Spiritual Healing - Limbic Revisioning and Epigenetics

[travsha]

I recently shared this piece on another topic about healing, but thought maybe I would start a thread about it too.  This is the rough draft for one of the chapters in my next book.  It is about spiritual healing from a western medical perspective.  I have seen people cure emotional, spiritual, and physical disease with magic - this is my best guess as to what goes on for many of those healings (perhaps not all of them).  Enjoy!

 

P.S. - this book is about 30% finished, and will be my 4th book.  It is about Plant Spirit Medicine - or basically shamanism and witchcfraft focused on working with plant spirits.  

 

“The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole.  No attempt should be made to cure the body without the Soul… the great error of our day is that physicians separate the heart from the mind and the mind from the body.” ~ Socrates 

 

Why work with these plants?  There are many reasons to work with these plants, but healing seems to play a central role.  Especially in shamanic style practices, many people work with the plant spirits to help the sick.  The physically sick, the mentally sick, the emotionally sick, AND the spiritually sick.  

 

In the practice of curanderismo, and in most shamanic style practices, illness is seen as usually having a spiritual cause.  For example, chronic pain, cancer, weight gain, baldness, diabetes – these are usually thought of as physical problems, but in a shamanic perspective this might not be the case.  The shaman or healer might instead point to a lack of connection with spirit guides, or point to intrusive energy in the client, or repressed emotions and memories.  The intrusive energy would be a spiritual cause, which is then manifested as physical symptoms like chronic pain, cancer, or anything else.  

 

In my experience, pain and dysfunction often arise, or at least are made worse by people resisting themselves.  Your body can regulate itself much better when relaxed – chi moves more freely, muscles don’t cramp, cells receive nutrients and expel waste more efficiently, and nerves and organs work more effectively (for a scientific example, compare function of the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system – the first excelling in healthy cell functioning, while the second excels at fight or flight and survival situations.  If you stay in fight or flight mode too long, your body becomes rigid and unhealthy leading to illness caused by “stress”).  If you have something within yourself that you do not want to acknowledge (repressed emotion or memory, health dysfunction, mental confusion or need to make decisions ect), your body can create a response to any repression that occurs.  Ignoring problems allows them to grow.

For example, you may have a lot of anger you refuse to let go of.  You might hold this anger in your stomach, which could lead to abdominal clenching.  That clenching can then lead to fascial and muscular restrictions which become more and more habitual.  Those restrictions may lead to mis-positioned organs, restricted chi, upset stomach and digestion, ulcers and so on.  Or instead of anger, maybe repressing something builds stress which leads you to clench your jaw, which becomes a TMJ disorder, and leads to headaches and neck pain.  Maybe this pain even disrupts healthy body and cell functioning enough through inflammation and oxygen depletion that cells reproduce incorrectly and cause other issues like cancer.  

 

Or maybe resisting the self just impairs immune and energetic functioning enough that when some negative energy or a “bad wind” comes by, you aren’t prepared to maintain healthy boundaries and relationship to this energy, and the energy becomes an intrusion which could cause harm.  This intrusion could lead to the same issues as above, and often looks for areas where this type of dysfunction is already occurring to take advantage of.  

 

This takes on a deeper level too, because the body is incredibly inter-related.  As your body builds resistance to itself, your brain develops and shifts to fit it’s most common uses.  There is a phenomena called Hebbian Learning which states that “neural nets which fire together wire together, and those that do not fire together, do not wire together.”  Basically, this means that neural pathways which are used often build stronger connections which make them easier to use in the future, and neural nets which do not get used often start to breakdown and disappear.  Because of this, our brains often find it easier to use the stronger neural pathways and keep us in a habitual frame of mind.  Obviously, this can be an effective or detrimental function, depending on whether or not that habit is healthy for you!  The largest implication of this phenomena is that your brain can restructure itself and change the way you experience life.  This has huge implications.

 

The area that this Hebbian Learning process might have the most noticeable effect on our health is within the limbic region of the brain.  The limbic brain is where we store memories, process emotions, have dreams and sexual desire, and is also related to our sense of self in the past.  Through the autonomic nervous system, the limbic brain is also connected directly to our tears, laughter, digestion, vomiting, diarrhea, ect (all the different types of purges - sounds like an Ayahuasca ceremony!).  The limbic region is also open-looped, which means that it is regulated by your relationships to other people, and this region can become damaged from critical emotional experiences or difficulty coping with stress.  Limbic revision is the therapeutic alteration of personality residing in the human limbic region of the brain – resulting in greater emotional health, stress coping abilities, and better choice making in relationships.  Limbic revision is basically a fancy way of saying emotional healing – with added insight to the mechanic of how this healing takes place.  Usually, with things like psychotherapy, this process may take many years, but anecdotally speaking, this process is much, much faster with plant medicines and shamanic practices.  

 

Limbic Revisioning is also connected to epigenetics, so this process works on multiple levels.  Epigenetics are the coding of your genes, not the actual genes themselves, and this is highly susceptible to internal revision.  Environmental toxicity, nutritional stress and psychosocial stress can effect genetic expression by altering epigenetic physiology, leading to numerous different diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, mental health problems, and auto-immune diseases.  When doctors research childhood traumas, neglected children, and similar cases, they find that most of the damage seems to be stored in the epigenetics.   

 

But the shaman doesn’t see this limbic revisioning and epigenetics, or necessarily even know about the limbic brain.  From the shamans perspective, they see what they describe as dark energy or spirits, and they fix this by “cleaning” the client (I believe this “cleaning” involves limbic revisioning).  If these energies aren’t cleaned, then the client often gets sick or has other emotional problems.  So we come into another idea of allostatic burden and load: our energy system or stress response system is burdened overtime by accumulated stress.  This accumulated “dark energy” or stress can modify our limbic system or epigenetics, and our system sometimes becomes over-burdened, resulting in illness.  This is largely documented in science as a potential cause of many health issues, and has long been held as a source of illness within natural medicine and shamanic healing circles.  Short-term stress responses like releasing adrenaline and cortisol, or putting of problems to be dealt with later, which are helpful in small doses, can become harmful when they are used too frequently – creating allostatic burden.   This burden can have long lasting effects on the functioning of the autonomic nervous system as well as the immune system – creating physical disease from emotional causes.  

 

So in light of comparing the shamans perspective with the western medical perspective, it seems like shamanic ceremonies work through a process of “cleaning” allostatic burdened and pathologically imprinted epigenetics from our emotional centers (limbic brain).  By the way – these centers just happen to be hard-wired into our tears, yawns, and vomit, which is why crying can be so healing, and why plant medicines sometimes cause an emotional/physical purge (rapid limbic revision).  

 

This healing is largely based on the idea that your brain can restructure itself and change the way you experience life.  This restructuring is a more western and medical based understanding of how shamans heal clients by cleaning “negative energies”.

 

So, if we can return to our more shamanic way of thinking about energy and balance, we find three main keys to achieving lasting healing, all of which involve changing our emotional and mental thinking patterns.  First, the client must find faith that a cure is possible, and they must participate in their own healing process (through ceremony and/or real life action).  The client must also find faith that their mind, spirit and other resources are powerful, and can be used as effective assets for dealing effectively with life’s problems.  Lastly, the client must gain awareness of the forces around them, as well as their relationship to those forces so that continuing good health is assured.  These lessons must be taken to heart for true healing to occur.  

Edited November 13, 2014 by travsha

[Horne]

Interesting post, Travsha! Unfortunately it's a topic I know little about though, so I'll most likely buy your book when it comes up for sale.

 

What you wrote about yawns and tears struck a nerve with me, as in my twenties I experimented a lot with psilocybin mushrooms, and yawns and tears and purges were usually part of the process before I reached a stage of sudden insight into whatever was on my mind at the time. I remember thinking I always had to reach some "low" before reaching a "high" somehow. Is your book going to cover psilocybin experiences? I would be delighted if it does.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Horne

[travsha]

Yes - there will be a section on psilocybin mushrooms.  Most common types of entheogenic fungus and plant will be covered at least briefly.  We used to always say, the best mushroom experiences were the ones that made your eyes water - now I think I know why!  With Ayahuasca, almost all my "purges" are giant yawns actually - like my jaw is gonna crack open!  

 

A lot of the entheogens have common features in how to get the most from them healing wise.  In each tradition I have found, learning how to sing their visions is one of the main skills for a shaman to learn (this is true with Aya of course, but also with mushrooms, salvia, iboga, san pedro, snuff's, datura ect).  Fasting or dieta can help you connect more deeply with plants.  Intention and ceremony to guide the experience are always present - just lots of common threads.  

[Horne]

Yes - there will be a section on psilocybin mushrooms.  Most common types of entheogenic fungus and plant will be covered at least briefly.  We used to always say, the best mushroom experiences were the ones that made your eyes water - now I think I know why!  With Ayahuasca, almost all my "purges" are giant yawns actually - like my jaw is gonna crack open!  

 

A lot of the entheogens have common features in how to get the most from them healing wise.  In each tradition I have found, learning how to sing their visions is one of the main skills for a shaman to learn (this is true with Aya of course, but also with mushrooms, salvia, iboga, san pedro, snuff's, datura ect).  Fasting or dieta can help you connect more deeply with plants.  Intention and ceremony to guide the experience are always present - just lots of common threads.  

..................................

 

Awesome, consider a copy of the book sold. :smile:  I never tried Ayahuasca myself but I remember the almost impossibly intense yawning very well from using mushrooms. Damn, I should go and buy me some again in the near future. At least Psilocybe tampanensis is still legally for sale here, cheap too.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Horne

[travsha]

I had to look on your profile where "here" was - Ayahuasca is legal in Netherlands too actually.  You guys seem to have less bogus control over what plants are legal!  

 

Psilocybin fungus is not legal where I live, but the strongest ones in the world grow all over here (cyanescens).  I have also had good luck finding Amanita's (which are legal here).  Both of them grow all over any parks and woods, as well as many peoples lawns and houses!  

[Horne]

I had to look on your profile where "here" was - Ayahuasca is legal in Netherlands too actually.  You guys seem to have less bogus control over what plants are legal!  

 

Psilocybin fungus is not legal where I live, but the strongest ones in the world grow all over here (cyanescens).  I have also had good luck finding Amanita's (which are legal here).  Both of them grow all over any parks and woods, as well as many peoples lawns and houses!  

............................................

 

The Netherlands used to be fairly tolerant towards psilocybin mushrooms for years, and they were legally sold in so-called "smartshops". Around 2007 the political climate became a lot less tolerant though, First the dried mushrooms were made illegal for sale, and only the fresh ones could still be sold legally. Then further limiting steps were taken and nowadays you can only buy the underground parts of the fungi legally (usually referred to as "truffles"), while the actual mushrooms are illegal. Insanity, I know. 

 

I used lots of different varieties of psilocybin mushrooms, also Copelandia cyanescens and I loved those best (ah, the visuals!), they were called Hawaiians here in popular language.

 

I did try Amanita muscaria too, they grow overhere a lot, especially in the east of the country. I ate them and smoked them, but I didn't like my experiences that much, as they made me feel incoherent and didn't provide me any clear insights  and peak experiences like I was used to from taking psilocybins.

 

You are right, Ayahuasca is legal here, and I think the only reason I've never taken it is because I was never in touch with people in the scene that utilizes it, same with peyote, etc. I've always been one keen on experimenting with entheogens and though it's been years, I keep fond memories of the times I was heavily "into tripping". Salvia divinorum is still in the shops as we speak as well, and morning glory seeds can be found on any big market or in any gardening centre (never been so fucking sick in my life as after taking morning glory by the way, so I kept it a once-in-a-lifetime-but-never-again experience LOL). I also did some years of experimenting with LSD, which was like finding "God/The Divine" to me, and that's a huge understatement, really.

 

I started out as a recreational user, experimenting with friends back in the day, but I soon found out I reacted differently than my peers at the time. My experiences were truly spiritual ones, profound and life-changing, while to my friends it all seemed to be just fun and games. So since that realization I preferred solitude when I wanted to take anything. That said, I did have some amazing and unforgettable experiences with friends, hanging around and going all stupid, hahaha!

Edited September 11, 2014 by Horne

[travsha]

Amanitas are great for me - but I dont work with them to get high necessarily, so I dont think I experienced the disappointment you felt when compared to other mushrooms.  My goal is usually to communicate with the plants spirit, and even though amanitas dont make me as "high", I find them easier to talk to.  Actually - I think salvia is the easiest plant in the world to talk to, though only if you ingest it orally and not smoked.  She really doesnt like being smoked.....

 

If you ever did have interest in ceremonies close to you, there might be people here: http://forums.ayahuasca.com/   ....  I havent specifically looked for ceremonies in Netherlands there, but in general, I find that site has lots of good info.

[Horne]

I wanted to learn from Amanita, I think it was about ten years ago, basically without exact expectations but to experience what the effects on me would be. It did have effects, but I remember little of them really, just that I felt weird and I had a totally imaginary conversation with a woman who I experienced as being really there in the room with me. I think I'll try some Salvia in the near future, after some research and when the moment feels right. Thanks for noting she doesn't like to be smoked, from what I've read it's a common way of taking Salvia, but since you're the experienced person I'll take your word for it.

 

Thanks for the link, I know there are some Dutch fora about Ayahuasca, but it's not exactly top priority to do a thorough search right now. I'm much more interested in connecting with psilocybin mushrooms again, and the Salvia seems attractive too. It's not as if I'm about to try every plant available at the same time, as I like being careful and thorough.

Edited September 12, 2014 by Horne

[travsha]

With Amanita's - smoking them does not require curing, but if you want to eat them, they should be cured for 3-4 months first.  Proper drying and aging of the mushrooms gives you less unwanted side-effects (like nausea), and more of the desirable effects (like altered states for spirit communication).  This happens as certain alkaloids break down into muscimal.  

 

Most people smoke salvia, but most people dont work with salvia as a spiritual medicine.  Most people just want to feel different.  She will often try to scare people who smoke her and disrespect her that way, so many people report uncomfortable or scary smoking experiences.  Smoking is also so intense, that you will often forget large parts of what happened, and you may find it hard to understand.

 

Chewing the leaves makes a much longer lasting, milder, and easier to understand experience.  I get much more out of this personally.  

 

All of that being said - some people do smoke it and talk to salvia, and do ritual this way.  This is not the traditional way, and I personally get better results chewing the leaves.  The Mazatec indians (where salvia comes from) claim that smoking salvia is disrespectful, and also only chew the leaves.

 

Besides chewing, I find that tea or alcohol tinctures also work if you make them right.  Alcohol is probably the most effective way to ingest salvia, though I rarely use alcohol personally.  

[ruby]

I thought this thread was interesting to read  through. Might have to pick up one of your books sometime in the future. voted up some of the posts.

[travsha]

Thanks for the support!  I like to share ideas, and it always means a lot to me when people appreciate that!

[ruby]

Thanks for the support!  I like to share ideas, and it always means a lot to me when people appreciate that!

 

yep, no problem..