Shamanic healers from around the world offer a different perspective of what it means for a woman to transition from a regular menstrual cycle and fertility, through to menopause. I asked our shamanic practitioner, Lisa Sabatini, to share her insight with us.
Many of us are familiar with the image of someone “hyperventilating” (breathing rapidly) as a reaction to stress. However, the opposite is also true from periods of prolonged stress: In times of continued mental, emotional, or physical stress (such as chronic physical pain), our breathing can become shallow and we may even hold our breath without realizing it.
These days it seems everyone has elevated stress levels. Most of us don’t realize just how much that affects our health and wellbeing. Our nervous system acts as an information superhighway, delivering messages throughout our body regarding stress management. From a Shamanic Healing perspective, this is how and why it matters:
There was a time in my life when I was so busy and stressed, I couldn’t stop for a single minute. I mean that quite literally. I flew through the day, from one thing to the next on “autopilot” (going through the motions), and everything became a blur. By the end of the day, when it was time to sleep, I’d lay in bed awake for hours. My mind still thinking, wheels turning, about what I had done that day and what I needed to do the next day.
When I was introduced to mindfulness, I was confused. It never occurred to me that the healthiest place for my mind to be (and amazingly the most productive!) was in the present. Not thinking ahead, nor about what had already been done, but in the present moment.
An extract from the Possibility Project Podcast.
Sarah Knight: You haven’t always done this work. Where did you come from and what brought you into doing healing work?
Lisa Sabatini: I originally came from journalism and communications – I was a journalist for many years, I produced television. I like to explain it this way…journalism is about research but communication is about taking the things in journalism that might be really complex and making them relatable and clear. I feel like everything around us is communication, even healing and the work that we do, is very much about communication. Communicating with ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our spirit – that is our beliefs – and even with nature. How we communicate with the world around us and how the world around us communicates with us.
