Swan Medicine & Past Life Healing
Swan waits patiently for us to call upon her to take us “through the mirror” when a past life healing is required.
It never occurred to us, when we chose to remain open to whatever animal spirits appeared to assist us with our healing work over the weekend, that the shamanic archetype taking the form of Swan would be one of them. Nor had it occurred to us that the chronic pain one of the women was experiencing might be the result of a past life trauma. However, when I shamanically scanned her as she spoke of her pain, observing the shamanic energies available to assist in her healing, it gradually became clear that the underlying, hidden source of her present-life pain syndrome was a violent trauma which had occurred in a past life in medieval Europe. The pain she was feeling in the present was an echo, or a mirror reflection, of the impact of the intrusive energy of that long-ago trauma. That energy, which had followed her through several reincarnations, had been awakened in this lifetime by a recent physical injury.
Swan is the animal spirit feminist shamans work with when attempting to heal the impact of past life trauma on present life experience. In shamanic reality, Swan has the power to carry us safely back through time into the exact moment in a person’s past life when the trauma being mirrored by the present-day distress originally occurred. During such shamanic journeys, we can observe the sequential dynamics of the causal situation, and intervene in any number of ways to shift things in that time and place so that the trauma either never occurs, or is healed in the past life at the time and in the place where it took place.
Painting by Scarlet Kinney
Gallery No. K334: Deer, Shamanic South
w/c and pastel on 300# hot press w/c paper
22 x 26” – Price: $1200
Available through the Center’s art gallery,
Turtle Mountain Mythic Art
Swan is found in the shamanic South. When one enters the shamanic South during a shamanic journey, one discovers a lush, water-rich summer landscape glistening beneath a bright noonday sun. If one walks into the tropical forest that is the first feature of the landscape one encounters, and follows a path South along the East bank of a North-flowing stream of pure water, one will eventually arrive at the central geographical feature of the shamanic South –a beautiful Waterfall of the kind one finds in tropical forests. Along the way to the Waterfall, one is likely to encounter Deer, whose shamanic “home” is also the South. Climbing the cliff to the east of the waterfall, one eventually arrives at the Great Marsh which feeds it. This is Swan’s home in the shamanic South, and this is where one begins the long journey with Swan back in time to the client’s past life.
I’ve done many such shamanic healings that all began in this manner; by greeting Swan at the edge of the Great Marsh and asking to be taken back into the client’s past life. Such journeys are always the stuff of high adventure, but this particular case required that I undertake two separate journeys, each involving a long piece of unusually dangerous shamanic work, in order to shamanically interrupt and reorganize the sequence of events that led to the original trauma. With a great deal of help from a goddess archetype active in that time, I finally prevailed, and the causal trauma was undone.
In every such healing I’ve ever undertaken, clients have reported back to me that they didn’t feel any change immediately, but that over time the issue and its symptoms gradually became less troublesome, until finally they were gone. Curious about this phenomenon after a client once reported the very clearly incremental nature of the healing’s effect, I sought a shamanic teaching about it from Swan. What Swan revealed during that journey was that the reason for this felt sense of gradual, rather than immediate relief when a client has experienced this particular type of shamanic healing, is that the healing moves forward through time incrementally, lifetime through lifetime, beginning with the lifetime in which the trauma and healing occurred, until at last its benefit reaches the person in her present life. Hopefully that will be the case for this woman as well.
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