Shine the Light
Toward a New Paradigm in Mental Health Treatment:
The Shamanic Psycho-Spiritual Model.
As a practicing psychotherapist for 13 years I have found myself increasingly disillusioned with the limitations of ego based models, with the lack of individualized treatment, and by the noticeable decline in quality of care being provided to mental health clients, under the guise of cost control, clients are limited in their access to services, which leads to the marginalization of clients and staff whose morale is less than therapeutic because they recognize the disservices being done, but feel powerless to change it. The combination of these factors leads to less than optimum care.
Ego based models tend to rely heavily on objective observation (behavior) rather than the actual internal psychic processes of clients. The word psyche means soul and is related to the breath or spirit of life that exists in all people, which means that psychology is actually the study of the soul (Small, 2001). This has happened largely due to lack of investigation into other potential, non-behaviorally based treatment methods. This lack of soul study is due to several factors: difficulty in measuring non-observable criteria, biases within the psyologicial community against studying alternative treatments, fears within the psychological community that their profession will be de-legitimized for conducting such research. There is along history of psychology and other helping professions in general being marginalized as “soft science”. Nonetheless, as human consciousness has evolved, as technology has evolved and as society has evolved psychological theories must evolve if helping professions are to remain relevant and purposeful.
I became interested in Shamanic consciousness as a potential model through my own personal growth work, specifically the use of shamanic journey and shamanic breathwork (SBW) as tools to access my own internal psychic processes. I found that using these interventions has propelled my self-awareness in ways that would not have been possible using only ego based psychotherapy models. I have further witnessed other people’s use of shamanic consciousness with similarly dramatic results. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that integrates ego based psychotherapy models and shamanic consciousness to form the Shamanic Psychospritual model (SPSM) in order to optimize the therapeutic benefits of both models (Starwolf 2007).
Before the SPSM could emerge, humanity had to be ready, as the adage says, “when the student is ready the teacher will appear”. This requires that there had to develop deeper understanding of the ego, a deeper social consciousness, and the technology to support the model. My own observations of human evolution leads me to conclude that humanity first developed its connection to spirit as a necessity for survival and for the simple reason that human consciousness hadn’t evolved to include a concretized understanding of the ego. This happened much later in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the development of psyoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. Since Freud pioneered the study of psychiatry, which eventually encompassed a variety of helping professions, our understanding of the ego has gone though many incarnations but has yet to include a substantive spiritual component except for Carl Jung who broke with Freud over a variety of issues (Schultz, 1990). With the evolution of human consciousness from being shamanically based to ego based there came an opportunity for even further evolution that integrates principles of shamanism and ego based psychotherapeutic models (SPSM).
Just as it was necessary for human consciousness to evolve it our social consciousness must evolve. In a relatively short period of time, social consciousness has evolved from being characterized as isolated to global, from “other” based to “we” based, from fear motivated by ignorance to acceptance motivated by understanding. In part, this change can be attributed to a variety of social justice movements ranging from the suffrage movement, to the civil rights movement, to the equal rights movement, to the environmental movement, to the American Indian Movement (AIM) that have raised consciousness in the social arena. These movements have led to renewed interest in spirituality in a way that differs from the past. There is an unprecedented willingness to explore spiritual paths that were previously foreign whether from other cultures such as Asian Buddhism from to Native American spirituality of North American indigenous peoples.
In the scientific arena, the field of physics has provided the technology to study, understand, and validate some shamanic practices. For example, healing in shamanic tradition is largely done from an energetic perspective, but until we understood energy from a physics point of view, all were believed to be hocus-pocus. Physics, specifically Quantum Theory, has shown that anything, when broken down to its molecular level is simply a mass of electrons, protons and neutrons (atoms) that vibrate at a given rate of speed, which determines the density of the given material. Theoretically, using this knowledge, our reality could be influenced from an energetic standpoint by changing the rate at which atoms vibrate. According to Neils Bohr, Quantum Theory has also shown that particles have no properties until they are observed or measured. In other words, they have unlimited potential until they are measured, the measurement process assigns the function of a given particle. Physicist David Bohm proposed the holomovement which states that the universe is in a constant state of enfolding and unfolding on itself so quickly that it is not discernible to human senses. This process, in effect, causes the universe to change repeatedly, but so quickly we don’t notice. Quantum theory then supports the notion that healing can be affected from an energetic perspective.
In order to understand this model, one must first understand the history, origins, practices, and underlying values of the shamanic tradition. Every continent has an indigenous culture and each of those has a shamanic tradition. My focus will be on the shamanic tradition of the Native Americans of North and South America. While some differences exist between traditions, the fundamental beliefs and practices of the two vary little.
Shamanism is one of the oldest spiritual paths in human consciousness (Ferrar, Ferrar and Bone, 1995). It was a way for indigenous peoples to understand the world around them, to relate to world around them, for purposes of community building, and for emotional, physical and spiritual healing (Harner, 1990). Characterized by a specific set of values, a specific worldview, a specific view of people, and a specific view of illness and healing, which will be discussed further in subsequent parts of this paper.
