If you’re reading this it’s probably because you’ve felt anxious at least once in your life or are feeling it now—you understand how awful it feels, and you don’t want to feel it again. It’s much more likely, however, that you’ve experienced anxiety more than once in your life. It’s probable that you feel anxious quite often; many people wake up in the morning with anxiety, it can stay with them all day, and then they go to bed with it. Feeling anxious has almost become a normal way of life.
“Anxiety is a term used to describe uncomfortable feelings of nervousness, worry, and tension, which we all feel from time to time. Anxiety can affect anyone. It affects our thoughts, physical reactions, moods and behaviours.” (www.irishpsychiatry.ie)
Anxiety can be a normal response to a stress in our lives and some degree of anxiety can improve our performance in certain stressful situations. However, if it occurs too often or for little reason, or if it begins to interfere with our life and prevent us from doing things, then it has become a problem, it has become toxic to us.
Anxiety can affect you in 4 main ways:
Thoughts – Anxiety can lead to frequent negative thoughts such as “I will not be able to cope” or “I’m going to fail”. It can also cause frequent distressing images in the mind.
Physical effects – Anxiety can produce many physical symptoms, such as a pounding heart, a churning stomach, light-headedness, muscle tension or breathing difficulties.
Mood – Persistent anxiety can also lead to feelings of being down or depressed.
Behaviour – Anxiety can change how we behave by changing the things which we feel able to do. This can result in avoidance of many things which actually just results in strengthening the feelings of worry.
For people with anxiety disorders, worry and fear can become overwhelming and interfere with their ability to lead normal lives.
Common anxiety signs and symptoms include:
⦁ Feeling nervous, restless or tense
⦁ Having a sense of impending danger, panic or doom
⦁ Having an increased heart rate
⦁ Breathing rapidly (hyperventilation)
⦁ Sweating
⦁ Trembling
⦁ Feeling weak or tired
⦁ Trouble concentrating or thinking about anything other than the present worry
⦁ Having trouble sleeping
⦁ Experiencing gastrointestinal (GI) problems
⦁ Having difficulty controlling worry
⦁ Having the urge to avoid things that trigger anxiety
Nothing can actually CURE anxiety because we do need some anxiety in our lives. Anxiety is an emotion or a sensation that can protect us and informs us that there’s something wrong. But when it does become toxic to us the good news is that Shamanic Therapy and Energy Healing can help you disconnect from many sources of fear, helping you to feel more grounded and rational. The fear level in you subsides, your anxiety levels reduce, and you feel more like ‘yourself’ again.
According to the “Holistic & Alternative Medicine Directory”: “Energy Healing is a form of healing that manipulates, restores and balances the flow of energy in the body. The energy is channeled through the practitioner to the client, helping remove energy deficiencies and blockages and allowing the body to activate it’s natural ability to heal itself.”
Shamanism is the oldest form of Energy and Spiritual Healing known to humans, dating back thousands of years to the Iron Age and before! From a Shamanic perspective true healing- spiritual healing- cannot be done on a physical level. Healing means to return to wholeness, and returning to wholeness is purely an inside job. Spiritual healing addresses the root- the spiritual- problems that cause dis-ease.
Many Shamanic traditions recognize these 3 main imbalances as the root of all trouble.
Disrupted Energy or Power Loss:
If any of your energy centres are blocked, very low in vital energy or filled with low vibrational energies stemming from past pain, painful memories or fears, there’s a big chance you’re not feeling at your best. When you are aligned, energised and working properly, you will feel relaxed, light and generally peaceful. However, when your system is out of balance it can manifest as: physical issues, fatigue, emotional disruptions, brain fog, disconnection from the sense of joy and peace, self-sabotage, poor sleep, fear-based thinking, depression, anxiety etc.
Energy Parasites or Negative Entities / Attachments:
Shamanic Practitioners travel through the invisible realms of spirit. They learn how to communicate with Spirit Guides and also see “beyond” physical reality. In the invisible realms of Spirit there are all sorts of beings and just like in our waking reality, not all humans are nice, it’s the same over there. Not all spirits are nice and pure. Some of them have negative or demonic energies and need to feed off our own vital energy, like parasites.
If an energy parasite has attached itself to you, there’s nothing to fear, a trained and experienced Practitioner can help you easily with this. Once this happens your anxiety will skyrocket though. You may experience all your fears, addictive tendencies, overthinking, physical issues, anxiety, depression, and negative thinking spiral out of your control as well as you feeling very low in energy and vital life-force. This often happens through the manipulation of this energy parasite as these negative or fearful emotions are literally what they feed from.
Soul Fragmentation or Loss
When we experience a painful situation or a very shocking experience, our souls can become fragmented or parts can break away to protect us. By doing so, part of our soul energy leaves, taking away with it the rawness of the difficult situation and sparing us some of the mental distress. This happens to literally enable us to survive in some cases as the trauma can be overwhelming. Surgeries, intense heartbreak, abuse, trauma, loss and big accidents (car crashes, falls, plane accidents etc) can trigger this and afterward we might not feel like “ourselves” in a number of ways.
The thing is, slowly but surely we lose our vital energy and a lot of “who we are”. If we’ve been through a lot, we will very soon begin to feel fatigued, exhausted, unmotivated, lost, cynical and disconnected from love. A Soul Retrieval will return this lost part back to us, allowing us to be whole again.
Any of the above situations can contribute to feelings of extreme helplessness, anxiety and other more significant mental health issues.
A Shamanic Practitioner will check for all of the above as well as other issues that can contribute to feelings of fear and anxiety such as-
⦁ The anxiety you are feeling may not be your own but has been given to you by someone else or you have taken it on subconsciously. You may also have inherited it from a past life or even down through your Ancestral line. In this case some Cord-Cutting and/or Returning of Emotional Baggage would be very helpful if not essential.
⦁ Anxiety can often be trapped in different parts of our bodies or energy centres, causing physical pain or discomfort on top of the emotional distress, Hands-on Healing is an excellent way of releasing these trapped feelings, allowing them to be freed from the body back to where they came from! Sometimes multiple sessions may be needed to track the progression of the pain through the energy field and physical body as well as heal any damage done to the aura during the process of attachment.
⦁ Being ungrounded and uncentred are very big contributors to feelings of anxiety and we can feel a lack of connection to the earth below us and our own bodies. In this case any techniques that ‘bring us back into our bodies’ are extremely helpful such as focusing on each of the five senses (3 things I can hear, 3 things I can see, feel, touch, taste etc) and techniques like mindfulness and visualisations of ‘being rooted’ like a tree for example.
⦁ A really big contributor to anxiety that I find over and over again in this modern day and age is what we call ‘lack of connection‘. A lack of connection can be to any or all of the following-
-Nature, Mother Earth, the cycles of the year, the moon etc
-Each other i.e. feelings of loneliness and isolation
-Our Spirit Guides, Allies and Helpers, especially our Power Animals (please see my website for more information on this- https://irishshamanism.com/power-retrieval/)
-Spirituality
-And ultimately to our own selves
Being indoors with artificial lighting, heating, easy fast food and multiple screens really facilitates this lack of connection or ‘disconnection’, even something as simple as going outdoors, doing some gardening or hugging a tree can really help! As well as obviously unplugging and making an effort to connect with people, talking and reaching out.
⦁ Feeling powerless or disempowered. A big part of the challenge of anxiety is about feeling out of control with your thoughts. But you can actually stop that spiral of negative thinking with help and practice. Reframing our thoughts is very empowering. Becoming aware of our negative thought patterns, not pushing them away or burying them (where they can fester, build up and do even MORE damage) but also not becoming attached to them. By ‘observing but not absorbing them’ we can allow the thoughts and feelings to exist, feel them, notice which parts of the physical body are most affected, breathe into and through them but not allow ourselves to become ‘entangled’ with them. By not trying (in vain) to block, control and deny them they then tend to fizzle out and lose a lot of power over us allowing us to become stronger and more empowered in the process!
⦁ A Power Retrieval can also be very helpful to recover our feelings of being disempowered and the loss of Vital Energy that goes with that.
⦁ Practicing compassion towards ourselves, knowing that we are doing the best we can on any given day and that our best will change depending on a number of things like; how we are feeling, what’s going on in our lives, how much sleep we are getting, support e.t.c.
Many of us are holding so much trauma from our own past, past lives and from our family’s past, we are used to the struggle and pain and somewhere along the line we have decided it’s ok to feel this tired and anxious. But it’s really not.
You deserve to wake up every morning feeling free, grateful, blissful and trusting. Feeling like this really is a possibility, as strange as this might seem to you now, once you decide to work on shedding all the heavy energies still stored within you.
When you begin your healing path, you are opening the door for light to come through and help you get rid of everything that might be standing in the way of YOUR highest good. However, it is important to know that once you begin Energy Healing, there’s potential for discomfort while the energy is still being released. Sometimes, but not always, it gets a little worse before it gets better. It isn’t easy to choose this path of recovery and healing, it does take some hard work and determination, but it isn’t easy to live with fear and anxiety either especially when it starts to cause problems in your life and becomes toxic and painful.
With some effort and help, your reality starts to improve dramatically to match your new energy frequency. Our external world is a direct reflection of our internal state. When we begin Energy Healing, the world around us shifts accordingly, bringing in a lot more opportunities, blessings, energy, inspirations, people, love prospects, happiness and reasons to feel grateful.
If any of this resonates with you or you would like to make an appointment to start your own journey of discovery and healing then please contact me (Anna) at Midlands Irish Shamanism @ Oak Tree Holistics on 090-6400184 or 085-9371879.
Irish Shamanism, Soul Clinic 