The logic of shamanistic healing

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 7:42 pm | #21

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bloggerclarissa :
“Except that maybe the person hasn’t considered that there is any other way to be [and therefore remains sick].”
- Of course. But this all hinges on one’s desire to change things.

It does. But in a sense one just has to move ahead blindly, because the new way of being hasn’t been mapped by the current neurological structures. I mean, one is locked into the old way of being by force of habit and by the innate conservatism that we all possess to some degree. We choose “the devil we know” rather than the one we don’t. That’s an evolutionary adaptation.

Shamanism proposes that you need the courage to move ahead out of this existing structure of mind. It also recognizes there is a sense of blindness to all this moving and fumbling one’s way out of the morass.

STAY SANE AND 

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 18, 2011 at 8:14 pm | #23

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bloggerclarissa :

-Embracing the blindness is scary but also liberating, once you dare to do it.

It’s what shamanism has over other methods of therapy: you leap in at the deep end and heal yourself. Authoritative interventions can often confuse and mislead as much as they are capable of assisting.

SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism