Cradled by the spirits E-Book

Umberta Telfener

• Herausgeber: Umberta Telfener
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Two premises organize the release of this book which the author wishes to give to readers by allowing them to download it freely.
In April 2019, the Imperial College in London inaugurated the first research center dedicated to the relationship between psychedelics and mental health, investing 17 million pounds. In the same year, the John Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA) also invested 3 and a half million dollars. Since then research is furthering and investments are made regularly. Depression, addictions and anorexia, but also Alzheimer's could - the researchers hypothesize - benefit from Ayawaska and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Current research challenges the cartel on banned substances and studies how psilocybin, LSD and other similar substances can help the mind: a British study claims that an acid contained in 200 species of hallucinogenic mushrooms could cure depression.
Cradled by the spirits tells the author's experiences with shamans around the world and specifically with the Shipibo shamans of the Peruvian Amazon forest. The use of a medicine that produces awareness and allows a spiritual journey is described: Ayahuasca, which the author has taken several times guided by shamans in several places. This experience "teaches you how to live" and the book also talks about how to learn to take life in the right direction.
Since the author is a health psychologist and a systemic psychotherapist, the different care skills in the different settings, the forest and the therapy room, are brought into relation. You open the book with a letter from Raimondo Bultrini, journalist from the well-known Italian newspaper La Repubblica; you close the book with a rich reflection by Cristina Koch, a systemic thinker and friend.

Umberta Telfener is a psychologist and systemic psychotherapist, President of the European Family Therapy Association (EFTA), teacher of the Milan Center for Family Therapy. Has written six books on love for the larger public and clinical ones on the work as psychotherapist and systemic practitioner, including a dictionary on systemic epistemology: Systemics, voices and paths in complexity, Bollati Boringhieri 2003.

Leseprobe

Umberta Telfener

Cradled by the spirits

Experiences with Ayahuasca and the pleasure of living

Umberta Telfener

Cradled by the spirits Experiences with Ayahuasca and the pleasure of living

In braccio agli spiriti Esperienze con l’Ayahuasca e con il piacere di vivere

© 2019-2024 Umberta Telfener

First digital edition: october 2019 First English edition: march 2024

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial – No Derivative Works 3.0 Italy License.

Sommario

Frontespizio

Dear Umberta

First experience with the medicine, 2010

The days before, the preparation

The first ceremony

The second ceremony

Medical counselling

The third ceremony

The fourth ceremony

Personal intentions

The last ceremonies

Some other stories

Returning home

The journey continues. 2011…

Exchange of messages

Another experience

Experiences from the group

Another personal experience

Returning to Perù

Returning to Perù

The integration of the experience

What have I learnt from these experiences?

Comparison with psychoterapy

The collusive aspect

The ritualistic aspect

The dimension of the sacred

The spirits, Umberta and us (Maria Cristina Koch)

Citations, books and articles referring to Ayahuasca

To my son, wishing him to ride life as one should ride Ayahuasca

Dear Umberta

Dear Umberta

My teacher once taught me that a wise person never promises. So not out of dogma but out of conviction of the rightness of this, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to come to Amsterdam and experience the medicine with you. But my wish is there, even if your introduction to Ayawaska is not the most peaceful to digest in all its physical/emotional implications.

I think you have done well not only to practice, but to share this experience; I think we have all experienced those moments with you, described with such humility and intelligence. Now I have to reflect on them.

It was good and useful that you approached us readers like this: you addressed people who want to see with their minds that there are other dimensions with other forms and many colorful variations of the five elements. With your intelligence and sensitivity you could help people who are suffering and cannot afford a psychologist, but would need psychological assistance born from involvement. So perhaps writing this experience also become a better acquisition for you, an understanding which I am sure you have already digested, otherwise you would not ask yourself so many questions about the “truth” to follow, an absolute truth, not relative, a permanent Center of gravity as the songwriter said. Experience sometimes teaches us to keep the most secret things to oneself as if preserving them in a golden box, so how can the energy of compassion get out of this golden box without opening its spouts? You offered the sprouts to us.

The body is one of the vehicles for knowing the mind and vice versa, hence also the energy, that of the physical force and that which develops in the invisible channels directly connected to the whole Universe outside. Unfortunately, too often we unleash selfish (material) energy instead of compassionate mental energy. As humans we are extremely practical and do not believe in the power of the mind, but we rely on others to tell us what their experience has been in this vast world to explore, perhaps not to be driven like blind men in the traffic of a metropolis. If your words can be of relief and sufficient to convey the experience, it is because you have been able to reproduce in words a certain compassion for all creatures, a power discovered in your journey. If the intention is good, the fruit will also be good, and will bear more.

With my Tibetan master Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche we were in a friend’s kitchen in Beijing in 1988 and she had a gas machine brought from Italy, which did not work with the heavy gas in Beijing at that time. So we called Chinese technicians, but they did not know what to do. The next morning, while the landlady and I were out, the master set about widening the gas nozzles, and in the evening we were able to cook chicken ourselves.

I must leave you now, though I may have time and opportunity to talk about your experience and mine some more another time.

Raimondo Bultrini1

Notes

1 Journalist in the Middle and Far East for the italian newspaper La Repubblica. ↩

First experience with the medicine, 2010

The days before, the preparation

Life is a unique journey we take now (Eskhart Tolle).

Hallucinogenic plants are hallucinogenic precisely because they contain the same chemical structure found in the human brain (George Devereux).

What matters most in the world is life.

December 2, 2010

I am full of questions. This is also why I have always been interested in shamans and their power, their rituals1, their ability to heal. Shamanism is the most archaic form of connection with the sacred, the oldest technique of ecstasy and union with the divine, a process of transformative channeling. Shamans are not priests but teachers, community ecologists, companions on a journey of discovery that connects the two hemispheres of our brain. They are experts of the hidden world and use plants2, songs3, myths4, to describe the special relationship with nature5, with Mother Earth6, with Heaven and the Beyond, with the “nagual” – as Castaneda called it – the extraspatial and temporal area of the second attention, the area of our right hemisphere.

I have made offerings of food, songs and thoughts in the woods, next to a stream, during nature’s awakening or in a flat, enclosed by four walls. I have recharged my energy above the boulders of Machu Picchu, an archaeological site reached on foot with the backpack on my shoulders, full of strength drawn from the beauty of the places, the forest, the people around me; I have chewed coca leaves that make my mouth anaesthetized, to increase my energy in the strenuous climb from Colca Canyon in Peru. I built my Eren, protectors who accompany and safeguard. I praised nature with songs and thoughts and appealed to the helping spirits, animal spirits, and objects I built to protect me (the arrow – representing the possibility of flying to the sky and aiming for the goal; the knife to open the way and reach the heavens; the whip to chase away the spirits and fear10; the bear’s tooth that frightens others; the map of my possible shamanic journey that guides me; the alter ego animal…). I have brought stones to build a fireside, wood for the fire, food to give to the spirits and protectors, fabrics of the five colors (white, red, blue, green and yellow) to put on the Ovat (a place of worship dedicated to Mother Earth, built in every place full of energy, glowing with nature). I have listened to poems invented on the spot – the Algsch – that suck up the bad spirits and appease our protectors, I have sewn/designed fabric maps for my shamanic journeys and dolls and protector animals… I have seen shamans meditate on the sea monsters that had led them to the realm of the ancestors, dance like a snake or a long-tailed condus-condus; use the cusungù, the mirror of the world that allows one to control energy; the tolù, a smaller mirror for personal defense; the dungù – the drum; the orbà, the hair-covered clapper; the artish, the wild juniper of the Taiga; and the scacciapensieri for purifying children (a mouth music instrument used in Peru and South America as well as in Sardinia, Italy). I have seen the shamans wear the paltò which is like a horse with wings that takes them to the sky, and tread the hat well, so as not to lose it in a gust of wind. I have asked soothsayers, sorcerers and readers of coca leaves and shells, animal bones and ivory fragments. I met western shamans capable of putting you in direct contact with the unconscious (then you are often overcome by an incredible and sudden sleep) and healers in Italy and particularly around Rome. Every year I set myself a goal of my own, a task to be carried out with concentration, to improve myself and to access the “other” world. I built with my imagination (a radar that is set in motion when you get to the end of what you know, a language to express things that still have no name) invisible masters and spirit guides who in a circular room of my mind would enter through closed doors and give me timely advice, allowing me to open up towards intuition, to increase possibilities and amplify my personal growth (“Masters are imaginary and can set in motion dormant areas of your mind and new potentialities; they are what our imagination does to open us up to other possibilities” claims Igor Sibaldi, a western shaman and wise man who allowed me this experience). I participated in initiation rites, I killed a dragon of my mind as a symbol of the difficult? past that wants to be present, as a symbol of undigested events. I have dialogued with monkeys in many temples in India, Mexico, Guatemala and on the top of Machu Pichu, sacred places with an air saturated with mysticism. Places to seek a way of life, because every encounter is a promise. I have tried to forgive myself and others and rid myself of all guilt. I realized that the main element of spirituality is LOVE11, which is first of all towards oneself. I have realized that it is not about egoistic attention but about the network connection between people, animals and places, the connection with nature. I continue to try to perfect myself as an agent of love, to amplify the channel of connection with the divine. I have realized that for this to be possible, it is necessary to invest in life and not to be afraid of death, which we need to keep close to us, to remember that each day could be our last and to be able to appreciate it fully, by doing at least one thing each day that we enjoy and one that is a sign of respect to others. This serves to increase dharma, service and compassion, to amplify dignity and connection to the high and higher forces, at the expense of power. To increase kabedud, the kabed attitude, which in the Bible means “rich” in the sense of “heavy, who knows how to weigh things, who gives weight to things” that is developed through the ability to make no effort.

The intention of my research is not to become a sorcerer myself12, but to investigate alternative ways of healing and to aspire for balance and connection: I would like to give space to what is not usual, to understand the spiritual aspect that guides us when we step out of routine. In fact, I agree with Kespi (1997), president of the French Acupuncture Association, who argues that in order to cure13, the doctor must connect each person in front of him or her to the order of the world, to the sacred architecture of the universe and of life, and that one must subjectively consider oneself the instrument to achieve this harmony, the means that favors this connection, going along with Providence. I therefore seek elements of meaning in suffering, immediate reasons for pain and initiatory opportunities for understanding. The aim I pursue is to construct responses – culturally determined –, to enable the people who turn to me to take charge of themselves, to understand and take responsibility for their resources, to appreciate what is happening and to consider suffering an event that pushes them towards their evolution.

The intention is to look into the mystery, to attempt to enter into being, to access events of an archetypal order, transcending cultures. For I would always like to live honoring earth and sky, dreams and imagination. I look for ways to go beyond the limits of everyday life, so predictable; I believe that we are all born with the ability to connect to nature and to our souls: this ability, because of the life we lead, falls asleep and diminishes over time; the channels that would allow us this communication close, causing us to lose some of the spiritual potential in our lives, making us become more and more materialistic, as our western culture encourages us to do. I believe that life is a journey into the sea of what we do not know, in order to awaken our instincts and our balance, to get rid of fear, to trust ourselves more and more, using the sun, the moon, the trees14, the winds and the stars as guides. The limits as markers of the path, the people we meet as ever new stimuli.

A journey that has the form of a spiral whereby we return to places we have already travelled to but from a different vantage point.

We have a physical body, an emotional one, a mental and an etheric body, the most sensitive of all (Foster Perry speaks of solar, lunar, terrestrial and saturnine bodies and of an Akashic Record, a direct line between the past and the future, which connects all the memories accumulated and contained in the body. He believes that the blood contains the memories of the etheric trace of our becoming). I also believe that the survival of our planet depends on individual people and their relationship with ecology and consequently with the spiritual aspect of living, our contact with nature: an inner quest to find a place in the world, a place of connection and care that allows absolute respect for the cosmos we inhabit. I am always reminded of one of the pivotal teachings of the Buryati and Mongolian shamans: the existence of an inner space that is the seat of the soul; a psychic space with which each one of us is born and which gives meaning and coherence to all our lives, which are like a mandala that brings forth a design, with its ever more sophisticated harmony. This spiritual space is in danger of becoming smaller and smaller as we grow up and everyday life takes over. Everyday events invade and can drain the lake of the spirit, which becomes empty, as if dead.

Shamans have told us of a personal “duty” of each individual, that of creating a relationship with external reality in order to evolve, finding one’s own voice: the ability to accept the world and its conditions, while remaining sensitive to the divine and its possible influence. The ability to make the spirits of nature speak through our own voice of the heart, the only medium for this secret language.

I am a clinical psychologist and healing is my field of work, both through psychotherapy and through collective interventions in institutional settings. Interventions that are attentive to resources and based on the idea that every system has knowledge that must be brought out and then honored. I am therefore in some way also a “medicine woman” and a guardian. Why not inform myself about how other cultures cure? Why not go and see the places where shamanism is a religion (all of Russia, except the Kamchatka peninsula), the places where it is a mode of treatment that is sometimes more accessible and less expensive than hospital medicine (Senegal, Peru, many parts of South America)? Travelling for this purpose has become a passion for me, providing me with a focus and interest. It allows me continuous learning, motivated by the desire to access trans-personal development. I firmly believe that there are many possible paths in people’s lives; everyone has to choose their own and this has to be somewhere between joy and sadness.

The goal is to keep alive the desire to see, to know, to do and to enjoy all of it. Only by knowing oneself can one become free, and only as free will one be able to face problems and dangers: it is self-confidence that becomes the shield that allows one to identify a path, increase awareness and protect oneself from the fear of daring. Only trust in oneself and one’s own energy allows one to live fully and be well, to be able to connect with others.

I have learnt in my curious wanderings that the mystery of existence is the mystery of one’s own soul.

The Ayahuasca vine.