Healing Mental Illness
If you had told me, five years ago, that I would be spending the past few weeks of my life in Thailand, taking courses on shamanic healing and divination, I would have probably laughed in your face. But that is exactly what I spent the last week of October and first week of November this year doing.
Shamans are people who alter their state of consciousness to gain knowledge and do healing. It’s a direct experience kind of spirituality – the shaman knows because she sees things in her visions, not because anyone told her. Thus, shamanism is a universal spirituality – available to anyone who would undertake the effort to build their visionary skills. Five years ago I didn't know that direct experience of spirituality was possible, or that I could build up my visionary skills to increase my chances of accessing it.
I personally started practicing shamanic techniques around two years ago, but my interest in shamanism goes back almost 10 years, to when I was a senior undergraduate majoring in anthropology. What I was immediately drawn to at that time, based on my personal history, was medical anthropology. At that time I had been taking psychiatric medication for bipolar depression for seven years, since I was thirteen. I believed deeply that I had a chronic, genetic condition – something was wrong with my brain, and something was wrong with me.
Medical anthropology is the study of how different diseases manifest in different cultures, as well as how they respond to them – and one of the most fascinating things within medical anthropology is the study of mental disorders, because they vary wildly between cultures. One of the most important things that I think we can take from how other cultures perceive mental disorders is this: Mental illness in other cultures is not chronic.
Quite often, what we think of as mental illness is seen by others cultures as an initiation experience – an illness one passes through on the way to becoming a healer – a shaman. This was not how I thought of it then – I had at that point been on medication for a third of my life, and I believed that I would be on medication for the rest of my life. I believed that surely if I stopped taking the medication, I would steadily become crazier and crazier – not that I would pass through it and emerge with spiritual gifts like vision and healing.
I spent my entire senior year wrestling with this idea - writing my undergraduate thesis on the difference between mental illness cross-culturally and trying to prove, somehow that Western psychiatry had the upper hand – that they were the ones who really knew what was going on. And even though my paper thus concluded, a seed was planted inside of me:
Mental illnesses in other cultures are not chronic.
They are experiences passed through on the way to becoming a healer.
For several years I continued believing that somehow other cultures got it “wrong,” that they were, in fact, less knowledgeable than Western psychiatry, and that the only way to deal with such different beliefs is by evangelizing these people and converting them. I didn’t allow myself to fully feel the ego-threat of these different beliefs; I didn’t let them challenge my own beliefs about life, and destroy the rigid belief structures that were no longer necessary.
But somewhere, deep underground in my subconscious, an earthquake was happening. Because when we take in this idea, this idea that mental illness is not chronic, when we really take it in and begin to feel its full effects, it gives us a kind of window from which to escape our own mental prison. If we believe that mental illness is a chronic, genetic condition, and that it will be with us for the rest of our life, than we have doomed ourselves to this fate. We will always create situations that support this belief unconsciously and then be able to justify ourselves. Look, we’ll say, poor me. I’ve always been this way and I’ll always be this way. But if we can begin to challenge this belief, if we can look at other cultures where mental disorder is not something to be suppressed but something to be moved through, then we can begin to see a way out.
We can begin to become hopeful about our situation; we can begin to realize that we can, somehow be healed. We can begin to look at alternative methods of therapy than simply psychiatric medication, including spiritual or energetic forms of therapy which would have seemed hopeless or foolish to us before. We begin to pay attention to experiences that validate the idea that we might get better, and in paying more attention to them, we’ll experience more of that in our life. Once the window out of our mental prison can be created, a path to a new belief can be walked. We can find people who will help us, we can find new sources of information that will assist us, we can create new ways of being that are happier and more healthy.
Something inside me saw this, even though I did not know it myself at that time. And something inside of me began to change, began to make preparations for the day when I could finally accept it, finally accept who I was, finally walk away from the diagnosis I had carried with me much of my life. The story of how I finally left behind my diagnosis is much longer – but discovering shamanism was the beginning. It was the way out.
That is what shamanism is. The shaman opens windows to other ideas, to new perspectives, to expanded consciousness. And it is through this expanded consciousness, through truly understanding what and who we are, that we are healed.
