It is clear that flu, colds, bruises, cuts, infections, broken bones or even cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis etc. are disturbances that belong to the physical plane. Serious illnesses are constantly reminding us of the death of our physical body and they are all to be seen as part of what it means to be an embodied living being. But you haven’t thought that these illnesses are just effects, and if you were a shaman you would be interested in the cause.
Suppressing the effects of illness with medications on the physical plane will do no good. Instead, the causes of the illness must be addressed in order for the true healing to occur.
In other words, the ultimate causes of all illness are found within the imaginal realms. Seen from the shaman’s perspective, the causes of illness are not viruses, bacteria or microbes. The true causes are actually the negative internal states that appear within us in response to traumatic or negative life experiences. Thus, three classic causes of spiritual illness can be listed:
1: Disharmony
It’s experienced when life suddenly loses its meaning or in a case when we have lost an important connection to life.
For instance, if a person loses another person with whom he or she shares a deep bond. Let’s say a death of the spousal partner. The survivor may go into crisis because of the unbearable grief and within a short time he or she may face some medical challenge, like cancer.
Disharmony is experienced in response to such life situations and it causes diminishment of your personal power. Losing your job will likely lead you to the process of losing your livelihood. It’s simply a life-shaking situation. When you experience disempowerment, it affects your energetic matrix, and soon you become vulnerable to illness.
2: Fear
The person who carries great fear inside is vulnerable to illness due to his or her anxiety which aggressively diminishes their sense of well-being. This by all means affects their feeling of being safe in the world.
The sense of well-being is the sole base upon which your personal health system stands. Your immune system will have trouble functioning if this foundation is affected negatively. It’s all about the feedback mechanism: the fear and anxiety it creates, produces disharmony.
At the same time, disharmony generates fear, and if the two of them conjoin, the protective mantle of the body’s immune system is affected, as well as the energetic matrix.
After this, I’m afraid that illness is inevitable. Let me remind you that 500 years ago, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus stated that the fear of disease is more dangerous than the disease itself.
3: Soul Loss
The soul loss as a classic cause of illness is not even mentioned by the Western medicine, yet it is the most serious cause of premature death. However, the closest the Western medicine gets to soul loss is implying to it as ‘losing the will to live’.
In Western society, soul loss is seen as a phenomenon that usually occurs in response to trauma. If the trauma is severe, it may result in a fragmentation of that person’s soul cluster. Shattered soul parts dissociate and sometimes these soul parts may never return.
Unfortunately, the number of causes of soul loss is great. Soul loss can occur in childhood (if the child is unwanted or bullied), in adolescence (if the person molested by the one who is supposed to be caring for them), in mid-life (bitter divorce, betrayal, traumatic abortion, serious surgery, terrible car accident etc.).
War veterans come home personally damaged because they had suffered brutal soul loss. Although the medical specialists call this disorder a post-traumatic stress syndrome, they still have little to offer in terms of healing of these broken, wounded and damaged individuals.
Although the most common symptom of soul loss is depression, other classic symptoms include: feeling of not being all here, an inability to feel or receive love, lack of enthusiasm and joy, an inability to remember parts of one’s life (blocked memory), apathy and despair, an inability to make decisions, overexpressed (chronic) negativity, addictions, suicidal thoughts etc.
You might still think the term “soul loss” is unfamiliar among the Westerners, but you can surely stumble upon examples of it used on daily basis. For instance, when one is describing personal hardships, one says: “I lost a part of myself after the tragedy”, or “I’ve not been the same anymore since the trauma”.
Most everyone has a sense of having lost a part of themselves at some point in life, but no one has the awareness that the missing part could and should be recovered. If you are taking good care of the things that are ‘invisible to the eye’, you’ll be able to witness the great joy and good health through the ‘visible’, external parts that belong to the physical plane and live a healthier and happier life.