helpful to him as the modern school children.

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A related thought. It is only where there is no love that such spontaneous laughter at a misfortune hurts. A husband or a wife, for instance, can spontaneously laugh at something like this happening to the other, so long as there is love between the two. But when there is no love between the two, the laughter becomes cruel and it hurts like hell.

The Mahabharata tells us that one of the major reasons behind the epic battle was Draupadi’s laughter. While going round the newly constructed magnificent palace of the Pandavas at Indraprastha, Duryodhana sees a door where there is none and bangs his head on it. He mistakes solid ground for water due to the illusions created by Maya, the architect, and mistakes water for solid ground. As he falls into the water taking a step seeing solid ground before him, Draupadi, along with her friends, laughs out spontaneously in mirth. And Duryodhana feels so humiliated he would take his vengeance by humiliating her in the dice hall of Hastinapura later.

Of course there was no love between Draupadi and Duryodhana.

Love gives everything a different hue.

When there is love, you can laugh at the discomfiture of a friend – and he might join in your laughter. I do not think anything could be more healing than that laughter of his.

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Mind Power, the Will to Live and Cancer

In one of my sessions earlier this week in a training programme for young engineers from Tata Steel held at the Centre for Excellence, Jamshedpur, one of the topics we discussed was managing the mind – something every executive should know in today’s world. The job of an executive today is more challenging than it has ever been in the past. His pace of work is hectic and unrelenting, and the content of his work is varied and fragmented. Much of his work is reactive rather than proactive in nature, requiring him to react to decisions taken by others and actions initiated by others. The decision making processes are disorderly, characterised more by confusion and emotionality than by rationality and frequently involve hard negotiations. Besides, organizational politics and self-serving interests of individuals and groups complicate the process further. Under such conditions, an executive who does not know how to manage his mind ends up as a total failure.

Our discussion on managing the mind led to a discussion about the mind’s power to heal and to cause diseases. Though this would have been strange to doctors from the western world to accept until a couple of decades ago, I do not think there is any sensible doctor in the world today who does not believe in the power of stress to cause diseases. About seventy percent of all our medical problems, for instance, are believed to arise from stress and stress related reasons. As far as skin diseases are considered, experts say that most of them are related one way or other to stress.

I would like to explore here in some depth a topic that we only touched upon in the training programme, since the topic was really beyond the scope of the training. Is there then any connection between stress and cancer? Is the mind in any way involved in the development and growth of cancer? Can he mind heal cancer?

Dr Carl Simonton is one of the doctors who strongly believe that the mind is involved in the development of cancer and since it is involved, it can also help in the healing of cancer. In fact, he believes that any treatment of cancer that does not take the mind into consideration is bound to be ineffective. “The mind, the emotions, and the attitude of a patient play a role in both the development of the disease and in the response that a patient has to any form of treatment,” he says. True, he does not abandon conventional treatments like radiation in treating cancer. But such is his faith in the power of the mind to cause diseases and to heal them that he invariably uses meditation and other forms of mind-based healing techniques in all his treatments along with surgery and chemotherapy.

Dr Simonton’s journey into mind-based healing began in 1969 while he was doing his internship in radiation therapy at the University of Oregon Medical Centre in the United States. One of the observations he made during this period was that while some patients receiving the treatment did not make much progress, others beat all kinds of odds and made great progress. In a few cases, a few patients who had almost no chances of survival lived on for years. He questioned why this was so.

In his discussions with the patients, Dr Simonton realized that the patients who survived were those who refused to accept the verdict of the doctors about the certainty of their end. In some cases, people felt that they could not afford to die at the moment because they had so much to do.

Incidentally this later feeling was something that Dr Viktor Frankl, the developer of logotherapy, had enquired into deeply. Dr Frankl was an inmate of Nazi concentration camps in Germany during the second world war. He observed that while the unimaginably horrid conditions of the bestial concentration camps killed the vast majority of the inmates, a few people survived in the camps too. He himself was a survivor, despite finding, to quote from the Preface of his bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning, “himself stripped to naked existence. His father, mother, brother, and his wife died in camps or were sent to the gas ovens, so that, excepting for his sister, his entire family perished in these camps. How could he—every possession lost, every value destroyed, suffering from hunger, cold and brutality, hourly expecting extermination—how could he find life worth preserving?”

His enquiry into the reasons for his own and other people’s survival led him to conclude that those who survived were the ones who had deeper commitments in life – those who had a compelling reason to live on, a purpose to live for. In other words, those who found meaning in living. If you still found meaning in living, you lived on, and if you found no meaning in life, you surrendered to death. Based on his observations, he developed what is known as logotherapy, a sister science of psychotherapy. Logotherapy helps people to find meaning in life and through that meaning develop the will to live on and find the strength to fight their problems..

As I write this, a report in the local edition of The Hindustan Times [dated 17th March, 2010] says in my small city of Jamshedpur alone 57 people have committed suicide so far this year. Which is a shockingly huge number – 57 people choosing to end their lives in two and a half months, most of them young! The figure was given in connection with the report of a young girl, a class eleven student, in one of the leading schools committing suicide on the previous day and a boy ending his life the day before.

People, young and old, commit suicide when they find there is no point in living on anymore. When they lose meaning in life, when they lose purpose.

And, concluded both Dr Viktor Frankl and Dr Carl Simonton, people succumb to diseases and death when they lose meaning in life, when they lose purpose. And they refuse to succumb to death so long as there is something for them to live for.

One person told Dr Simonton, “I can’t die until my son graduates.” Another said, “I can’t die until I see my grandchild.”

Dr Simonton says, “They didn’t die until they wanted to. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe something as simple as the will to live could alter the prognosis of cancer.”

Hope. Things to look forward to.

Dr Simonton’s next step was in trying to find out if there was a connection between the opposite factors and the beginning of cancer. Was there any connection between hopelessness and cancer? Between having nothing to look to forward to and cancer? Between meaninglessness and purposelessness and the origin of cancer?

His enquiries led him to statements such as “I felt trapped,” and “I had nothing to live for.” These were the feelings of patients who were suffering from cancer at the time of the development of cancer. Some were people who had found that all their chances of making a living after retirement were closed. Some others couldn’t get along with their spouses. Yet others had nothing to do. “It seemed as if the mind had decided to die on at a less than fully conscious level, and the body simply found a way.”

Can cancer then be psychologically induced?

Dr Simonton’s asked himself, “Everyone has cancer many times during his lifetime, but most people don’t realize it. What is unusual in cancer is not that malignant cells arise, since in the day-in-day-out replacement of billions of cells, some ‘bad cells’ do get made. But at times, and for some reason, the body allows these ‘bad cells’ to grow when it normally, routinely, reorganizes them as abnormal and destroys them. Why, then, in these instances, does the normally operative immunological system break down?” And he concludes that it must be because the mind lowers host resistance to these cells.

Under conditions of hopelessness and purposelessness, when there is no will to live, the mind does not resist the cancerous cells. It ‘permits’ the cancerous cells to grow and spread.

His next question to himself was: “How the hell could I bring about the will to live in someone who felt badly enough about life to develop cancer in the first place? How could I change such a defeatist attitude, one made worse by having cancer? How could I mobilise the power of the mind to affect the immunological response to cancer?”

His answer to the question was something that we in the east have practiced for ages: meditation.

He asked his patients to meditate for fifteen minutes, three times a day. He asked them to physically relax during these meditations, and then, in the next stage, to visualize a natural scene of peace and serenity. In the third stage, the patients were told to visualize vividly, in total clarity, the immune system systematically destroying the cancerous cells. The visualization involved something that was new then but has become an old method now: Patients visualize that an army of white blood cells are attacking, destroying and carrying away the cancerous cells.

One woman used the vacuum cleaner technique – visualizing that the white blood cells form a vacuum cleaner and suck in the diseased cells. A young man visualized what is going on inside him was the timeless battle between the powers of darkness and the powers of light in which the powers of light destroyed the powers of darkness.

And then at the end of this visualization, the patient begins the final visualization. He sees himself, with complete clarity, as totally cured of the disease and being in perfect health.

The visualizations are repeated exactly as they are, three times a day, day after day.

The practice produced amazing results. It was found that those who were cooperative with Dr Simonton’s meditation programme and followed his instructions achieved excellent results while those who were uncooperative and did not follow instructions fared poorly. Dr Simonton defined excellent results as ‘marked relief of symptoms and dramatic improvement of condition’ and poor results as ‘no relief of symptoms.’

In the cases of both kinds of patients, conventional forms of treatment had been given along with meditation. Which is to say that while conventional treatment was an important element in the healing process, meditation was another significant element.

Of course, the patients’ will to live was yet another significant aspect of the whole process.

The mind does have power over cancer.

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In his book The Healing Mind: the Vital Links between Brain and Behaviour, Immunity and Disease, Dr Paul Martin, who is more cautious about the powers of the mind, says:”There is now little doubt that psychological and emotional factors can influence the development and progression of certain cancers... Psychological variables such as social support and the patient’s emotional response to their disease have substantial bearing on survival. Equally, there is little doubt that appropriate psychological and social interventions can be of enormous benefit in helping cancer patients to cope with their disease, improving the quality of what remains of their lives and, in some cases, extending their survival time. To ignore the mind is an irresponsible waste.”

According to Dr Paul Martin, “The termination of a close relationship, whether through death, divorce or other means, has often been linked with cancer. When American psychologist Lawrence LeShan looked at more than four hundred cancer patients he discovered that a remarkably high proportion [72 percent] had suffered the loss of someone close to them not long before the onset of their cancer. In contrast, only 10 percent of comparable people without cancer had suffered such a loss.”

The link between the sense of hopelessness and cancer is so high that one might even say that it can be used to predict cancer. In a study, women undergoing cervical smear test were interviewed before their test results were available. And it was found that “women who expressed feelings of hopelessness during the interview had the greatest likelihood of being diagnosed of having a malignant tumour. The interview alone predicted the results of the smear test in over three-quarters of cases.”

Two thousand and six hundred years ago, the Buddha said in the first verse of the first chapter of the Dhammapada: “All that we are, is the result of what we have thought: It is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.”

A lot of things that ancient masters have said and many things that psychology and psychoneuroimmunology tell us today suggest that sickness and health are personal choices we make.

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Note: In writing this article, I am deeply indebted to an essay on Carl Simonton in a book by David Hammond on the powers of the mind [The book is not exactly about healing. It is called The Search for Psychic Power. The chapter on Dr Carl Simonton, however, is about healing.].