Do You Need A Session With A Shaman?

Little touches make you feel calmed [KES]

When I was invited to try shamanic healing I decided early on I had to go in with an open mind.

As a cynical journo, it’s easy to be resistant to an old, holistic therapy I imagined as drum beats, long robes and scrutinising my aura.

But embroiled in a post-wedding slump as I’d been, and feeling uninspired by pretty much everything, I was willing to give this a go in the hope of giving myself a little boost and nudge towards finding whatever spark was missing in my life.

I was staying at Middle Piccadilly in Dorset, a rural retreat where mobile signal is as absent as cows are plentiful, and I’d arrived laden with pop psychology and self-help books.

But perhaps all I really needed was a little human intervention.

The buildings and rooms are rustic and simple [Middle Piccadilly]

Middle Piccadilly

The retreat in Sherbourne isn’t quite what I’d expected. Unlike spa retreats I’ve been on in the past, this is more rural, quieter, smaller and perhaps rather more authentic. It’s family run, has only nine rooms and feels very individual and personalised.

Dominic, partner and head chef rustles up delicious vegetarian food for me, and the menu options include all kinds of packages including a raw food option, detoxes and juicing, all with the aim of reviving and caring for guests, rather than forcing them through a weight loss bootcamp.

It acts as a reset button, Dominic explains, and is tailored to the individuals and their needs.

The vegetarian menu is truly delicious [[Middle Piccadilly]

The rooms and grounds are rustic, harking back to its days as a farm and there are two friendly cats milling around.

You can ask for the hot tub to be fired up if you fancy it, though this isn’t a spa in a traditional sense of a pool, steam rooms and so forth. However, you can also book in any number of a plethora of treatments from hot stone massages to colonic irrigation (done off-site) to shamanic healing (more on that later).

But mostly there’s not much to do. Which is the point.

To begin with I find this very difficult. And actually it isn’t until 48 hours later, when it’s time for me to leave, that I feel like I’m really settling into the pace.

The Star Room is perfect [KES]

My favourite thing is when I discover the Star Room. It’s a yoga studio, that’s open to guests, with mats and meditation cushions in the corner you can pull out and sit on, and it’s one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been.

I spend a good chunk of time over the weekend there, cobbling together my own yoga routines, doing a bit of meditation (with the help of my Headspace app) and reading.

The quietness of the place and the area really sinks in, particularly if you’re from a big city, and I enjoy a long walk around the local lanes, with just the cows and birds for company.

While I’d initially panicked over being bored, by the time my 48 hours was up, I was ready to stay and do a lot more of not very much.

The local area is perfect for relaxing [Middle Piccadilly]

Shamanic Healing

A Shamanka is a female shaman and the school at Middle Piccadilly is the only place in the country that trains women in the lost arts of women’s shamanism. Traditionally a shamanka is ‘a woman of spirit, of power, of vision, of compassion. A healer, seer, ceremonial leader, counselor and wisdom keeper’.

Meeting my shamanka was quite an experience. In her mid 80s, Eliana looks far, far younger, overflows with vibrancy and is instantly easy to connect with.

We had an initial little chat about how I was feeling and anything I might want to bring up in the session, but before I revealed too much, she invited me to hop onto the bed and lie on my back to begin the ritual.

She called the spirits with a rattle, from north, south, east and west (with any trace of cynicism on my part now left firmly at the door) and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder, keeping a quiet rhythm with the rattle going throughout.

I’d been worried that the whole session would be a waste of her time when the first question she asked me was ‘how was your childhood?’ and all I could say was ‘very nice’.

She explained that many issues we deal with as adults stem back to things that happened to us as children. You don’t realise how impressionable you were and how unexpected things you’d forgotten about might affect you years into the future. So I wondered, would my lack of notable issues mean there was nothing I could work on?

Traditional Shaman items [Flickr/billdamon]

Visualisation

But I needn’t have worried.

Using a series of visualisation techniques, that took me to where I now see my ‘happy place’ (a beach in a hidden cove in Cornwall), Eliana leads me through a series of thoughts with gentle questioning, raking back over anything that might have led to current worries I have.

We land on a previously forgotten incident in my childhood, when I’m about six and did something a bit naughty at school.

Tracing it back, it seems that may very well have been a pinnacle incident, and though it wasn’t really a big deal at the time, or ever considered since, we look back at how six-year-old me felt and why she might have been acting out.

It can be uncomfortable going back over long-forgotten details of your life in this way and I certainly found it difficult to explain ideas of blame around the people closest to me.

I say this to Eliana, who reminds me that I’m not sending blame to my family, I’m simply recognising that a series of events and behaviours by myself and by those closest to me could have influenced the way I developed. It’s all in my self, too, so they are not feeling any blame.

In the treatment room [Middle Piccadilly]

What Colour Is A Feeling?

The whole experience is both emotional and physical and Eliana asks where I’m feeling this memory, and what colour and shape it is.
Weirdly, and unexpectedly, I can answer both – it’s a butterfly shape and it’s dark grey.

She asks me to take this shape out and throw it at the floor and I take hold of the butterfly under my ribcage (in a kind of blood-free mime, just to reassure you).

I am also asked to say out loud the feelings six-year-old me was feeling, as well as I can. It’s not an easy thing to do.

But even more unexpectedly, I feel noticeably better after I do this.

The last part of the treatment concerns colour and uses the power of different colours to revive the parts of the mind and body that have been most active in the treatment. Again, it’s an entirely visualised process, we’re not throwing poster paints around here.

Writing it down I appreciate that it all sounds very hippy, I choose green to replace the grey butterfly, yellow for my throat area which seemed tense and blue for my mind.

Eliana insists she can see a change in my aura just from the short treatment and uses a feather to brush away anything left cluttering my energy field.

After the treatment I have a lie down. I feel a bit exhausted, even though it’s still early in the day.

The healing is very outside my usual experience but rather than dwell on it, Eliana tells me to just get on with things and not spend too much time analyzing what’s happened.

I do some yoga, read and take it easy before heading back to London, feeling somewhat lighter, happier and more confident.

In the weeks after I feel better too. I feel more purposeful and that I can handle whatever’s thrown at me.

I can’t pretend to understand shamanism, but whatever it is that’s made the change, I certainly welcome it and my mind is more open to it in the future than I would ever have expected.

The experience is partly like modern talking therapy, with Eliana acting as a therapist, getting me to talk through my issues and feeling, but there’s another dimension too – one that I can’t explain, and one that I don’t want to scrutinise too intensely.

I think it’s something more holistic, that goes deeper than just talking through your problems. It’s the intuitive questions asked by Eliana, it’s giving yourself over to the process, and it’s accepting that there’s something inside us, and our connections to each other that is very powerful.

The green retreat grounds [Middle Piccadilly]

Home-time

The calm of Middle Piccadilly does stay with me for some time, and the train journey back to London gives me ample time to reflect and absorb the experience, before compressing myself back into London living.

For some I know that the shamanka experience would be a step too far, but even without it, I think you would be hard pressed to leave the retreat without feeling better, more grounded, more focused and more like yourself.

Middle Piccadilly Retreat in Dorset offers a la carte stays as well as various wellness retreat packages. Contact relax@middlepiccadilly.com or visit http://www.middlepiccadilly.com/ for more details.

South West Trains run a regular service from London Waterloo to Sherborne. For the best value fares, go to www.southwesttrains.co.uk

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