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By Isa Gucciardi, PhD
The following article is a reprint of an article that appeared in Sacred Hoop Magazine, Issue No. 60.
In modern Western culture, curses are generally viewed with
scepticism, and in psychotherapeutic circles, they are rarely mentioned
outside of the symptoms or illnesses with no obvious cause, so people
who feel they have been cursed do not have much recourse to help from
the ‘experts’.
Shamanic healing is often a process of restoring balance.
Bringing these shamanic understandings of energy imbalance into a
modern therapeutic context, however, can be complex, for there is a
basic difference between the two in how they perceive the nature of
reality.
People often see the events of their life as outside of their
control, being passive to unseen forces that shape their reality. In
many traditional environments, shamans are considered to be able to
interact with those forces to change them, but the individual is not
typically seen as having that ability.
This view, that people are not ‘captains of their fate’, wherever
it is found, creates an environment where a curse can take on an
inordinate amount of power. To defeat the effect that a curse can have,
a different view regarding the nature of reality is usually required.
Buddhism provides just such an alternative view, holding that all
external experience is a reflection of the individual’s mind. Nothing
is ‘happening to’ anyone. We are each creating our own reality based on
our individual beliefs and perception.
By combining shamanic and Buddhist worldviews with western
hypnotherapeutic technique, we can create a more powerful tool to meet
the challenge of curses.
As people who feel they have been cursed are not generally taken
seriously in the West, the idea of being cursed is usually considered
to be ‘crazy.’ However, in traditional cultures, if people feel they
have been cursed, they come to the shaman, who then searches for the
source of the curse and tries to remove it.
Methods of removal differ according to the culture. For example,
the shaman might simply dissolve the curse, send the power of the curse
back to the curse creator, or enter into some form of psychic warfare
with the curse creator to banish it. It is considered to be the
shaman’s responsibility to deal with curses, and although patients
might be asked to perform a ritual to help clear the effect of the
curse, they generally are not asked to take responsibility for how they
found themselves in the midst of a curse process.
So if the patient is successfully relieved of the symptoms of the
curse, it is generally the shaman who receives the credit - the patient
is not often shown how to prevent curses in the future. But in order
for deep and permanent change in health and consciousness to take
place, more emphasis must be placed on the patient taking personal
responsibility. To gain this greater personal power the individual’s
belief systems may need examining and revising.
THE DYNAMICS OF CURSES
Curses are composed of patterns of energy, or specific combinations of
thought forms that are designed to break up the flow of power within
the person who is cursed. Thought forms have their own anatomy and Huna
(Hawaian shamanism) provides us with a helpful way to understand this
with its concepts of aka and mana. Aka is the raw material from which
all thought forms are woven: mana is the charge, often drawn from
emotional or mental power, within aka structures. Aka structures can be
complex or simple and can be charged with positive mana or
negative mana.
For example, the thought form (aka) that you might generate
regarding your neighbour’s cat might be a simple structure, if you like
cats, or don’t see the cat very regularly. The mana charge running
through would possibly be quite neutral. But if your neighbour’s cat
has a habit of marking anything you leave in your yard - and you don’t
like cats anyway, the aka you generate is likely to be more complex and
the mana that runs through it is likely to be powered with different
types of mental and emotional charges.
A curse is a consciously-made thought form that has a particular
type of aka and a particular form of mana, ranging from well-designed
curses by professional curse-makers, to sloppily designed curses cast
by people moving in and out of negativity without much focus or
direction.
We therefore need to take responsibility for the larger reality
that we generate from our thought forms. When we take responsibility
for creating our own reality, we expand our consciousness and have
greater choice in what we create.
It is very difficult to cast a curse on someone with an expanded
consciousness, as curses or negative thought forms - or even neutral
thought forms - can only be lodged in psychic systems that are not
being fully ‘patrolled’.
If we do not patrol our psychic space we lose contact with it.
Carl Jung calls this disconnected part of the self ‘the shadow’:
‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the
individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If
inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it.
Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that
it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed
and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable
to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness.’ [‘Psychology and
Religion’]
So the shadow can become a repository for thought forms such as
curses. If we seek to know ourselves as fully as possible, however,
there is less likelihood that something like a curse could have an
effect on us.
MESSAGE IN THE SYMPTOM
Any symptom of imbalance can show us how we have moved out of
communication with parts of ourselves. The symptom provides us with
opportunities to reconnect with disregarded or forgotten aspects of
ourselves on a daily basis. Our daily experience is driven by these
shadow aspects creating our external reality so as to attract our
conscious attention. So if we do not take responsibility for aspects of
our experience we might wish to ignore, we wind up completely out of
control, lost in unconsciousness and suffering, not understanding how
we generate our reality.
JOHN - A CASE STUDY
The following is an example of a young man who had wound up in just such a position when he had a curse placed on him.
John had recently returned from a vacation in the Carribean. He
had fallen ‘madly in love’ with a young woman with whom he spent every
minute. He felt a well-known sorcerer had cursed him. The sorcerer had
been involved with the same woman in the past and was furious about her
interest in John. In an argument the man told John that he ‘would bring
him down’ if he persisted in seeing the young woman. John continued the
relationship and since he had returned from his trip he had had a
series of reversals, including being involved in an accident and losing
money on investments.
On the surface, it appears that John is the hapless victim of a
jealous Caribbean man versed in curse making. Traditionally John would
now visit a shaman who would take charge of removing the curse. If he
went down this course of action, the shaman’s power and the
effectiveness of the ‘cure’ would be dependent on his belief in the
shaman’s power.
But the shaman is actually working in an environment he cannot
possibly control - the patient’s psyche and the mechanisms through
which the patient is generating reality.
A look at John’s emotional biography reveals how his mind has
created pre-conditions for his misfortunes: John came from a wealthy
family headed by two emotionally and physically distant parents. They
were generous with money but were not affectionate or physically
demonstrative. He spent most days in the years before he went to school
alone and feeling isolated. Perfect circumstances for the soul to
fragment and for soul loss to occur.
He noted that if he was sick, his mother became available to him
in a way in which she was not when he was well. Over time, he developed
several chronic illnesses, including asthma and allergies, which kept
her attention focused on him. His father would buy him presents when he
was sick, but did not focus on him the way his mother would. Although
he enjoyed the presents, he was angry with his father for not showing
him the affection he craved.
He performed poorly in school and felt isolated from his
schoolmates. As a teenager he became a self-described ‘trouble-maker’.
He hooked up with a gang and became completely identified with its
leaders. Here we can see energetic interference from external sources.
When he got into trouble with the law, his father provided bail money,
but did not interrupt his globe trotting to spend time with his son.
As a young adult, John found himself involved in situation after
situation where he felt he was given the short end of the stick –
including the situation in the Carribean. Even before the recent string
of bad luck, he had felt the universe was against him. He felt ill most
days, and nothing worked out the way he wanted it to.
CULTIVATED POWER LOSS
So, as a young child, John learned to gain power over his mother by
becoming sick, to gain the attention he did not get if he was well. As
a teenager, he chose to lose power through his troubles with the legal
system in order to gain power over his father by draining his money.
Over time, his sense of triumph in getting their attention made
him lose track of the fact that he had to harm himself to do so. He
lost sight of the part of himself that was being harmed.
He really wanted their love, but in its absence he turned to
craving power ‘over’ to salve his sense of isolation. This caused an
imbalance of power: the power he gained from his parents’ could never
compensate for the power he gave up to get their attention and he was
always left wanting more.
As he grew older, he tried the same techniques on other people or
situations he sought to control, but he rarely got the same
satisfaction or result he got from manipulating his parents. He became
more and more desperate to draw energy from other people to compensate
for the defecit he was creating within himself. This desperation had
been part of the dynamic he had with the young woman in the Caribbean,
and was part of the reason he had not heeded the sorcerer’s warning.
From a curse-maker’s point of view, this had all prepared fertile
conditions; an area of John’s psyche was in the shadow, ‘unpatrolled’,
and therefore an easy place to plant the curse.
NUANCE IN POWER RETRIEVAL
The encounter with the curse maker became a ‘wake up call’ for John.
The disruption the curse created in John’s already disrupted psychic
system threw him out of control. His inability ‘under the curse’ to
control the power drain it had created, made him pay attention to his
own imbalance of power. And because he was asked to be an active
participant in his healing when he sought help, he had the opportunity
to take responsibility for his situation and therefore move into a
greater state of in-dependance.
A shaman working in a traditional manner might be able to remove
the curse, but if John was determined to ‘collapse’ into power loss to
try and draw external sources of power into him, it is likely that John
would find himself in a similar situation again, and might require the
shaman’s assistance once more.
At best, if a shaman were to try to operate in an environment
where the client cultivates power loss, the shaman would always be
trying to fill a sieve. At worst, John’s requests for assistance could
become yet another way to draw power into the hole that his power loss
had created. In this way John’s power ‘addiction’ would actually be
fed, which would not be helpful.
SHAMANISM MEETS BUDDHISM
Cultural bias and ignorance of the dynamics of the unseen world, limit
many Westerners in dealing with curse situations and can prevent modern
therapists from dealing with their effects.
However, in bringing Buddhist understandings of the nature of
personal responsibility and shamanic understandings regarding the
nature of the unseen world into the Western therapeutic environment,
the client is well served. In Buddhism and in Vedic science this
cycling of power is called a samskara, or karmic pattern.
These karmic patterns pull people out of balance when they cycle
power through their psyches incorrectly. For John, work could be done
not only to remove the curse, but also to help him radically change the
way he cycled power and so longstanding karmic patterns could be
relatively quickly dismantled. By teaching people to draw power from
universal sources rather than from other people, symptoms are relieved
and balance restored.
FIRST STEPS TO HEALING
The first step in bringing John back into balance was to teach him how
to make a power retrieval for himself. So John was taught how to enter
the shamanic journey trance state. He agreed to learn to journey
without realizing the potential effect of the influx of universal power
the journey would provide.
The first journey can be read as a portrait of a person’s
relationship to power. John’s first journey attempt to the Lower World
to meet ‘a teacher in animal form’ and ask the animal if it was his
teacher, was characterised by complete shut down:
“There is nothing here. I am sitting here in this cave and there
is nothing here. I cannot see anything. There is nothing happening.”
This was not surprising, given his historic relationship to his power, and he was encouraged to try again.
“I am here in the cave and there is some kind of cat at the back of the cave. I am scared. I am coming back.”
He came out of the journey without asking the animal if he was his teacher. He tried again.
“I am in the cave. The cat is here. It is a mountain lion. I am
scared. It is not going away. ‘Are you my teacher in animal form?’ The
cat is just staring at me. It is not saying anything. It comes forward
out of the back of the cave. It gets very close to me. It does not hurt
me. I think it is my teacher.”
Once a relationship to a source of power was established through
the relationship with Mountain Lion, further work could be done. He
re-discovered the state of loneliness and isolation of his early
childhood, a state of soul loss.
In a traditional setting, shamans travel outside of time and find
and bring back (retrieve) the soul part that is caught there. In the
method I teach, and which John used (Depth Hypnosis), the soul
retrieval is affected through regression therapy. The regression takes
place in a lightly altered state of consciousness.
By introducing the perspectives of the Adult Self and the Teacher
parts of a person into the root circumstances surrounding soul loss,
re-patterning takes place, and soul retrieval is effected. In this
model it is the client who is doing all the work, not the shaman or the
therapist.
In the first regression, John came face to face with the young
child part of himself who was left alone when his parents had left on a
trip to Africa. Adult Self and this child soul part talked together,
and after establishing the time and place of the abandonment by his
parents, Adult Self asked:
Adult: Would you like to come with me since you cannot go with your parents?
Child: No. I am going to stay here until they come back and find
me. I don’t care if I am starved to death; I am not leaving until they
find me.
Adult: What if they never come back?
Child: Then I will die and they will be sorry then!
At this point, Adult Self at a loss, John was directed to ask
what Mountain Lion thought needed to be done. Mountain Lion came and
picked up the child like a cub. The child kicked and fought, but
Mountain Lion held on until the child was exhausted. Then Mountain Lion
gathered the child against it and let it sleep. It then directed Adult
Self to ask the child if it wanted to come back with the Adult. The
sleepy child agreed and the soul retrieval was affected.
Mountain Lion had allowed John (as a child) to discharge pent up
rage at his inability to influence his parents. This drained the power
driving the cultivation of power loss and John’s resistance to sourcing
power from his own sources. Only then could the soul retrieval be
effected.
More soul retrievals of this type took place over the next few
sessions, until John was able to experience what life was like when he
was drawing on his own sources of power. A turning point in his
understanding of what was needed to stop him cultivating power loss
came in a journey. He met Mountain Lion to ask ‘What do I need to do to
create a stronger connection with my own sources of power?’ and
expected the usual welcome where the cat would come forward to meet
him. Instead, the cat turned his back on him, and refused to answer his
question
This sent John into a sullen state, and then into a fury. He
spent the remainder of the journey alternately raging at Mountain Lion
and collapsing into a self-pitying heap. In reviewing the journey, John
was convinced his question had not been answered. He felt his familiar
view of the world had been confirmed: that Mountain Lion was treating
him the way everyone treated him - without the proper respect due to
him.
He was gently guided to understand, however, that Mountain Lion
was answering his question perfectly: He needed to take a deeper look
at the rage and self-victimisation that was driving the cultivation of
power loss. In doing this, he could truly step into his power and
dissolve any possibility of the curse maintaining its foothold in his
psyche.
It was difficult for John to try and resist this message. His
rage was so clear and it was so clearly in response to being
‘abandoned’; he then removed layer after layer of this interference,
with the help of Mountain Lion. Through this process, he came into a
very strong understanding of where the cultivation of negative power
had actually taken him and resolved to abandon the use of it for good.
Free at last, John was now ready to remove the curse himself,
with the help of Mountain Lion. The curse that had been cast upon him
by the man in the Caribbean had provided a path of initiation.
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