September 2010

By Ross Heaven 

In the ceremony of limpia - cleansing - the patient may sit on a wooden chair below which is a bowl of smoking copal incense. This will purify the patient's body and is relaxing to any spirit intrusions, which are made drowsy by the smoke. As the limpia takes place, the shaman circles the patient, chanting, blowing tobacco smoke over her and stoking her body with flowers. The tobacco smoke eases the passage of the intrusion, which is then caught by and 're-housed' in the flowers.

Sometimes an offerenda is also made in thanks for the healing - or to the intrusion for leaving - in which case a gift of some kind may be tied up with the flowers. The whole bundle is then taken into nature and buried so the spirit will not be disturbed and others won't be infected by it. Coastal shamans may take the flowers to the sea instead and cast them to the waves so the tide takes them away from the shore. 

In the Amazon rainforest, it is not flowers that are used, but the leaves of the chacapa bush. These are approximately nine inches long and, when dried, are tied together to make a medicine tool which is used as a rattle during ceremonies. In a healing, the chacapa is rubbed and rattled over or near the patient's body to capture or brush out the spirit intrusion. Once he has it in his chacapa, the shaman then blows through the leaves to disperse the intrusion into the rainforest where the spirits of the plants absorb and discharge its energy.

Another way of dealing with intrusions is the use of cleansing leaf baths, a method practiced in Haiti as much as in Peru. Haitian shaman, Loulou Prince, explains:

From David Nitchtern on HuffPo:

There is a Buddhist practice called "exchanging oneself for others" that is intended to cultivate compassion and empathy -- in Tibetan it's called "tonglen." As we breathe in, we bring into ourselves that which is difficult, problematic and upsetting from the other person -- everything we wish we could get rid of. As we breathe out, we send them every good quality -- openness, clarity, affection, peace -- everything we would like to hold onto.

Tonglen is an outrageous practice in that it reverses our normal tendency to include only that which is comfortable and easy and to exclude anything that is challenging or difficult. The result is that we open ourselves further, our heart and mind, and allow for a wider range of what we are willing to include and work with in our lives. Ultimately, this particular meditation is liberating for the person actually practicing tonglen, but due to a possible shift in our attitude it can also benefit others.

From Ayahuasca.com:

Similarly, a significant part of the initiation process is for the new shaman to demonstrate the self-control which separates healers from sorcerers. Self-control is manifested in resisting the immediate urge to use newly acquired powers to cause harm. Among the Shuar, there is a general sentiment among the people that becoming a shaman — acquiring tsentsak, magic darts — creates an irresistible desire to do harm, that “the tsentsak make you do bad things.” Shuar shamans themselves dispute this. While the tsentsak indeed tempt one to harm, the desire can be resisted; those who “study with the aim to cure” become healers.

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The magic darts kept within the chest of a Shuar shaman, for example, are living spirits, who can control the actions of a shaman who does not have sufficient self-control. The magic darts want to kill, and it requires hard work to keep them under control and use them for healing rather than attack. Similarly, the Parakanã of Eastern Amazonia believe that shamans possess pathogenic agents that cause sickness, called karowara. When animated by a shaman, karowara are tiny pointed objects; inside the victim’s body, they take the concrete form of monkey teeth, some species of beetle, stingray stings, and sharp-pointed bones. Karowara have no independent volition; but they have a compulsion to eat human flesh.