Article: Native American perspectives on healing. Ancient wisdom for all peoples.

 

What is Healing?

Sage Words from Native American Wisdom Keepers

By Sandra Cosentino

 

 

 

"Medicine is a vibration within all of Creation."

"The heart of healing is to accept it to come to you."

"Have kindness from the heart and faith.
Always pray when you start the day. 
We all carry the seeds within us."

Drawn by direct knowing from lucid dreams, spirit helpers, ecstatic experiences of direct union with Nature, I seek that elusive state of balance, wholeness, aliveness, awareness.   Blessed to be part of a stable, affluent culture I, like so many of us in the Western world today, have answered the call  to explore inner realities, other cultures, and places resonant with primordial spiritual energy and beauty.  Each new understanding shortens the time it takes to recreate myself.  Traveling an ascending spiral that moves faster and faster.  Yet underneath I feel that sense of dancing on the edge of the unknown me. Can I bring home the soaring eagle into this physical being?  Can I feel the pulsating life of the universe in every cell of my own being?  Is this elusive state of balance somehow here right now in the moment I just embrace me as I am?  Including all those doubts, fears, judgments and limiting beliefs of my own culture toward “natural”, self-directed healing?

"What is healing?"  I pose this question to Native wisdom carriers in my circle: Uqualla, who is from the Havasupai tribe who live within the western Grand Canyon; and three traditional Hopi friends who live on high, windswept mesas of remote northeastern Arizona.  Wisdom from Amaru Li, a Peruvian healer and spiritual teacher/bridge person is included as well.

 

Uqualla

"Ancient spiritual wisdom has survived in global wisdom people. We are instruments of healing and healed in the process.  Healing is for every breathing moment.  Medicine people, shamans, healers have many names.  There are many spirits such as rock spirits, tree spirits.  Humans each are given giftings to facilitate a particular medicine.  All are unique.

Healing is as diverse as the many grains of sand, of stars, colors. Medicine is a vibration within all of Creation.  Not just human.  We are just a small part of the total, receptors and givers of healing. Our physical reality is more tunnel vision, we expect physical presentation to stimulate healing.

Plants are physical form manifesting into this reality.  Plant, ceremony, tradition has guaranteed complete healing with the addition of spirit-soul vibrations into it.  It is instilling that frequency and vibration into the place of receptiveness. 

People assume they are healers.  In the medicine spirit way, we never ever copy or take another's ritual.  The heart of healing is spirit presented--they must be in the right place of heart connection.

I watch so many people prepare medicine and exclude the sacredness of it.  So the body won't completely heal.  You can simply heal by touching.  Touch the essence within:  mind, heart.  If that door is not open, the person will not heal.  Ancient medicine was not to allow a person to exist without knowing there was reason for them to exist.  They are ill because they have not honored their vessel with spirit as watcher, the guide.

We have the gift of choice:  you will fall, will hurt.  This ignites illness.  So when a person goes in for healing, the healer knows, they must heal the impurity in the physical being, to open that door to heal the physical, must honor all aspects. Spiritual fine-tuning.  Honor and be happy with this form.  It will be as long lasting as they make it.  Fuel is food thought, wisdom.  Honoring with humility the spirituality.  It will continue that we as 2-legged form will desire a physical hand held form of medicine that will better us, but not necessarily heal.

Contemporary medicine is a result of individuals who have tuned themselves into limited understanding.  They do bring corrections.  They have a gifting from spirit to understand molecular chemistry, but they do not understand this genius was gifted by great Creator.  In that honoring, healing comes forth in various stages.

Healing spiritually must begin with each individual within his or her own area bringing healing from within.  You will sense the physical medicine that can bring healing for the moment.  This is always temporary. 

Every rising sun be aware of Creator that allows us to be in the best of health.  As plentiful as grains of sand and stars of skies--healing is that many and that varied.  Understood by science, the right dosage is required to work properly.  With spirit, vibrational medicine must be right amount for some awakening.  In the time we are here we can emanate, radiate.  There is so much to be said for healing.  It can be interpreted in so many ways.

The best gift is that you have allowed for someone to walk their walk in a beautiful way.  I honor all medicine people, native, non-native, scientists, educators--all are gifted but should give thanks daily in their heart.

Healing will continue in a right path as long as we are honoring and humble, things come automatically.  It harmonizes with our capabilities.  People stimulate a part of you that will allow for healing to continue, to touch heart places.

You are the only form that needs to be present for healing to happen.  Don't harbor things inside, constantly allow for release. 

In collective consciousness we find much nurturing, sanctuary.  If you seek security, it is a sign that you need to address self.

Ceremony is to joyfully make sign to spirit that we truly honor you and should be woven through the whole of your existence.   Ceremony reminds us to emphasize our connection to the unseen.  It stimulates spiritual vibration to an ascended level.  Everyone in that circle has a part to add and will come out stronger spiritually.

Enjoy the simplicity of waking every morning to understand your journey, life purpose.  Be able to see the sunrise,  this assures you are breathing.  Unseen has many names: something greater, essence.  This has allowed the opportunity of journey this day.  If you make it to setting sun, reflect, give rest.  If negativity is there, address it in different light.  It will in time resolve.

Heart take lead pulls self away from physical ego.  Trust what is there and felt; it takes lead into your life.  Start from where you feel within.

If you feel the call of place, go.  Just be.  If you do, everything else will fall into place.  It is a must for foot to touch ground.  Ritual call. Let heart child take lead.  In the innocence of the child, you will be called to the right offerings."

 

Poliquimana, Hopi:

“Just as you plant a seed and take care of it from the day it is planted, you, as a being, transform as you work with the universe. Nature is the grounding for whole universe.  We are plants for the whole universe.  To heal the universe, be strong with that stem.  Give yourself that opportunity to heal. The heart of healing is to accept it to come to you.

Pray together, become one--it helps you open.  Don't hesitate.  Practice society within your heart.  Open to your own individuality.  Group energy helps, but you have to accept.  Have courage to give your prayers.  The terrorist attack was a wake up call to the universe.

If children are not afraid, they can come forward and lead universe in a whole path.  Have trust in yourself and universe and creator.  Creator walked this path many years ago and left this open for all people.  Burn cedar (juniper) incoming and outgoing to open doors and make it easier to work with feelings.”

Quotshomgnewa, Hopi:

“Take bad energy out and give it to the Creator, release your inner self. Then you regain power.  Prayers, use lots of prayers. I use different types of herbs for different problems on body points. I look inside the body using a crystal like an x-ray and see things that should not be there.

I pray to nature, to living creatures for help in healing a  person, they pray too.  Deer is what I work with.  They help and strengthen me and know what I am doing.  They give guidance.  I asked Deer to help me for three days; we went on the hill and prayed and deer came.  This was a sign that I was recognized.”

Hopi Medicine Man:

"We're here to protect and preserve this land for our children and their children. Where you are born, you always go back, that is your umbilical; it is always imprinted. We send our messages from the center of Mother Earth to infinity. Our natural foods grown from the land sustain us." He spoke of how since time immemorial Hopis have maintained their sovereign status given to them by the highest leader who is always there for everyone.

“Someone with a good heart, with no anger can persevere and will succeed in fulfilling what needs to be done. Have kindness from the heart and faith. Always pray when you start the day.  Rest when the sun goes down. We all carry the seeds within us. We each came in with different things to fulfill. It is important for children to know their purpose. Knowledgeable people sit on their knowledge, but sometimes they take off the mask and become their true self."

 He was encouraging each of us, of all cultures, to express our true heart. This is our gift to the world that changes everything around us.

Amaru Li, Peruvian Shaman

Amaru has a new vision bridging his traditional culture with today’s world:

“Shamanism regards disease as an imbalance and offers ways to restore and preserve emotional and spiritual health by re-establishing the body’s natural balance…The shaman uses the energy of Mother Earth and directs the Universal Energy for healing... we integrate mind, body and spirit into a personal vision of harmony and balance.”

His teachings and healing sessions incorporate meditations, rituals and ceremonies dedicated to honoring and respecting the self as well as Mother Earth and transforming negative belief patterns into new realities.  Some elements he works with are:

Energy balancing to cleanse, restore and protect the body’s natural flow of energy

Practicing reciprocity—giving and receiving

Connecting to the higher frequencies of positive emotions

Extraction of the negative

Retrieval of splintered parts of the soul

Power animal medicine practice to bring strength, healing and wisdom

Practice of ceremony for connection to the cycles of nature and spiritual guides; for expression, spiritual development, psychological transformation and to help us remember our purpose in the universe

Creating sacred space for conscious interaction of the sacred self with the forces of the divine universe

(above excerpts from Amaru Li's web site)

So, What Is Healing?

Woven into this indigenous wisdom are fibers of devotion, honoring, purification, flow, humor, centeredness, belief and trust in self and the universe and so much gratitude.   I, too, choose to open the pathways of direct connectedness to Source, to each day release that which no longer serves, to re-create this physical expression as an evolving frequency.  Cracking the shell of what I think I am into a softened permeability.   Humbleness is now a new seed of wisdom borne of deep listening and observing:  of the light residing in each of us, of the dawn chorus of bird beings calling up the sun and those wordless moments of just being.

Ancient wisdom expressed in a co-creation with today’s frequency is my homing beacon.  This is a time of each of us now today accepting the call to be our own shaman-healer.  No longer the sole province of the magician-seer as in times past, but a birthright, a gift, a calling voicing through each of us.  To ask what is healing, is to ask, what is love, what is God, why am I here?  Ultimately it is a mystery uniquely expressed in each one of us.


posted July 18, 2005

 

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