Welcome to Shaman talk. My name's Rhonda and I'm your host, and this week is an opportunity to explore potential missing pieces in your healing journey. When I discovered that I was missing attention in two of the four healing bodies, I finally understood why I was stalling in certain areas of my life. Today, I'm going to share what I discovered for myself how you can apply this to your life in conjunction with the Three Cauldron, our centers we discussed earlier in the series. If the three Cauldrons symbolize your journey towards healing and transformation, then the four quadrants of healing mental, emotional, spiritual and physical help to ensure a holistic approach to each of your cauldrons. I'm going to go over how each of these work and why it's crucial not to overlook any of these areas. We'll start with mental healing. Mental healing focuses on the power of thought, perception, attention, and intention.

It's about understanding the narratives we tell ourselves and the habits we form as coping mechanisms. Intention in Shamanism in shamanic practice is the focused mental and spiritual energy that guides your actions in life, as well as your journeys and other spiritual interactions. It's the why behind what you're doing. It acts as a compass. It directs the spiritual energies and entities you work with towards a specific outcome. For example, your intention could be to seek healing, gain wisdom, or connect with a spirit guide, or simply to stay focused on a task or maybe connected to a positive emotional state that day. Attention, on the other hand, is the act of consciously directing your awareness. Attention is what you use to navigate once your intention has set the course. It's the focus you maintain on your intention, the ritual at hand, or the messages you're receiving. Attention ensures that you are fully present and engaged in your life and able to make conscious choices throughout your day, which can be, of course, very challenging.

In summary, intention sets the destination while attention navigates the journey. Both are essential for meaningful and effective mental healing. Through practices like recapitulation, narrative therapy or maybe guided ceremonies, you can aim to quiet your mind and replace toxic thoughts with empowering beliefs. You choose where you place your attention. Toxic thoughts or chronically negative thought patterns have now been shown to cause clinical inflammation in the body, and inflammation is the cause of many physical issues. How you speak to yourself is directly linked to your physical well being. And did you know, as an aside, that research categorically shows it's more important to decrease your negative thoughts than to increase your positive thoughts? Now, I thought that was the same thing, but apparently it's not. I noticed at points in my journey that I was increasing my positive thoughts, but I wasn't really paying attention to my unconscious negative thoughts in the day to day.

I was giving my attention to increasing the positive and not to decreasing the negative. Once I made that shift, my whole outlook and mental health improved. Not in isolation and not in a toxic, positivity way, of course, but alongside the other quadrants of healing that we're going to go over today the mind. The mental is actually often the starting point of a healing journey in the west anyway, because that's where we tend to spend most of our time. We are a mental heavy culture. The mental or the mind is where decisions are made, intentions are set, and awareness begins. It's also where your trickster tends to hang out and pull you around a bit from pillar to post at times. That's why mental healing alone is not sufficient. It can serve as the foundation upon which other forms of healing can take place. But mental healing alone really leads to a successful healing outcome.

For example, you might realize that something in your life isn't right. You might say, I can't do this anymore and have a breakdown, which is roughly what happened to me. Or you might start to look for ways to understand a toxic relationship in your life that leads you to realize that you're no longer willing to continue in that relationship. Many people get stuck in the mental realm, needing and fighting to understand every feeling, every trigger, every interaction. And perhaps you fall into the trap of being overly focused on justice or on pinpointing the root cause of a behavior or an interaction. While this kind of mental understanding is important to some degree, there is light and dark in all aspects of life. If you can tell someone who asks you why you act the way you do and why you are triggered the way you are, if you can be self reflective, if you can take responsibility for your actions even sometimes not always, even sometimes and you feel like you're making progress, but then to your deep frustration, you're still affected.

You're still pulled into drama. You're unable to overcome these triggers that overtake you in life. That means you're likely sitting in the mental realm and you might be intellectualizing your healing path. So it might be time to shift your attention to other areas, other quadrants. Let's move on to the emotional quadrant. Emotional healing involves confronting and processing the feelings we so often want to suppress and that we mismanage. In the emotional quadrant of healing, we aim to release emotional blockages and cultivate emotional intelligence through techniques like breath work, certain shamanic ceremonies like maybe like a talisman ceremony or a healing drum journey. Ways to tell you might need to focus your attention on this quadrant are to track your tears. If you don't cry at all, then perhaps strong emotions are an unsafe place for you. Perhaps you cry all the time at odd or seemingly inappropriate times, which can be a pointer to suppressed and unprocessed emotions.

Other pointers are struggling to enjoy life, spending a lot of time being busy at family gatherings and not taking time to genuinely connect with people around you. These types of pointers mean that your emotional health likely needs some attention. Another one is if you have rages, seemingly small things that can be a sign that you're disconnected from your emotions, that your emotions maybe aren't safe for you to feel. Or maybe you feel that you don't deserve to feel your emotions, and that's all in your unconscious. Emotional suppression can happen when you betray yourself in the small moments. It's one of my favorite phrases when you don't speak up and say no. Or if your boundaries with others are weak or nonexistent. If you feel perhaps shame or self derision, but also fear of conflict, this all gets shoved down and causes a middle cauldron meltdown eventually.

Emotions are the language of the soul, spirit and body, so ignoring this aspect can lead to physical ailments and spiritual disconnection. Emotional healing allows us to live more authentically. It can form a bridge between mental and that we mentioned earlier, and the physical triggers as well. And emotional healing also involves learning to navigate the complex landscape of human emotions, from joy and love to grief and anger in a balanced way. It's linked to our ability to direct our intentions and our attention in our day to day lives. We discussed glimmers of joy in an earlier podcast, and finding a glimmer would be an example of both a mental and an emotional action. So sometimes the actions you take might cover more than one area of the wholeness template of the quadrants. Spiritual healing focuses on our connection to the greater universe, our ancestors, and our own spirit.

It is a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves. It helps a person to look within and understand themselves while also figuring out the great answer of how they fit into the rest of the world. In other words, spiritual connection and healing helps you understand your interpretation of the meaning of life in shamanism. This can be achieved through shamanic journeying, creating personal altars and connecting with the ancient magic of the land, omen walks, ritual and ceremony, and daily life through which you aim to deepen your spiritual understanding and your connection to your guides. The darker side of the spiritual quadrant is when you chase peak experiences and you mistakenly think that spiritual highs are the point of a spiritual path. A spiritual high could be feeling totally spaced out and super relaxed, or it could be feeling just so wonderful during or after a retreat or during a healing or other guided experience.

There's duality in all things, and peak experiences are wonderful if it's meant for you. I've had many, and I've had some real tangible breakthroughs during some beautifully peak spiritual times. But it's not the point. If you are chasing those experiences, then there's a good chance you've missed out on some of the other bodies of healing. The combination I see most, actually, is being spiritually connected and seeking that peak experience coupled with intellectualizing your experiences. So you often miss out the emotional and physical parts of a healing journey. The magic of the spiritual quadrant is not in the peak experiences. It's in the mundane. Everyday small things we are often taught to overcomplicate our spiritual lives. We can see that in some of the Eastern traditions. We'll often separate our spirituality from our day to day lives. Like going to church on a Sunday, but having nothing to do with God the rest of the week.

Classic example in our culture. Now I find spirit in all things, including my laptop, my phone, making dinner, spending time with my family, doing the dishes, the washing. Precious magic moments that are so often missed because they're seen as easy or normal or not spiritual. But everything is spiritual. Living by your values is spiritual. Laughing in company is spiritual. Art of any kind. Beautiful conversations, little synchronicities. It's just the magic is in the mundane. So keep your eye out for that. Spiritual healing in this quadrant really does provide a higher perspective and a deeper connection that make the challenges of our lives more navigable. It makes it easier for us to get stuff done. It makes it easier for us to understand why things happen the way that they do. And a belief in something greater than ourselves is vital, actually, for holistic well being.

For me, that is the universal energy that some call God. And my guides are a way that this universal energy talks to me and communicates with me. The relationship to the divine for me serves as a compass. It guides me through life's complexities and it helps me to make decisions that are aligned with my values and my truth, such as that is. And FYI, they also call out any BS as well. My guides bring me information about myself that I have been heavily trying to avoid, is usually hidden in shadowy. And this form of healing in this quadrant and this divine relationship can enrich our lives in ways that material wealth and external achievements just can't. There's a sense of peace, joy and fulfillment. And just the most important thing in there actually is resilience in difficult times. That comes from being in harmony with the universe and our inner nature.

Finally, physical healing. Physical healing is about tuning into our bodies and understanding its signs and signals. We aim to release physical tension and cultivate a healthier lifestyle through somatic release outdoor ceremonies, movement, self care, eating well being, hydrated, et cetera. Physical healing is not just about treating symptoms. It's about tuning into our bodies and understanding the signals, which I just said already. But our bodies are wise. They hold the keys to our well being and they can guide us towards a healthier lifestyle. But we have to learn to listen in order to unlock that wisdom. One way you can tune into your body is through somatic release techniques. These are body centered methods that help you to release stored tension and trauma. You might engage in a shamanic journey, for example, that focuses on your bodily sensations. And as you travel through that journey you might encounter areas of tension or discomfort in your body.

And maybe you can add in guided imagery or breath work. You can learn to release this tension from your body, this trauma, if that is what it is. Another way to do this is to get outside. Nature itself is a healer and outdoor ceremonies can be a really powerful way to connect with your body. You can use a fire ceremony to release old wounds or a water ritual to cleanse and renew the elements can serve as co facilitators, if you like, in your healing process. Movement of any kind is another key to physical healing. It could be anything from shamanic dance to simple stretching to yoga qigong. The idea is to let the energy flow through your body, breaking up any areas of stagnation where trauma or tension might be stored. We'll often do something called the bone dance in our monthly membership where we can channel the energy of the gods and movements through a deep ceremony together.

This ceremony not only serves as a form of physical expression, but also releases these stored tensions, emotions and issues. It's important to note as well here that trauma is not just emotional or psychological, emotional or mental. It's also stored in our physical cells. And recent studies have shown that traumatic experiences can actually change the way our genes are expressed, leading to physical symptoms and health issues. So shamanic practices with their holistic approach can address this cellular memory. Through techniques like energy healing, ancestral work, even plant medicine in its many forms, we can begin to unlock and release these cellular memories leading to profound levels of physical healing. I'd like to add here that our ability to love ourselves enough to want to eat well, drink water and avoid what we know doesn't work for us is usually linked to the emotional body. Avoiding pain is what we are really good at.

Unfortunately, when you eat without thinking, it's usually to suppress an emotion, both positive and negative, that you don't want to feel for some reason. And it's usually unconscious you can see the physical body is really intricately linked to all other quadrants. And physical health isn't just about the absence of disease. It's also about vitality, energy and a sense of well being so that we can engage fully with this precious life we've been given. The body is the vessel that carries us through life. Physical well being is crucial for sustaining our healing self or healing journey. Which brings me to the importance of this holistic approach. Neglecting any of these four directions or four quadrants of healing can result in an imbalanced and incomplete healing journey. And as I've said, focusing solely on mental healing without addressing emotional wounds can lead to intellectualization without true transformation.

Similarly, diving deep into spiritual practices without grounding them in physical reality or emotional healing can result in pretty spectacular spiritual bypassing. By embracing all four directions of healing, you can ensure a balanced, holistic approach that honors the complexity of human existence. This comprehensive path allows you not only to heal, but to thrive in all aspects of your life. I'm going to take a wee segue. Please indulge me. It might be difficult for anyone to take on it might be difficult for some to take on all four at once. As a person with ADHD, I struggle to make many changes at once. I'll share the way I do this work, and those of you with ADHD may not like this. Routine. Routine. Routine. I need to embrace routine. It seems, even though in the past I actively hated the word and would run screaming to the hills anytime anyone mentioned putting me on a schedule.

I was a nightmare to work with. And I feel very sorry for my previous bosses who had to deal with me. When our family decided to live together as a community, I had to be forced kicking and screaming onto a dinner schedule like a cooking schedule. But over time, what I realized was that routine was actually relaxing for me. I didn't have to think about what I had to do that day. I had a glimmer of realization that routines were the way forward. And now if I can get something onto a routine, then I do it. I have a morning routine that consists of eating well, taking my supplementations, cold water, shower, depending on where I am in my cycle. Everything I need is an eye view so I can remember. And the more I practice, the easier it gets. That's just a wee snippet for my neurodivergent pals.

Hope you enjoyed this week's episode. And as always, if you can subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast, that is the best thanks I can ask for. Until next time. May the wisdom of the ancients guide you. The warmth of your hearth comfort you, and the sacred cauldrons within you find harmony and balance.