Release Date: March 18, 2005 This content is archived.
As a child in Saskatchewan, anthropologist Barbara Tedlock first learned from her Ojibwa-Cree grandmother about storytelling, massage, dream prophesy and the fruits, flowers, twigs and roots used to make strange and mysterious healing concoctions. Her grandmother told her about native "shape shifters" who changed into deer, clouds, beavers and willow trees, and about witches called "bear-walkers" who traveled at night inside glowing balls of light that commonly are seen in shamanic rituals in many cultures.
She explained to her, Tedlock writes in her book, "That our thoughts and emotions overlap and intermingle, and that this mixing of head and heart connects us to future events hidden in the dark womb of time."
As a doctoral student in cultural anthropology conducting research in the Guatemalan highlands, Tedlock, along with her husband, anthropologist Dennis Tedlock, was initiated into a Mayan shamanic tradition by Don Andrés and Dõna Talín, local Mayan healers.
"Gradually," she recalls, "we learned to enter and control our dreams in a kind of alert sleeping, and to share, interpret and complete those dreams together.
"We studied astronomy, hands-on healing and herbalism. We learned to recognize different kinds of shrines and to pray correctly; to gather flowers and incense; calculate the Mayan calendar, which was crucial for divination, and to embrace casual but meaningful coincidences of inner and outer events, thus transcending and improving our emotional and intuitive selves," she says.
"Don Andrés taught us about the vital energy that suffuses the material universe; he trained us in bodily awareness and emotional attunement -- how to recognize the lightening in the body and the 'speaking of blood,' manifestations of our connection with the cosmos. In this way we would be able to increase our energy and use it to heal others and ourselves.
"From my grandmother's care and the work of Don Andrés and Dõna Talín," she says, "I've seen firsthand the effectiveness of shamanic healing."
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