INTRODUCTION: Hank Wesselman PhD., holds advanced degrees in anthropology and zoology from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in the 1960s, living among people of the Yoruba Tribe in Western Nigeria, where he first became interested in indigenous spiritual traditions.
He has conducted field research in Africa as an anthropologist since 1971 and has taught for the University of California at San Diego, the University of Hawaii at Hilo, California State University at Sacramento, and Kiriji Memorial College and Adeola Odutola College in Nigeria. He currently teaches at American River College and Sierra College in northern California.
His widely-read books include his autobiographical trilogy: Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker, as well as The Journey to the Sacred Garden, and most recently, Spirit Medicine (with his wife Jill Kuykendall.) His website www.sharedwisdom.com includes his schedule of workshops and presentations.
DW: To me, “holistic” incorporates the body, mind and spirit equally into a total picture of living. With your being a shamanic practitioner and an anthropologist, in a sense this gives you a foot in both worlds the spiritual and scientific. So I have to ask you first, how do you view healthy living or holistic practices (including spiritual or energetic energies) from your experiences?
HANK: All healing begins with a holistic foundation. More than 3,000 years ago, the Greek physician and healer, Aesclapius, established the first holistic treatment centers in the ancient world where the principles and practice of medicine reached a high art. Over 200 of these centers were dedicated in his name after his death and were called Aesclapia. They are still remembered today as well as the healing practices he initiated in them – especially “divine sleep” or “dream therapy”. Those who were ill were brought to these holistic centers and placed in a state of light trance by the priests after several days of preparation and fasting. Then in the semi-darkness of these magnificent shrines, the spirits of Aesclapius and his family appeared to the sufferer, doing the diagnostic work and the healing. This is shamanistic medicine in every sense. A similar healing method is included in my book Spirit Medicine.
Among the indigenous peoples, it is understood that spirit medicine and physical medicine are different sides of the same coin, so to speak. If a warrior were brought into camp with an arrow sticking out of his body, that would not be the time to grab the rattle and go into trance. This would be the time to get that arrow out, stop the bleeding and prevent infection and promote healing—physical medicine—and all traditional healers know a lot about it. Yet unlike our Western medical paradigm, the indigenous healer uses both physical medicine and spirit medicine together, and to great effect. The goals of these two different modalities are somewhat different however.
The primary purpose of the practice of Western physical medicine is the avoidance of death and the prolongation of life. The goal of spirit medicine, on the other hand, is to nurture and preserve the soul. When your soul is in good shape, you are in good shape. When your soul is in shreds, you have a serious problem.
A good medicinemaker uses everything at their disposal when confronting illness. They know that physical medicine and spirit medicine form a unity, a continuum that flows back and forth. What Westerners call energetic medicine links the two together.
DW: This makes wonderful sense because to me it often appears that too many health practitioners are quick to put a label on a person, pigeon-hole them with a diagnosis, or just give them a pill to suppress a symptom. They don’t seem to seek out the root cause and treat it. They just keep changing medications or diagnosis as the root cause seeks other ways to express itself through physical symptoms.
HANK: Precisely.
DW: When you talk about the soul being in shreds, that would have a great impact on the over all quality of life as well – wouldn’t it? Can you also explain how spiritual or emotional attitudes can have an impact on physical health?
HANK: The indigenous shaman, in their capacity as a healer or medicine man/woman, devotes their attention to the relationship between cause and effect. It’s understood that as we pass through life we’re going to get colds, the flu and other viruses. As kids we’ll have measles, chicken pox and mumps. We’ll have sports injuries, fall off our bikes, and so on – and this continues throughout life. We may cut ourselves in the kitchen or get into a car accident, and some of us are unlucky and acquire internal illnesses of a serious nature, like hepatitis, heart disease or cancer. Eventually we pass through old age and the progressive infirmity and death of the physical body.
From the shaman’s perspective, however, these are all effects – every single example I just gave, and what the shaman is primarily interested in is the cause. In order for true healing to occur, it’s not enough to suppress the effects with medication. You have to address the cause.
For the shamanic healer, the classic causes of illness are not microbes, bacteria or viruses. They are internal states that we move into in response to life’s traumas, trials and tribulations. The first classic cause of illness is what we might call disharmony, a state that often develops in response to some sort of catastrophic loss experience.
Disharmony is what happens to an older couple who have been married for 40-50 years and one of them makes transition. Deep down there is an incredible bond between them and often, within the next six months or so, the surviving spouse will come down with something sudden, serious and they are gone. That’s disharmony.
Disharmony disempowers us. It diminishes us. When our personal power goes down we are vulnerable to illness. It’s amazing how often people become ill when they lose their job, lose their livelihood, retire, or get an “F” on a test.
The second classic cause of illness is fear. Fear is not good for you. It diminishes your sense of well-being. Your sense of well-being (your sense of being well) is the foundation of your personal health system. When your sense of well-being is diminished, it diminishes the ability of your immune system to function. And when your immune system goes down, you are vulnerable to illness—big time.
Now it is no news to Western medical practitioners that disharmony and fear can manifest themselves as illnesses that are recognizable to science – no surprise to anyone. Fear and disharmony are like drinking buddies. Fear creates disharmony and disharmony creates fear.
DW: A vicious cycle with the two nurturing and supporting each other. How destructive!
HANK: Well, it is the third classic cause of illness that is the most serious. This is the phenomena known as soul loss. Soul loss is regarded among the indigenous peoples as the major cause of serious illness and premature death, yet it is not even mentioned in our Western medical text books.
Soul loss implies damage to our personal supernatural – the essence of who and what we are—and it usually occurs in response to some sort of very serious trauma. My wife Jill wrote the chapter on soul loss in our book. Here are some examples:
A child comes into the world and perceives that they are not wanted or welcome. Perhaps they came in as a girl and the family was hoping for a boy—and the whole family turns away. This awareness of rejection can be perceived by a newborn and it can be devastating to the soul.
Soul loss can happen to a child who goes to school and is teased, bullied or ridiculed by their peer group – day after day. This kind of psychic attack can be greatly damaging to a young soul.
Soul loss is what happens to a child who is molested by those who are supposed to be caring for them—or to someone who is abused.
Soul loss is what happens in response to a rape experience.
Very often, the soul, traumatized by what has happened to the individual, will totally dissociate from the physical body during the time the act is actually going on. Often if the horror and the terror are severe enough, the soul fragments and the parts of it will dissociate and leave – not to return. This can be a life coping mechanism as in the case of someone who has been terribly brutalized and could not psychologically withstand the memory of what happened.
The Central Park Jogger in New York City is a classic example of this. This was a woman who was attacked, raped, and severely beaten, but could not remember anything of what had happened to her. The memories are simply gone. In such a case, the memories would be of no service to her as they would only traumatize her further.
Soul loss is what happens in response to a serious surgery or a terrible accident. I can’t tell you how many people have approached me over the years and said that they were in a terrible car accident years ago and have never been the same. It’s like part of them is missing. When I ask them to tell me about the accident, they tell me that they don’t remember it. They don’t remember the pain, the trauma, but they do remember waking up in the ICU. That’s usually a dead give away that a person has had soul loss. When someone has blocked memory and cannot recall anything from parts of their life, this is usually an indication of soul loss.
We could also be talking about an acrimonious divorce, a traumatic abortion experience for a woman or a miscarriage. My wife, who works as a soul retrieval practitioner, is often startled at how many experience soul loss on the day that they get married. Often one person may give up their life or their dreams so that their partner can live theirs. They just sort of let go of all of their gifts, qualities, and abilities that they had to offer the world.
Soul loss is what happened to all our men and women who were sent to Viet Nam, Korea, Kuwait, Desert Storm and now Iraq. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is soul loss. These young people come home as the walking wounded in response to the terrible damage that has happened to their soul, and unfortunately, our mainstream medical people have very little to offer them because they haven’t been trained in what to do when a person has lost a part of their soul.
Now--what do you think would happen if you went to a primary care physician and reported that you have had a terrible soul loss experience? A good one might say, “Gee, can you tell me a little more about that?” Most would just give you a funny look and ignore what you said. They simply aren’t familiar with this concept.
DW: Or you would wind up walking out with a prescription to help you “feel better”. How would a person know if they were experiencing soul loss? You’ve given wonderful examples of how it might occur – but are there symptoms or behaviors that could be indicators that a person could look for – either in themselves or others around them?
HANK: Soul loss is very easy to recognize if you know what you’re looking for, and all of this is laid out very nicely in Spirit Medicine. A classic symptom of soul loss is feeling fragmented – the sense that you are not all there. Another is being unable to feel love or receive love from another person. Having a relationship with someone like that can be devastating because the love you have to offer can never be received, nor do they have any love to offer you in return. They are emotionally remote.
Other examples might include: a sudden onset of apathy or listlessness or a chronic lack of joy. Sometimes I ask people when the last time was that they experienced real joy. They get a funny look on their face and confess that they really cannot remember the last time that they felt joy. An inability to make decisions or discriminate, the presence of addictions or suicidal tendencies, chronic negativity (when a person is always down) are other indicators of soul loss. This brings up the classic symptom of soul loss--depression.
An enormous number of Americans suffer from depression. About ten years ago there was a cover story in Time Magazine on depression in America. I think it was titled “Prozac: The Breakfast of Champions.” This was Time’s way of being very glib about a serious subject, but as I recall, the article revealed that about 60 million people – roughly a third of all Americans at that time– were taking anti-depressant drugs to control their moods on a daily basis. That’s a shocking statistic--one that reveals the depth of the damage that has been experienced both individually as well as in our “National Psyche.”
DW: That’s just incredible and astonishing. It’s kind of overwhelming when you think of 1-out-of-every-3 people are on anti-depressants. I have a different question. I think I already know the answer--Do you call yourself an Academic Anthropologist?
HANK: Yes. I teach four anthropology classes three days a week in two different colleges in the Sacramento area. One of the most popular classes that I offer is called “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion.” It’s about religion and magic in the lives of traditional or indigenous peoples.
In my research, I have been working for much of the past 30 years with an international team of scientists in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley in search of answers to the mystery of human origins. My specialty work involves reconstructing the paleoenvironments of paleontological and anthropological sites at the times they were laid down in the remote past. I’m currently working with a team in the Middle Awash Valley in Ethiopia where we are excavating a series of sites from between 4.5 million to 6 million years ago. We are recovering the fossilized bones of an early human ancestor who is so primitive, it may be the famous missing link that Charles Darwin predicted we would eventually find--the link between humans and apes. It has been named Ardipithecus.
DW: Fascinating, can you provide any details on this at this time?
HANK: We’re going to come out with a whole suite of papers, in Science or Nature most likely (possibly in 2006), as well as a series of monographs from the University of California Press, on various aspects of this fascinating project directed by Professor Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley.
Interestingly, my research has allowed me to spend much of my life living among indigenous tribal peoples, many of whom have rarely, if ever, been visited by outsiders. It was among them, of course, that I encountered shamans for the first time.
In the West, when we use the word “shaman”, most of us tend to conjure up an image of a masked and costumed tribal person dancing around a fire in the dark, involved in some mysterious ritual, accompanied by drumbeats. But inside that cultural shell of mask, costume and ritual, there is an individual who has a very real set of skills.
All true shamans are able to go into deep trance states in which they can dissociate their own conscious awareness away from their physical body and journey into an alternate reality that they call the spirit world. And in this alternative dimension, they encounter spirits--nature spirits, animal spirits, plant spirits, ancestral spirits, higher spirits, the compassionate angelic forces poised to help us, as well as the higher spirits beyond planetary and solar development. Through relationships with these spirits, the shaman is able to do various things, initially for themselves and then increasingly on behalf of others.
The shaman is the one who is able to restore power, for example, to those who have lost it. The shaman is able to access information from the spirits through divination. The shaman is able to guide the souls of the dead to where they are supposed to go in the afterlife. And of course the shaman is the master healer in the imaginal realms – the one who is able to work with the spirit to alleviate pain and suffering in humans.
The shaman is the individual who uses their own mind and body as the bridge between the transpersonal realms of spirit and the ordinary physical realm in which we live, eat, breathe, have jobs and so forth. When the bridge is formed, the spirits are able to come into our world and help us, and this is when miracles often happen. The missing link in healing is, in my opinion, spirit medicine.
DW: I have to say that your book Spirit Medicine is absolutely incredible and wonderful, too.
HANK: Thank you. There is also a little companion volume called The Journey to the Sacred Garden. The two books really work together to create a whole because “Sacred Garden” is about the shaman and provides guidance and tools so that the reader may find connection with a personal place of power healing in the inner worlds. Both books have CDs that record tracks of monotonous drumming and rattling to help alter consciousness. All of the instructions for their use are included in the books as well. I’m glad that you enjoyed Spirit Medicine.
DW: So much of today’s population is looking for answers. I’ve always used the adage: sometimes in order to go forward, you have to go back. It almost seems like a time where spiritually we are trying to evolve into the next state of consciousness by looking backwards to the indigenous roots and traditions that have withstood the test of time. Again, with your anthropological background – could you comment on that?
HANK: That’s a good way of putting it. As much of your readership is probably very much aware, there is a spiritual reawakening going on in the Western world in which non-tribal Western people are reconsidering aspects of an ancient technology of transcendence that was pioneered tens of thousands of years ago by the shamans of the stone-age indigenous people. There is an interesting series of beliefs, values trends that they hold dear. This is discussed in length in an essay called The Modern Mystical Movement posted on our website <www.sharedwisdom.com>
Some of their beliefs might include:
- the belief in existence of alternate reality which the indigenous peoples call spirit world;
- the belief that it is possible for ordinary people like you and me to learn to alter consciousness so that we can go into this alternate reality ourselves and have the direct transpersonal connection with the spiritual world that defines the shaman, the mystic;
-the belief in the existence of spirits – those spirit helpers and spirit teachers who are so familiar to the indigenous peoples.
It should be said that Jesus of Nazareth is regarded as an important spiritual teacher and healing master, whether or not the believer is psychologically Christian. Interestingly, although most modern mystics are not affiliated with any major church, temple or religion, all of us profess belief in some form of higher supernatural consciousness or being, or – if you will – God. In that line, all of us understand quite clearly, that every thing, every where is connected to every thing else through an underlying field of power. In anthropology, this is the doctrine of animatism – the belief in a single, unifying animating force that fills everything everywhere with energy.
Now this underlying force and these inner connections lead to a very strong ecological focus. We transformationals are very environmentally savvy. We are all deeply concerned with stopping corporate polluters and reversing greenhouse warming so that we can go beyond our limiting concepts of short term gain and discover the long term ecological sustainability upon which the future of our civilization, as well as the future of our species, depends.
Members of the transformational community are also distinguished by their deeply humanistic perspective on life.
We tend to be strongly concerned with the quality of life everywhere, both nationally and internationally. We’re concerned with the issues of children, women, the elderly, minorities and alternative lifestyles. We see relationships as being more important than material gain. We tend to have a very developed sense of the importance of balance and harmony because it is only in that state of balance and harmony that the Universe can continue to function for us in life enhancing ways.
There is an awareness that every thought, every emotion, every path that we take, every relationship we engage in, contributes either to the greater good of the Universe or to it’s suffering. So, there is a very strong ethical impulse within the transformational community for people to become more than they were, better than they can be, and so forth.
This, of course, leads us to a very strongly shared sense of faith and hope that as people move into and rediscover their own spirituality, they change--and as they change, the people they are connected to change in response. It’s kind of like a geometric progression from the individual outward through the fabric of the family, the business firm, society at large, eventually approaching a global effect.
It’s entirely possible that once this critical mass is reached, a really big change will occur in the world causing peace to break out and become the dominant reality paradigm. This, of course, is what enlightened souls like the Dali Lama have been anticipating– what he calls a spiritual revolution.
Interestingly, we transformationals still seem to be under the radar of the media. They really haven’t picked up on us yet, despite the fact that there are an enormous number of us. In 2000, a book came out by Paul Ray and his wife, Sherri Ruth Anderson called The Cultural Creatives. Based on 14 years of demographic research, their research revealed that there are approximately 50 million of us in the US alone with another 80 to 90 million in Europe. These are not small numbers and they appear to be growing. This awareness fills me with hope as it confirms that we are traveling in the company of an enormous number of allies.
DW: I have a copy of Newsweek that came out several months ago with a huge section on energy medicine. I would say that 50 percent of the copy was devoted to holistic modalities including material on hypnosis, meditation and yoga. I was heartened as I stood in the checkout line of my grocery store and saw it was on the cover too!
HANK: The face of medicine is changing because ultimately, it, like everything else, is consumer driven. People want these alternative therapies. They want them because they work. In this line, the shamanistic tradition has a body of wisdom and technique which is extraordinarily powerful because it is time-tested and it works!
DW: A lot of people connect or interlock shamanistic practices and soul retrieval, with Power or Totem Animals. Can you comment on that?
HANK: Healing occurs in stages. The first stage of healing is empowerment or power augmentation because healing can only take place within an individual when they are empowered. If you are disempowered, healing is simply not going to happen. Very often, the easiest way to empower someone is to bring them into connection with a spirit healer who will channel power, offer protection and support them. As a rule, the shamanic healer will engage in a practice called Power Animal Retrieval in which the practitioner enters an altered state of consciousness and goes into the spirit world to find a helping spirit to come and be in relationship with their client in order to empower them.
The next stage involves correctly diagnosing the problem. This is the same for Western medicine, I might add. Western physicians and shamans are both masters of diagnosis, however, the shaman is working with their spiritual allies to gain the information about the nature and scope of the person’s problem. This is, of course, called divination. The shaman, with the patient’s permission, will connect with spiritual allies and literally journey into the person’s body looking for the illness causing intrusions which have invaded in response to open or torn places in the person’s soul which allowed them to do that.
Now illness, for the shaman, is perceived as these inrusions, and once they are localized, the third stage of healing begins. This involves extracting the intrusive elements from the person’s energetic matrix. Carolyn Myss likes to call them energy circuits which are constantly circulating within the energy field of an individual, drawing from the personal power supply on a daily basis, 24/7, continually diminishing them at the level of their personal power. Energy intrusions, negative thought forms, negative emotions, negative intentions, negative perceptions of the self – these can serve as intrusions that people can create through chronic negative thinking or a negative approach to life. These continually diminish us, diminish us, diminish us… and this is not good for you.
With the assistance of their spirit allies, the shaman finds these intrusions and removes or extracts them from the person’s energy field.
The final stage of healing involves restoring the fabric of the person’s soul--a process called soul retrieval. In the North-West Pacific tribal cultures, people who do soul retrieval are often called “soul catchers”. Soul catchers are regarded as being in a league of their own as healers because what the soul catcher does is team up with their spirit allies and they journey as a group into the spirit world and find those lost dissociated parts of the self which have fragmented off and left, often forgetting their original source. Soul catchers find the lost parts and return them to the one who lost them, restoring the matrix of the person’s soul.
I discovered, quite by accident, almost 15 years ago, that I am married to a great soul catcher. My wife Jill Kuykendall is a specialist in this healing modality. Interestingly, she was trained in the Western mainstream medical paradigm and worked in acute care medicine for 25 years, so today, she walks in both worlds. She now has a full time private practice involved with soul retrieval work. Clients are coming from all over the country to work with her. The word is out that there is a great soul catcher on the West Coast. She is also the co-author of Spirit Medicine and wrote the chapters on soul loss, soul retrieval and more.
Soul retrieval is the final stage of a healing because from a shaman’s perspective, the primary problem in dealing with illness is not the cancer, the lupus, the HIV or hepatitis. The primary problem is the loss of power or the damage to the soul that let these illness intrusions internalize and take up residence in the first place. So the shaman works with energy, power and the helping spirits in order to restore power and facilitate the repair of the person’s soul. This, of course, is all important because if your soul has not been restored, there is no guarantee that the intrusions will not re-invade once they have been extracted.
DW: You know, the wisdom that you bring forth is so empowering that I seem at a loss for words at times. Please accept my apologies for not asking more questions, but you are filled with so much information to share, that I just want to listen to each and every word. What up-coming things can we look forward to from you?
HANK: Our schedule tends to fill up about a year in advance and we do about 40 workshops or presentations every year. We have a website <www.sharedisdom.com> and people can check there for events and up-dates. People tend to find us as they need us. I should also put in here that I’m returning to Africa in the Fall of 2005 to work on a research project there. But all our workshops will recommence the following January.
I would like to take a moment to talk to your readers about the choices they make in life – especially those choices made in full awareness or not, in consciousness or sub-consciousness. Those choices are what draw us further and further along the path of power and beauty – or it’s opposite.
It’s really all about learning lessons in the end, and the choices that we make are the vehicles through which we learn lessons. My wish for you and your readers is that you live well – love fully, and walk your path with heart. And may the force be with you!
One last thing--As I’m sure your readers are aware, the world seems to be moving deeper and deeper into crisis. As well, we have a crisis of leadership going on everywhere—among the politicians, the corporados, the military, even among our spiritual and religious leadership.
What is interesting to me is that only 2% of the world’s population is involved in pillaging and plundering, murder and mayhem, and the press seems to think that this is what we want to hear about. Accordingly, we often forget that the other 98% of us really just want to have a good life based upon respect, having a warm place to sleep, good food to eat, uncontaminated water to drink, schools for our children, jobs for our spouses and ourselves. We came here to be at home in this beautiful world.
So, things are not really as bad as the media would lead us to believe. Yet their reporting creates ever-increasing levels of fear and disharmony, and this is not good for us. This may be why certain illnesses like cancer – breast cancer and prostate cancer – are reaching epidemic proportions. They may be directly related to the social disharmony that people internalize into their bodies.
In this sense, Spirit Medicine is a serious attempt to take a body of indigenous wisdom and slip it into the minds of the public at large. In response, awareness of how and why illness works may increase in the public awareness. As we mentioned, the book comes with a CD to help readers learn how to shift awareness and begin their own self-healing by finding a personal place of power and healing in the inner world. A small book like this can make an enormous difference.
DW: I agree 100%. To me, if a book is concise, practical and user friendly, it seems to have a greater impact for readers. This is wonderful to point out too – DreamWeaver is about conscious living and creating empowering choices.
HANK: For a shaman the name of the game is power and their work begins with intention and trust. This is where everything begins. The more power you’ve got, combined with your focused intentionality, allows you to trust what is going to manifest in response. This is where it really begins.
DW: I would again wholeheartedly agree. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights with me this afternoon. Your words will provide a powerful tool for readers to make individual choices and trust themselves to take the next step to transform themselves, their lives and the world as a whole. Thank you again.