Congenital loss of the soul and the consequent inability to love
There are mysterious things that happen to souls.
Many years ago I treated a young man of around 35 years of age who had never had any luck and, frankly, had in my opinion made little effort in life, abandoning the most promising undertakings halfway through or at the first disappointment. Instead, he often insisted on paths with no prospects and which gave him very little satisfaction.
No shamanic treatment had given results, but – perhaps because being treated by me gave him only some small, miserable satisfaction! he-he insisted on coming to see me.
One evening my Pasuk (Spirit Helpers) led me into a dark bedroom, full of drapery. The plaster was chipped on the wall behind the bed. Looking closely there was an irregular hole in the wall, which looked like a bird’s nest. Inside there was not a bird but a boy, white as he had never seen the light of the sun, with delicate and moist skin, as if he had just emerged from the womb. However, he looked between 20 and 30 years old, even if in miniature. By letting him out of the hole he took on a normal size, but he tended to stay crouched because he didn’t seem used to walking.
I didn’t understand what I was in front of. He looked like a lost soul, and from his face and hair, he must have been my patient. But with the Conibo shamans, I had learned that the soul that leaves the body due to a susto (“fright”, the most common and classic cause of soul loss) exits time and stops growing, whether it is a child or a boy, or at least to grow old. In other words, if a shaman hunts for the soul that was lost when the patient was 7 years old, the soul will appear like a 7 year old child and will also have the awareness of being 7 years old, because for him time has run out. stopped.
Here, however, it was different, the soul seemed to have lived – probably a prisoner – in the hole in the wall for a long time, since early childhood, but it had grown as a child would have grown if kept segregated for the same amount of time.
I then discovered that an elderly woman was sleeping in the bedroom and bringing food to the boy segregated in the hole in the wall.
I didn’t know what to do. But since I had to do something, I followed the instructions of one of my Pasuk, took the boy away from his mother, purified him in a sacred waterfall and brought him back to the patient, blowing it into his ear. I then made an offering that was needed and guided the patient to take a lustral bath with special herbs.
When I returned to the Amazon I tried to understand what I had encountered. I asked Abuelo Jua, my teacher, who told me: “It looks like a Cofan curse.” It seems like a curse from the Cofan, a population of Colombia. “You have to ask a Cofan shaman. The Cofans,” he told me, “have tséntsaks who steal souls and feed them like pigs or chickens.”
For what purpose? I asked.
“To make them grow and become fat, like with pigs, the fatter the better.”
And then… they slaughter them?
The abuelo laughed. “No – he replied – it’s more like with cows …” The abuelo was ‘rich’ and had a cow that looked after Rosa, one of his daughters. “If they are fat they give a lot of milk, they drink the milk.”
Those who used this curse drew energy or power from the soul they raised… The boy who lived in the wall, however, was certainly not fat, he appeared frail and barely able to move – the elderly woman who fed him kept him on a stick.
The abuelo didn’t tell me more and told me again to go to the Cofans.
The River of Life
Some time later, speaking with an old Cofan shaman, he told me: “It’s a kidney disease.”
My patient had never had any kidney problems, but he had suffered from impotence, or erectile dysfunction, as it is called today, since he was young. And every shaman knows that sexual potency in men, as well as fertility in women, depend on the Power of the Kidneys (a curious thing is that the kidneys have nothing to do with a woman’s ability to enjoy sex and have orgasms), but with fecundity, while in men a low or bad renal power affects sexual enjoyment, given that it causes impotence, and also the fertility of the semen).
The shaman Cofan told me that there is a river in the kidneys, but it is difficult to see it. The river carries the Power of Life through the kidneys, from there tributaries go e.g. to the sexual organs, but the main river rises up to the chest, up to the Heart.
If the River is dry or has little water, the Heart will also be dry and you will not know how to love or create a territory with which to feed and make your family happy.
However, I didn’t understand what this had to do with the diaphanous soul held in a hole in the wall…
“Often – the shaman told me – someone has built a wall or a dam and the river cannot pass or little water passes and even the Spirits and people cannot enter and exit from there. The child is held back by the wall.” He understood man since he was a child, that is, his soul.
But who is holding him back? I asked.
“They keep him there to protect him.
“Often, in these cases, – the shaman told me – someone has built a wall or a dam and the river cannot pass or little water passes and even the Spirits and people cannot enter and exit from there. The child is held back by the wall.” He meant the man [the patient] since he was a child, in other words, his soul.
But who is holding him back? I asked.
“They keep him there to protect him. They are afraid that he will be hurt because he is small and defenseless and because his father has so many enemies. His ancestors. They do it before he is born and everyone inherits this wall, they are born with the wall.”
Ancestors is a very flexible term in the language of Amazonian shamans: sometimes they are ancient ancestral ancestors of all the people, other times your great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents, sometimes people who in past or recent times are linked to you with a red thread created by sex : therefore your parents, grandparents etc., but also brothers, but also step-siblings of your grandparents or even women with whom your great-grandfather had sex, without them being your relatives in any way. All it takes is a sexual connection.
I believe my patient’s wall was built by his mother. The elderly woman I had seen looked like her mother, or at least the patient recognized her when I described her to him. And even the room with the draperies was the same as his mother’s bedroom.
“When the ancestors have done this – said the shaman – you must free the prisoner. They look after him and feed him, but they steal his life force.”
And how do you free it?
“You must find the wall. The wall that the ancestors build is always there even in the Middle World. There is always a wall that is real, not just a vision!” There is always a wall in this reality, the wall materializes in a real place, usually part of the patient’s life.
Move away from the Wall and the Jailer
When I returned to Italy, I discovered that my patient had not had much benefit from the curanderia (shamanic healing).
I realized that even though the soul had been freed from the wall and brought back to him, it continued to return to its mother to be nourished. And that the mother sucked the Vital Power from her (the soul), like a farmer milks a cow.
When the mother (or another ancestor, even dead!) sucks the Power from him, she partially dries up the River of Life. Therefore, throughout his life the patient had had low vital power, inability to create a territory and inability to truly love.
I later told the patient that he needed to physically distance himself from his mother. He didn’t live at her house, but he lived in the same city. Just as the Wall materializes in this reality, the distance from the wall must also materialize here.
The Spirits and Fortune offered the patient the opportunity to move far away from home.
Spirits later showed me that a distance of at least 500 km from the Wall is needed, so that the soul does not return to its jailer anyway.
I had to bring the soul back again, which did not return in the hole, but it was near the Wall and it was difficult to convince it, which I could only do with a stratagem taught to me by the abuelo and which I cannot recount here.
But once the soul was freed and the patient had gone to live very far from the wall (over 700 km in his case), his situation slowly improved. A year later he found a decent job and a girlfriend and within about another three years he managed to create a good territory, which in another two years became excellent. The last time I heard from him he was a happy and even successful person in something he loved very much.
Healing times are long and requires trust and patience.
The curanderia between the two Realities
Many curanderos who practice shamanic methods or even other spiritual healers believe that just doing something in the Other Reality is enough to change the material problem. This is a serious mistake.
The method only works when the disease is not serious and has yet materialized only in a disorder, e.g. a functional disorder of an organ (such as poor digestion, having migratory pain in a knee…). However, when the disease materializes in an organic disease (a tumor, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatic steatosis…) or even in a functional disorder which however has persisted for many years and is therefore deeply rooted either in a situation of bad luck or chronic failure, the cure must act in both Realities.
One misleading thing is our language: shamans, shamanic practitioners or curanderos educated in the West distinguish the soul from the body and when they say “soul” they think of it as something distinct from the body and the concrete, material life of the person.
The Cofan shaman I had spoken to never said “soul.” He said that the child had been imprisoned in the wall and that he had been nurtured until he became a weak and cowardly adult who always remained in the same prison and took food, in exchange giving Life Power, to his captor.
The child who had badly grown into an adult had to be taken away from the wall.
It is no coincidence that the wall also exists in this Reality and even in this Reality man (not just an abstract “soul”) must be moved away from the Wall otherwise he will return, as he is used to, near the Wall to have food.
If the man moves far away from the Wall in this Reality then he will free himself from imprisonment and the flow of the River will be able to increase without being drained by the jailer.
A question that could be asked: what happens if he only physically distances himself without doing any shamanic intervention?
Usually it is an eventuality that does not come true: if the person is not saved from the wall in the Other Reality, he cannot escape in this one either.
When he succeeds, it doesn’t last, he actually continues to maintain distant contact with the jailer, which allows the jailer to continue to feed him and drain his vital power. So he fails to succeed and usually, after some time, he will also physically return to the fold or – as I will explain in the circles on these topics – will bond with a replacement jailer.
In the circle in which we will address the Soul of the Kidneys, we will see better how it works and why it happens like this.
Finding the River
The abduction of the soul at birth or – in other cases – in childhood and its segregation in a Wall or behind a Wall is not a rare event, but not a very frequent one either.
However, even if the soul remains free, the Wall has often been built anyway. Sometimes, instead of a wall, it is a Dam, often created by animals, usually Beavers. The Dam creates different problems than the Wall and we will not discuss them in this article.
In both cases, however, the River is usually blocked in part or completely and the water is held back to be given to the Jailer or, if the soul has not been kidnapped, the water still remains beyond the Wall and cannot nourish the sexual organs, the chest and the Heart.
In my courses for future curanderos I have never discussed the Wall and the Dam, much less this type of soul abduction.
The reason is that it is extremely difficult to locate the Wall and also to see the River correctly and follow its course. Sometimes it happens – and it has occasionally happened to some of my students or apprentices – to see the Wall or more often the Dam, but even in these cases they are unable to go up the main River (or perhaps some tributary) or confuse it with other flows of Power of the body. Partial and imprecise vision in shamanism usually results in only temporary healing or… no healing at all.
In fact, many times my students who have come across the Wall or the Dam, following their own shamanic instinct and the advice of the auxiliary Spirits, have destroyed the Wall and Dam and made the water flow out, but – by visiting the patient again after some time – in the majority of cases the barrier had been restored or had been replaced by something similar, which always blocked the waters.
In fact, it is not usually possible to heal the disease of the Wall without a complete vision of the Power of the Kidneys and the River and the areas that it passes through.
Only in recent times has Tsunki, the Spirit of the Water People, taught me a very special and unusual technique for locating and following the River of Life when examining the patient’s kidneys and abdomen – an area called the shag – and to see the Wall, if this is present. The method also allows us to discover who built the Wall, a very important step in understanding the origin of the problem and freeing the patient from it. In fact, I don’t always have my beginner’s luck, that I saw an elderly woman bringing food to the soul and the woman was immediately recognized by the patient as her mother!
These methods have been thought for the first time in the Circle on the Souls of Organs (25 -26 October 2014) where Tsunki showed many secrets about the River of Life, its Powers and how it can be strengthened or healed, and what the Wall and the Dam, how to definitively dismantle them and how to help the healing of the patient, who will often have to do things in this Reality, both by carrying out rituals (e.g. purifications or baths) and by acting on his own life: on this sometimes small but important steps that require a modest effort are enough, other times – as in the case of a kidnapped soul – it is necessary to move away from the Jailer and from the Wall itself.
