Excerpt from "The First Mind-Body Medicine..."

"The role of the shaman is to create order from disorder, to invite healing, cleansing, purification, and a realignment of the soul in a world where there is disorder, toxicity, and misalignment of living, thinking, feeling, and being.

These traditions are universal, transcultural, and pre-religious. They exist because we always have known suffering, loss, and illness. Confronted with spiritual, psychological, and biological suffering, we, as a species, have sought to create meaning for our suffering. These ancient traditions are easily dismissed as magical, imaginary, delusional, or meaningless collections of superstitious beliefs and behaviors.

While conventional science has accepted plant medicine and even now seeks cures from the 80,000 plant species of the rain forest jungles, it sees no relevance or context for shamanic practices for the suffering masses of the 21st century. How can the singing of songs, waving of feathers, or shaking of rattles solve any of our modern ills?

Shamanism is an integrated system of mind-body medicine. It was the first mind-body medicine, yet it contains more than methods to calm the mind or to shake off stress in a mechanical way. It provides a cosmology and architecture for healing not only the mind but also the soul, for navigating the confusion, injury, pain, or trauma we encounter as human beings walking the earth. Most modern attempts to adopt mind-body medicine such as biofeedback, breathing techniques, muscle relaxation, and massage may briefly relieve the symptoms of stress, but they do not address the root causes of suffering and stress.

Often medicine, plants, or relaxation are not enough to heal us. There must be something that creates realignment of purpose, meaning, and sense of place. There must be a way to reconnect to the inherent relatedness of us, one to the other, and to our place on the earth that sustains us.

More than stress alone contributes to or creates the majority of modern chronic diseases, from the epidemic of mental disorders including depression and anxiety to heart disease and more. Dis-ease is a disconnection from our sense of place in the world, from a loss of control and meaning...It is not poverty that increases the prevalence of illness, morbidity, and mortality but a loss of sense of culture, control, and meaning.

The shamans provide a doorway back to meaning, to a sense of place and control and order in our world. The mind-body understanding in health and disease needs to include not only tools for relaxation but also tools and rituals and context for realignment of the soul.

Systems biology and medicine (for which functional medicine provides a robust clinical model) operate from a similar framework.3 In order to create healing, the core systems of the body (meaning the body-mind and the mind-body) and the interrelationships or patterns that connect all these systems must be understood as a whole. Healing cannot occur out of context. Healing is created through an understanding of imbalance in each of the core systems and how these patterns of imbalance interconnect and influence each other. Once the imbalances are identified, factors that have created them (negative energies) such as poor diet, stress, social disconnection, toxins, infections, and allergens, must be removed (extracted). Then the ingredients for restoration and balance, such as quality food, adequate nutrients for restoration of optimal function, rest, sleep, exercise, rhythm, light, air, water, connection, love, and community, must be provided. Once the systems of the body are realigned, harmonized, and balanced, healing is possible.

The challenge of mind-body medicine is to embrace, contain, and include the human need for purpose, connection, and meaning."

THE FIRST MIND-BODY MEDICINE: BRINGING SHAMANISM INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
Mark A. Hyman, MD
Altern Ther Health Med.2007;13(5):10-11.