Demons, Ghosts, Archaic Wounds

Most shamanic traditions have notion of demons and ghost invasion leading to chronic illnesses. People often believe that demons and ghosts are some types of external entity of some sort.

Shamanism in Siddha tradition implies that individual and Cosmos are one. And Siddha practitioner can tap into cosmic-prana for healing, insight, and understanding. In Siddha tradition, demons and ghost are intrinsic aspects of us. There is no invasion or possession by external entity.

Demons are trapped energy from unprocessed traumatic emotional events or unresolved or trapped emotions of painful events. Demon is a scarring over our spirit from unresolved trauma. It shrinks our world and our capacity to connect with it.

Demons begin to take shape from unresolved emotions when the teacher called us stupid, the bully who taunted us, or the physical trauma, or the sexual abuse, or the first love who ever abandoned us. The hidden, repressed pain-filled, shame-filled fragmented emotions accumulated over time morph into our demons.

These are the unexpressed horrifying fears, shame, the gnawing guilt,… These are the traumas of the past that we have never faced. These trapped energies obstruct the vital flow of life leading to many psychosomatic conditions.

Ghosts on the other hand are trapped emotional behavioral energies that are passed down through generations.

Hating the other (yesterday it was Communists; today it’s terrorists) is ghost that is carried through generations. It is a ghost, whose contents are behaviors of enmity shaped by emotions of “them,” verses “us.” “They” want to hurt us and take away what we value. They aren’t like us. We have a right to fight them, and even destroy them.

These invisible emotional energies, which shape minds of many people rather than one, which survive generation after generation to undermine rational thought, is what the ghosts are all about.

They hide in the dark alleys, secret passages, and attics of our collective emotional body.

In Eastern medicine (Indian, Chinese, Tibetan) demons and ghosts are trapped emotional energies and are linked to organ spirits.

For example, a demon of shame has nature stickiness and heaviness. It and leads to damp conditions affecting spirits of stomach-pancreas-spleen leading to water and fat retention, pattern of worrying, anxiety, depression and many other self-image and metabolism related dis-ease patterns.

Ghost of fear has nature of wetness and sinking feeling it affects the spirits of Kidney-Adrenal-Bladder.

And a ghost of hatred has the nature of heat and dryness that affects the liver-blood-gallbladder spirits leading to chronic fatigue, stuck in repeating pattern of relationships, inability to move forward in life, impulsiveness, obsessions, and blood related dis-ease patterns. The normal soft and fluid feeling of tissues and organs becomes replaced by hard, wooden or rock like sensations.

In some healing tradition ghost and demons are referred as “archaic wounds”. Dr. Stanislav Grof in his work describes them as COEX (Condensed Experience). The COEX is emotionally charged unresolved events from different periods of life that resemble each other in the quality of emotion or physical sensation that they share. Each COEX has a common theme (fear, rage, shame, etc) that permeates all its layers. The COEX appears and unorganized or congested vital energy or spirit.

In Eastern medicine and shamanic medicine treatment involves helping person to reorient their spirit along with inner work, herbs, diet, and manual treatments.

In CranioSacral work we wait with client until their ego softens and they allow the primary respiration to dissolve their archaic wound while releasing the experience of pain that was deeply buried and become aware of wisdom behind it.