Trauma and Shamanism

Announcer 0:29

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, everybody.

As I record this, it is a beautiful morning. It's a Saturday morning. Coming to, we're in mid May right now. This is an absolutely beautiful time of year in the part of the world that I am the trees are budding and blooming and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing and it's very, very lovely day. On a welcome my listeners, wherever you are. I'm excited to see people from all over the world. listening to my podcast, I try to make it interesting to as wide an audience as I can, but still talking about things that I know something about otherwise, and you'll have to excuse me, I'm having a little you know, with spring comes allergies, I have a little bit of you here a little bit of congestion or, you know, I've sniffles I'm not sick. It's just my spring allergies acting up. In my voice I realize is a little bit scratchy this morning as well. Same reason. And that's okay. I live with it. It's you know, it's totally fine. Today, I'm going to talk about kind of a darker topic. And it's a topic that's extremely important to me, and I'm going to share a lot about my personal story with you. Because only because it's important to the topic, it's important to understand where I'm coming from and why this is a topic that is important to me. It's I want to say it's a topic that's near and dear to my heart, but it is not. It's not dear, certainly, but it's important. And so today I'm going to talk about trauma. And what that is from a spiritual, particularly sramana perspective. So when a shaman looks at trauma, what's going on? What's happening there? How, how do shamans in indigenous cultures, or shamanic practitioners in in, you know, practicing core shamanism or not, you know, more. I like to you know, modern shamanism is such a weird phrase, it's kind of an oxymoron. But anyway, people who are not connected with an indigenous culture who are practicing shamanism as a healing tool, how do they see and treat trauma? And what goes on and why why that's important. My personal take is that trauma is an epidemic. It's a pandemic, the way that that sort of a silent pandemic, it's so common. In people don't see it, people don't see its effect, they don't understand. And, you know, I'm going to talk a lot about that as well. I can go invisible for for ages, and other people don't know. You know, don't don't understand what's going on with them sometime. And that's part of my own story. So when I talk about trauma, I always, you know, if you've listened to this podcast before, you know, I like to define my terms, so that I'm not because my definition of things is correct or better than anybody else's, but so that you understand what I'm talking about when I say the word trauma. So, trauma, there's a couple different kinds of trauma, right? There's physical trauma or something severe happens to your body, you get into a car accident or something along those lines, there's damage to the body. That's called trauma. Right? It's damaged that happens. So, but I'm not talking necessarily about that type of trauma. I'm talking about what some people consider psychological trauma. And what shamans consider or you know, look at as a wound to the soul talk a whole lot about that today. So psychological trauma, what happens? What happens? how, you know, what, what's the what's the process? What's, you know, what's going on there. So, trauma is anytime there is a shock or extreme fear to the system. Right? So this could happen. You know, obviously, we think about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder frequently associated with people in wartime, lots of shocking, horrible things happen in more time. And, you know, they used to call it shell shock, or combat fatigue, or, you know, all of these different terms for it.

And, you know, the, you know, the, you know, we did a terrible job for so many years, and I'm not sure we're doing much better at bringing people back from wartime situations, and helping them through the trauma that they experience. So there's a couple of ways that trauma happened, and that are sort of multiply or make things worse, right. So and, you know, PTSD from war is not the only kind of trauma, everybody experiences trauma at some point. But, you know, not not everybody gets PTSD, there are things that can make that more likely to happen. And then in I think it's unfortunate that, you know, there is no separate diagnosis for Developmental trauma, which is trauma that happens to children. Because I do think that it presents, you know, from a medical perspective, from the medical model, that it presents its own sets of challenges, and needs to be recognized and diagnosed. And a lot of, you know, from reading some of the literature and listening to lectures about it, a lot of kids are mis diagnosed and medicated in ways that will basically prevent them from getting well. Because the powers that be don't recognize developmental trauma disorder, or complex PTSD as a thing, complex PTSD. Or see, PTSD is not a diagnosis that's recognized in the DSM. But it is, and I'm not, you know, I'm not giving out medical information. I am not a medical person or a licensed therapist or anything like that. I'm just talking from personal experience and from talking to therapists, but, um, complex, PTSD is not a diagnosis, not a recognized diagnosis. But people recognize that as you know, this is people who grew up with a pattern of trauma from childhood, right, it's not sort of a single traumatic event. It's ongoing, neglect, abuse, witnessing, you know, witnessing domestic violence, substance abuse, there's all kinds of stuff that happens that's ongoing, where a child doesn't feel safe or centered. And they, you know, they get a complex of traumas around that. And so, you know, it's something that I don't know, maybe they'll maybe they'll recognize that diagnostically at some point. And I know, there were there were a group of psychiatrists and psychologists who are trying to get something called developmental trauma disorder, which is another phrase for C, PTSD into the DSM. And for whatever reason, that was refused. I don't understand the politics behind such things. And so it's, it's not a great, not a great thing. So, um, I'm going to talk I'll talk about, you know, just briefly from the medical model perspective, you know, not being a healthcare practitioner or a therapist. I don't have that level of expertise, but I can, you know, I can only talk from my personal experience with with trauma. So, I'll talk very briefly about that. But then I'll spend most of my time talking about my own path and what's going on spiritually, from the perspective of somebody who practices shamanism. When there is when somebody has trauma, somebody has long term effects from trauma. What we've lumped into this PTSD category. So from there's a lot of debate about from the medical perspective What is going on with trauma? Right? It's very hard to pin down what's going on with people. And I think one of the reasons why childhood trauma may be different from PTSD that comes from sort of an adult being in you know, or young adult, even being in wartime is that they're different. You know, obviously, when you're developing, your brain is going through different changes, when you're eight 910 years old, or two years old, or, you know, your brain is going through different changes, different stages of development than you are when you are an adult.

And so the effects might be different from a purely physical perspective, we know that there are changes to the brain and PTSD, whether there are physical changes. There is also so you know, trauma, as a dis ease, right? is stored in different places. And this is why it's hard to it can be hard to treat from a medical perspective. So when you look at a person, a person has a body it has a mind has a spirit has a soul. All of these things, people are complex. And, you know, from a psychological perspective, we try to treat trauma as a disease of the mind. From the medical perspective, we say that trauma is stored in the body. From a shamanic perspective, we say that trauma afflicts the soul. Um, so which one of these is correct? To me? The answer is, all of them are correct. Trauma affects people on all of these levels, affects you energetically. It affects you physically, definitely. And it definitely affects you mentally, emotionally. I'll talk about my experience with trauma and some of my own symptoms. So, when I was in my early 40s, I was married, and I had two lovely kids and living quite a life in suburbia, and, you know, small town, suburbia, and had a great job, and everything was sort of hunky dory. And all of a sudden, I experienced a severe bout of depression was not my first time experiencing that. I had severe anxiety on top of that I had problems eating, I wound up losing a tremendous amount of weight in a very short period of time. I was having nightmares, difficulty sleeping, all kinds of stuff. I would have panic attacks if I had to visit my family, for example. So this is just a very short list of my, you know, what I was going through at that time. Um, and I decided, gosh, I haven't you know, no idea what's going on with me. It's really weird. And, and I decided to talk to a therapists at that point, which I highly suggest, I think, if, you know, I wish more people talk to therapists, see your shaman and see your therapist and see your doctor, you know, attack everything at every level. It's about spiritual warriorship. Right? Working on every level. So I saw therapist and the therapist started asking me questions about my childhood. Oh, you know, did was anybody in your family, an alcoholic or drug addict? Sure. You know? Did you witness domestic violence will? Sure, yeah. Were you were you ever abused as a child? Well, sure. Yeah. Were there ever situations of neglect? Absolutely. And at that point, I kind of cracked open. I kind of started remembering that, gosh, I've had bouts of severe depression since I was in preschool. And since I was a child, and I had these, like, I remember being in school and having a panic attack and not knowing what it was just, you know, unable to breathe and feeling flushed and kind of freaking out, you know, when I was eight or nine or 10 What the heck was going on, you know, And, you know, eventually I got the diagnosis because they, you know, Bill, your insurance company, they have to give you a diagnosis of PTSD. And I have long been a spiritual person I had been meditating my whole life basically, and, you know, practicing yoga and doing all kinds of, you know, doing all kinds of things, experimented with all kinds of spiritual paths. So, as part of, you know, treating myself trying to work through these

very severe issues I was having, that interfered with everything, like my life fell kind of fell apart a little bit, you know, I couldn't work. My kids were affected, you know, by seeing me in such a state all the time, my physical health declined. You know, it was was insidious, it was this horrible thing. And so I was meditating one day, and I, you know, get this clear message, which I now recognize was from spirit, that you need to go learn to practice shamanism, not, you need to go see a shaman and get a healing. You need to go learn to practice shamanism, so that you can work on yourself, you can work on healing yourself. And I thought, wow, that's gonna be really weird, because I don't live in the jungle of Peru or in Siberia, and how am I going to find a teacher? And, you know, just what's going on here? Like, I don't? I have no, you know, I don't even I don't know how that's gonna. And I didn't know the first thing. I don't even know what a shaman was. I don't know, understand what? shamanism other than things maybe I had seen on TV. And I thought of, you know, witch doctors, and, you know, people using, you know, different hallucinogens in Central and South America. So it was like, gosh, I don't know, but it was compelling. The message was compelling, which is now when I didn't recognize it, then necessarily, but now I recognize that's an indicator for me that it's a message from spirit, when I feel absolutely compelled to do something. As it happens, there was there is still a world class, well known, fantastic shamanic teacher who lived half an hour away from me, in the state of Maine in the United States. And Maine, interestingly enough, has a quite large and growing shamanic community. Who knew, right? I didn't know, I didn't, I had no idea that this was true. And thank goodness. So I called my teacher and I said, You know, I don't know anything about this. But this is the message that I got. And she said, you know, she had an apprenticeship starting up and said, Well, you know, you've missed my last introductory, introductory class, and you have no experience and, and this and that, but I'll meet with you. And, you know, you can, you know, we'll meet for an hour, and then I'll figure out if you can join, you can join this apprenticeship. And then if you do, you're gonna have to do a bunch of work on your own, to prepare for it. So I did, and I told her my story, and she took me on as a student, and my life has never been the same. I found my path in shamanism. And, obviously, I'm using that to teach and help other people. My initial intention was never to work with other people. My initial attention was completely self centered, I'm just going to work on myself, I'm going to heal myself, I'm gonna learn these techniques and technology and techniques. You know, technology sounds like a weird word, but it is it's, it's a science of healing. It's a spiritual technology. And I'm going to work, you know, I am going to work on myself. And I have to tell you, that was the best thing that that ever, you know, that's decision that spirit ever pushed me into making because I am, you know, years later, you know, it didn't happen overnight. It happened rapidly because some people live with live symptomatically for you know, the their entire lives and that's terrible. So what happened was You know, I eventually got my, you know, got my symptoms under control. And I live primarily symptom free. I don't have, generally speaking, and in, you know, it's not to say that I'm happy jumping for joy all the time I have ups and downs like every other normal human being on the planet. I have tried to, you know, I try to be in a good mood, but that's not always possible life happens, things happen, but I am not out of control of myself, I don't have

the symptoms that I used to when my life just fell apart. And, yes, I, you know, I have talked to a therapist, you know, many numerous therapists actually, um, you know, and I think that is a necessary and important thing. But I also practice shamanism daily, obviously, you know, I, it's, it's now become a part of me, it's something that I am more than something that I do at this point in my life. You know, I continue, though I, you know, see people as a practitioner, and I teach, you know, I continue to train, I continue to learn, it's a lifelong learning path. It's something I love about it. I use it every day for information for healing for greater spiritual connection. You know, I realize I'm not I'm not here to give a sales pitch about shamanism. We're not, we're not I'm not into proselytizing. But it is what it is. So I'm telling my story. So it and so the important thing, I think that I want to communicate is that I am not special. I'm not smarter than anybody else. I'm not more talented than anybody else. I'm not. I don't have special insight. I'm unique, but still have everything in common with everybody else. And so what I want to share with you, this is where this is where this becomes important is that there is hope you do not that if you are living with symptoms of PTSD, there is hope that you can that things can get better, that you can feel better, that you can control your symptoms. I do I do not. I do not judge what anybody does to cope or heal or anything like that. But I will tell you that I have never taken. I've never taken except with one exception. I've never taken psychiatric medication. I've never taken into depressions, except for here's one exception. I had a concussion. And I was given I had headaches continued, I slipped and hit smacked my head on the frame of the car door, which was not a fun thing. And got a concussion from it. And I had headaches that were ongoing. And they gave me they gave me a drug that was also used as an old. It's like an old fashioned tricyclic antidepressant. And so I took that for about a week. And that was that's my only use of antidepressants ever. And I wasn't taking them because I was depressed. I took them because I was having headaches from having a concussion. I also relied on sramana Keeling, I had a month's worth of prescription medication and I only took it for a week I try. This is just me personally, again, I don't judge if you take medication for depression or anxiety or anything else. There is nothing wrong with that. I am not judging. I realize. Sometimes when I talk about this sometimes when I talk about my decision to not take medication, people feel like I'm saying, you know there's something wrong with you if you take medication or something like that, never ever, ever would I want to say that imply that or make you think that i think that i do not whatever you're doing to cope, I will not judge and that includes if you're doing unhealthy things to cope. So a lot of people cope with trauma by doing you know, by taking drugs or drinking or getting, you know, becoming sex addicts or there's all kinds of sort of destructive ways over eating. You know, there All kinds of ways that we self medicate to deal with trauma to deal with the effects of trauma. And again, like, I don't want you to choose unhealthy things, I want you to take care of your body, mind and spirit. But I don't judge you for that. I don't say there's anything wrong with you for that. You're not a bad person. You're not, you're not broken. Okay. There is. There's, you know, there's something going on, you've been through some stuff.

And I think, you know, on a side note, I think that addiction is highly, highly connected to trauma. You know, so I think all of these methods of treating addiction one of the reasons I mean, there's lots of reasons why they're not always very successful. Right, I think, you know, if you look at the 12 step programs, their numbers are not very good traditionally. And again, I'm not putting, I'm not putting anybody down, like if you, if you are part of a 12 step program and working it, and it's helping you. Again, no judgment, I'm just saying, statistically, most people do not succeed with a lot of these traditional methods. And I think the issue is that if you treat the addiction, which is a symptom, and you don't treat the trauma, which is a cause, you know, what I see is a lot of people shifting symptoms. I remember talking to a gentleman one time, who had had a pretty severe cocaine habit. And he, you know, got into some trouble at some repercussions from that and decided to kick his cocaine habit, and he did, and that's good, because, you know, that is a dangerous drug. Right, you can definitely od on that you can kill yourself with too much of that. What do you replace it was with was sugar, right, and he had a severe sugar addiction, eat, you know, you know, tons of sweets, like really abnormal amount of sweets. So from a harm reduction perspective, probably eating sugar is better than cocaine, I would, I would, you know, argue that that he was in a better spot from doing less harm. But what he had done was replaced one addiction with another and I see this over and over and over again, with addiction. somebody gives up alcohol, and they wind up drinking tons of energy drinks and caffeine and, you know, stuff because we need, you know, a lot of these addictive behaviors are meant to sort of cover up or, you know, give us, you know, give us chemicals in our brain or to, you know, to basically not deal with the trauma. So, if you're being treated for addiction, if you have, you know, if you are an addicted person, I would encourage you to get help with trauma as well. So, somebody, somebody in the class one time asked me if somebody was and so we, you know, most places in the world and definitely around here, we have huge problems with opiate addiction. Um, lots and lots of people got hooked on painkillers and now have moved to heroin, all this stuff. So somebody asked me one time if shamanic healing could help somebody who was active, you know, actively in opiate addiction, meaning they're still using still using opiates. That's a hard thing to for me to answer. Because it's a little bit like renovating a house that's on fire. Right? You can treat some of it but the person's not in touch with the trauma. They're not there. They're continuing to cover it up. They're continuing to cause trauma by using the the, you know, by using the opiates. So, let's talk about trauma a little bit from the perspective of a shaman. What does a shaman See? When they look at somebody with trauma when they look With the shamans eyes, and the word shaman in different languages can be translated as one who sees in the dark or one who sees clearly definitely holds the implication of seeing. And again, when I, when I see somebody with an addiction, or you know, actually lots of different things, lots of different things present as trauma. So if you're in a, if you're in a helping profession, your therapist, your doctor, your spiritual healer,

um, start to become aware of what people present with. Because trauma can, you know, trauma can pop up in lots of different ways. It depends on the person. So for me there, you know, obviously, there was mood disorder, mood disruption, anxiety and depression, there was problems with appetite with eating, I couldn't eat, it would make me sick to eat. I had attention problems, like it was affecting my work, because I couldn't focus on what I was doing. That's just my, you know, I had the other thing other parts too, that indicated that it was PTSD. I had flashbacks, I had nightmares, trouble sleeping. So there can be this whole constellation of symptoms. So if you're in a helping profession, and somebody shows up with addiction, or depressive symptoms, or, you know, all of these things, I can't even elucidate everything that everything that somebody with severe trauma might experience. Um, you know, it might be a good thing to look into that. It might be a good thing, you know, obviously, do it, you know, seek out some training and understand how to talk to somebody, be trauma aware, understand how to talk to somebody, and the big one, a big indicator of trauma is dissociation. That is, kind of the number one, whatever, you know, whatever else anybody experiences. trauma is dissociative. And what if you don't know what dissociation is, it takes on two forms. One is depersonalization. Meaning, I feel like I'm outside my body. Right, that feeling that that you're outside your body, which, you know, a lot of it on the shamanic path, if you you know that that kind of sets you up for being a good shamanic practitioner being able to get outside your body. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes trauma to do that. So that's depersonalization. You know, some, some times I have experienced this, you feel like you're floating above your body, or you're behind your body, like you're not in your body. And the other one is d realization, meaning you feel like and I've experienced this as well. You feel like the world you're experiencing isn't real, like you're in a dream. And, you know, it's interesting to me, I've had I've had clients come to me before, who, you know, reported, you know, they're like, Oh, I just, I feel really dead inside. And I said, Well, do you know, do you have an experience with trauma? And no, no, no, nothing like that. Okay. Well, do you ever feel like things aren't real? Oh, yeah. All the time all the time? Do you ever feel like you're floating outside your body? Oh, sure. Sure. So you know, and then I journey I do diagnostic journey. And then I can see that there's trauma there. But those you know, just from questioning those kinds of things. And that might be a good set of questions. Do you ever feel, you know, asked questions around if you're in a helping profession, ask questions about dissociation. And if it's a regular occurrence for people, it's a really good indicator that there's that there's some trauma, even if the person isn't aware of it, because it will tell you that for most of my life, I did not remember most of my trauma. And it's weird. It's not. You know, one of the things I struggled with was are there. You know, there can be false memories and that's absolutely memory is fallible, particularly from childhood memory is a process It's not a static thing. It's not your memory is not like storing something on a computer and recall it, you know, storing a file on a computer and recalling it later. Your memories are connected to everything else you've gone through and filters and things you've watched on TV, and all this stuff. So you might think you have objective memories about things and they aren't. And so I struggled with are the things I'm remembering real? And then I got confirmation from family members. Oh, yeah, that totally Yes, that definitely happened. Okay, well, you know, consensus then tells me the things I'm remembering are real.

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trauma is an affliction of the body, mind and spirit and a treat it you need to treat it well, you need to take care of all things, all three things. Right. So when a shaman treats trauma and does soul retrieval, they're tending to the soul part, which is sort of the root core, if you don't take care of that the other parts can't heal, the integration work is for the mind and the body. And if you see a shamanic practitioner, and you get soul retrieval done, chances are you might very frequently there is a profound change almost immediately, not always, but very frequently, you might feel like, gosh, I feel fantastic after that, that happens with a lot of my clients, they feel really great afterwards. And then give them the integration work. And you might be tempted not to do the integration work because you feel great. At that time, do the integration work, do the work the practitioner gives you this is a key to you know, you might have some emotional relief, you might feel a physical release, you might, you know, definitely the soul, you know, the soul part has been returned and integrated into the soul body. But you want to get your system kind of in alignment, you want to get things you know, it's like, okay, I, you know, I changed the tires on my car, but I didn't balance and rotate them, and I didn't, you know, I didn't balance them the tires, and I didn't get an alignment done. So I'm just gonna keep going and keep wearing the tires down on my car. Got to get everything taken care of, you know, your tires replaced, you get the alignment done in your car, so you don't wear them down on the edges. And, you know, I don't know why I always I was sort of talking about people from I'm not a I'm not a really big car person. But I was talking about people from the perspective of cars, I guess, because cars are complex systems. And so our people right cars have electrical systems and coolant and engines, and nowadays, they're all computerized and electronic and they have tires and you know, undercarriage and a, you know, a frame a body a frame, and then you know, the the panels and the shell, the windshields and there's just so many parts, it's very complex, and humans are infinitely more complex than any machine that any human has ever built. Humans are infinitely more complex. Right? And even when I speak of body, mind and spirit that is such a simplification, right? When I say your body, the body that you have how many systems can you think of how many different types of cells? How many different types of proteins and how many different types of neurotransmitters how how complex is the endocrine system? You know, so your body is a physical thing, but it's also a bunch of processes. It's a bunch of systems. And your soul is just as complex. And your energy body is just as complex and your mental body is just as complex. Human beings are complex, I find it fascinating. It's really interesting stuff. So back to trauma, and, you know, so I would say, if you, you know, definitely, if you're experiencing some psychological symptoms, and you don't, you know, get some help. Definitely, if this brought up anything for you, talk to a counselor or therapists see your doctor, talk to a shamanic practitioner you know, and, and again, for me, I'm not giving out any kind of medical advice not qualified to do that don't have a license to do that, even if I did, wouldn't do it on the podcast. Um, for me, a big indicator is that dissociation if you experience dissociation regularly when you're not meaning to. So yes, you can force yourself to dissociate when you meditate or when you do shamanic journey or you practice astral projection or other other things. Or sometimes you get sick and you kind of feel out of it. That's normal.

Not to say that dissociation is abnormal, it's it's not the regular, it's not ordinary. It's not the regular state of the way. Things are experienced by people. I don't know, I don't know how to put it. I'm trying to be non offensive here to clear, I don't want to call you abnormal, if you experience dissociation dissociation is a very normal, adaptive process. In my honest opinion. I do not think dissociation is maladaptive. I do think it shows up at times when it's inconvenient, and that might be considered maladaptive. Right? I remember. I remember a time I was a boy, I was in Boy Scouts, maybe I was 13 or 14 years old. And we were camping. And we were we had had a big bonfire. And if you've never experienced Boy Scouts, you know, you have a big bonfire and everybody gathers around and you do you sing songs, and you do funny little skits. And you know, it's, it's pretty entertaining. It's a it's a fun way to end the day. And we were headed back to we were headed back to our tents where we were sleeping. And I just remembered, everything started moving in slow motion. And I felt like I was in a dream. And I felt like I was outside of my body paring down on it, and thinking to my like, thinking to myself, What is going on here? Like I really didn't understand. And I asked, you know, I remember asking the boys I was walking with? Um, do you guys feel like you're in a dream right now? And they were like, No, I don't I don't understand. So it was a really weird thing for me. But then I have experienced that through my life. And then when things sort of really broke down for me, later in my life in my early 40s, I was experiencing dissociation all the time. So if it's something you experience, I think it's a good indication that there's probably some trauma there, even if you don't remember what it is. And I don't want to try to implant false memories, because it is not important to relive your trauma. It's not from a shamanic perspective, you don't even have to remember what the trauma is to heal the missing soul to do soul retrieval. I have done soul retrieval on lots of people who were like, I don't, you know, I don't know at what point in my life that this, you know, this thing came from. So spiritually, there is also ancestral trauma. There's also trauma that's passed down through families. So something severe goes on in your family, many generations back, and I could not even tell you how far back, this goes, the research is still out on this. And that gets passed along on a physical level, we can see epigenetic changes in the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. So we know, on a physical level, we can see the remnants of severe trauma, at least a couple of generations, in human beings, and that's purely physical, and I can tell you on a spiritual level, it is much farther back than that. And maybe someday, you know, we'll see. You know, I don't know what kind of research would have to be done. But we'll see physical changes, manifesting in people, generations and generations and generations later. And how many of us do not come from some history of some traumatic history? How many, you know, how many of us cannot like if you go back far enough, you know, we're history of humankind is being displaced or enslaved or, you know, war or famine or any of these, you know, any of these horrific things. So, I think it's fair to say that there's trauma and everybody's family history and everybody's ancestral line. I cannot think of a culture where that wouldn't would not be true. may not be recent.

I may not be in the past, you know, few generations, but certainly, you know, my, my look at my, you know, some of my own ancestry. Um, you know, some of my Irish ancestors came over during the potato famine and probably lost the Irish potato famine and probably lost family members and experienced starvation and all kinds of stuff. And then when they got here in the US were treated poorly, very poorly, by the people who are already here. Same thing with, you know, some of my other some of my other ancestors, I had ancestors that were kidnapped by Native Americans here, you know, after after landing and had their infant murdered in front of them. You know, there's, there's trauma and everybody's, you know, so even though my European ancestry were colonizers, and, you know, we're, you know, in part responsible for causing a lot of strife and heartache and disease and taking over lands and warfare and all of that stuff. That's not to say their trauma is any less, right. So it doesn't matter what your, what your family history is, you deserve to heal from your trauma, you deserve to heal from the trauma that you're carrying. And there's a lot culturally, there's a lot of trauma. So there's another aspect that can happen with soul loss there can be so trauma can be this, you know, we think of it as like, I go through something really horrific and shocking. And yes, absolutely. That's sort of classical definition of trauma, most dramatic, most impactful. But there can be situations where it's, you know, I don't have, I don't have fantastic terminology for this yet. Maybe somebody can, if somebody thinks of it, maybe I'll talk to some therapist, friends of mine, to discuss this sort of level, there's sort of this low level ongoing trauma. So an example of that is something something isn't necessarily shocking. But there is a long term, either neglect or threat to survival. Right, which neglect is a threat to survival, particularly if you're a child. So I mentioned like the the Irish Potato Famine that some of my ancestors lived through. And, you know, seeing people around you dying of starvation and worrying about where your next meal comes from, is living in a constant state of unsafety and fear. And in my own background, having you know, a background of you know, child abuse and living in a family where there was alcoholism, and domestic violence and all these things. There's this constant underlying sense of unsafe pneus. Right, where there's no center, there's no place to cling on to that says, I'm safe. And so what can happen during those periods where there's maybe not an active threat, maybe somebody is not being particularly violent in that moment. There's this low level existential fear, am I going to be safe? Is something going to happen to me, you know, even if it's not articulated, there can be this slow leak, like you have a pinprick in a tire. I can't I'm using a car analogy, I guess. You have a pinprick in the tire, that's a slow leak away of soul essence. You might be living in a relationship that is emotionally abusive. And, you know, long term that will cause soul loss, because significant soul loss, right, because that emotional abuse doesn't give you you know, it makes you feel unsafe over a long period of time. And that creates, you know, creates trauma, it creates all kinds of, you know, again, the same kinds of issues even though you may not be able to pin down Oh, this, you know, huge dramatic event happened to me. So, there's a couple things I want to mention before I wrap up talking about trauma

and One is, you know, animals, animals, particularly mammals experienced trauma as well, I don't know if you've ever had a chance to observe a, you know, a dog or some other kind of animal experiencing like a shock or fright or, you know, whatever. And universally, what you'll see except for human beings, for some reason, we don't do this. You'll see them literally shaking off the trauma. Right? Something will happen, and you'll see a dog, like get up and shake itself off. Like, oh, that's, that's odd, you know, dogs shake off when they're wet. They shake that, you know, whatever. It is a nervous system reset that they're doing. Animals are mostly pretty good. I mean, yeah, so you can traumatize animals to the point where they, you know, they have they have issues, you know, they can become overly aggressive or overly shy or fearful or whatever, that definitely happens. But in general, because animals don't have aren't as the non prefrontal cortex. You know, here I'm separating animals from humans, humans are animals, we are soul equals, we'll put it that way. So talking about the brain at this point. Um, but most animals, particularly mammals, are fairly good at shaking off a lot of, you know, a lot of these day to day traumas that they experience where human beings are not. And there's that, you know, there's that sort of shaking thing. And the other thing I'll mention is there's a, there's a lot of fantastic research finally going on on trauma right now. And it's everything from how trauma is stored in the body, to how the the, you know, the Vegas Well, I guess this is about trauma in the body, but have a vagus nerve, you know, and polyvagal theory and all these things with trauma. And then there's also a lot of research starting now with sake, you know, say you know, psychoactive medications that are traditional medications, and, you know, we would consider them hallucinogens or entheogen. So there's a lot of experiments going on with, well, not all of them are traditional. So they're experimenting with LSD. Now they're experiencing experimenting with Scylla, Simon, and some of the more modern synthetic psychoactive medications like MDMA and things like that. It's very difficult in most countries to experiment, and there are fantastic results. Right? You know, these psychedelics, so psychedelic assisted therapy is being studied, it's hard to study these in most places in the United States, most of these substances, or all of them, are considered what they call schedule one drugs. Meaning that some bureaucrats in the, you know, some department in the government have decided that these drugs are highly dangerous, and have absolutely no legitimate medical value. Which is, and both parts of those are, you know, for these drugs, that their experiment, they're finally able to experiment with art absolutely ridiculous. Absolutely. 100% false and ridiculous. Take psilocybin, for example, you know, on the chart of, you know, on the research showing harm to harm to humans, so they're talking about, you know, what can cause severe harm, you know, and they ranked 33 drugs in order of most dangerous to least dangerous and they take into account things like addictive nature, ability to overdose things and, and they rank it as harm to self and harm to others. Right, so if I'm, you know, heroin causes a lot of harm to others because people are, you know, doing you know, doing terrible things to get access to the drug or you know, that sort of thing and alcohol. So alcohol is like third or fourth, see the third or fourth most dangerous drug on the chart. silicided which, if you don't know is, you know, commonly called magic mushrooms. It's the it's the psilocybin is the active chemical in shrooms mushrooms.

It is like 16th on the list. It's way down the list from alcohol, which is legal in most places. So it means it's less harmful than alcohol. So the, you know, the extreme risk to humans thing is false. And then the idea of no medicinal value. traditional cultures have been using it for centuries, if not millennia, they are now proving the the medical use, there are places in the US that are decriminalizing mushrooms. I think this is a good thing. I think anything that provides relief for people and, you know, particularly when we can look at indigenous wisdom, these people who sort of knew how to survive in harsh circumstances and knew how to heal themselves, using the materials that were around them, we should be looking at that we should be honoring that. So the idea that this, you know, the substance is a harmful, you know, as harmful as something like heroin and has no medicinal value. Both of those things are ridiculous. But the bureaucrats have placed it on the, you know, the highest level of restriction that you possibly could. And the issue with that is it makes it very difficult for researchers to experiment with it, because they have to get all of this special clearance from the Food and Drug Administration. stuff has to be tightly tightly tightly controlled, and so it hinders research that could really be helping people out there. So, and I would love to see more research with, you know, these tools being done in a compliment with Shimano Keeler, so maybe we train therapists in Shimano Keeling, or maybe a therapist works in conjunction, you know, or a psychiatrist, works in conjunction with a shamanic healer. Let's take all approaches, let's let's bring people relief. Let's heal people, let's help them experience their wholeness and fullness and live life a life of joy and fulfillment. And let's not hold people back from that, you know? Because for for not, you know, I can't think of a good reason for that. So anyway, not to go, you know, not to go. I'm not I'm not being political here. I'm just being pragmatic. I just think, you know, some of the ways these things are enforced cause more harm than good. And we should be looking to do less harm, we should be looking at harm reduction. So, that is trauma. And I and I'm sure I will speak more about this in the future. I have written a lot about trauma and my experience with trauma. I you know, have you know, know, obviously, I'm getting a little tongue tied at the end of this. I've written a lot about trauma. It's a topic that's important to me, it's a topic that's personally important to me, because I'm you know, I have been through the healing process. And I hope that I hope that I can give you some hope that if you experienced trauma Are you there people in your life who have PTSD symptoms or whatever that you can get better, you can control your you know, control your symptoms, you can feel better, you can't say cure, because that's a medical term and it has specific terminology, but you can live symptom free. It takes work. It takes seeking help, it takes a willingness to seek the help that you need. But if you do, there's hope. And I am living proof of that. Like I said, I'm not special. I'm not smarter than anybody. I am not any more blessed from spirit that anyone else. Spirit did give me some information that I guess helped me out tremendously. And I wound up being able to help other people and I love that more than anything in my life. I love doing that. I love helping people. I love talking to you all about trauma and I love seeing clients and helping them through some of the things that that I have experienced.

With that, I will leave you and I will talk to you next time.

Announcer: 1:10:20

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact john go to MaineShaman.com that's maineshaman.com