Healing begins with love, remembering, and speaking truth to power and believing that change is possible.
The power of Amazonian spirituality and truth-telling to heal mother nature
Amazon rainforest in Brazil. PhotoSpirit/Alamyvia The Guardian
'To be a person is to have a story to tell.'
‘Stories, because of their imaginative power which engages the brain, have much greater impact than simple facts. Increased brain engagement leads not only to increased thought on the engaging topic, but increased memory as well. When that engagement and memory are controlled and focused in a positive way, the brain’s love for storytelling can be the key to healing and happiness.’-Greater Good Magazine
‘Storytelling has been used for centuries to heal, teach, and connect communities. Indigenous cultures have long recognized its therapeutic and healing power. In Indigenous communities, storytelling is not just a form of entertainment; it is also a crucial method of transmitting knowledge, culture, values, and history from one generation to the next. Storytelling is considered a sacred practice essential for individual and collective healing.’-The Core Collaborative
World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Storytelling
Wasaka: the cost of spiritual healing in the Amazon
I hope you may find time to watch this heartfelt video, and more so, I hope you will share it also with your children and grandchildren. It is a very beautiful and inspiring presentation on what it means to be human, our humanity and our relationship with Mother Nature. It is the story of a wise grandfather, his teachings and his love for his family, his grandchildren and his wise teacher, Mother Earth. The story is narrated by one of the granddaughters remembering her grandpa. Kamran
Photo: via The Guardian
‘The plant medicine hayakwaska (ayahuasca), marketed as a mystical shortcut to healing and enlightenment, is an example of what the Indigenous storyteller Nina Gualinga, sees as commodification and extractivism in the Amazon. Nina is from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, Ecuador, and she speaks with the memory of her shaman grandfather about the ongoing cultural appropriation, environmental destruction and marginalisation of her people, questioning our very relationship to the Earth and the quest for healing’- Watch the Video HERE
‘They came for our land, our wood, our gold’
River dance … Photo: CRISIS Gallery/© Santiago Yahuarcani/Via The Guardian
…‘My grandfather would call us together at night and tell us about the era of rubber. He told us how the bosses arrived with rifles and started to force the Indigenous people to collect the sap of trees for rubber. They demanded 50kg of sap from each person every two to three weeks. They gave them the materials they needed to get the sap and they gave them food, but not enough food.
‘Anyone coming back with less than 50kg was punished. Some were thrown into a hole 15 metres deep. Others had an ear hacked off. “There was also a guy, my grandfather told me, who’d make everyone watch as he cut off a lump of your flesh with a knife. They wanted to scare people so they’d get their 50 kilos.”
‘Then came the time when the bosses decided to plant sugar cane, coffee and corn for the women to harvest. “These women worked with their babies on their backs,” says Yahuarcani. “One baby started to cry because of the heat of the sun. The overseers came and took the little boy from his mother’s back and threw him on the fire.”...
‘My grandfather told me the butterflies were the spirits of the victims, of the people who had been burned’
Fantastical worlds … CRISIS Gallery/© Santiago Yahuarcani/Via The Guardian
Read the entire article: ‘They came for our land, our wood, our gold’: Santiago Yahuarcani, Peruvian painter of dancing dolphins – and genocide
A selection of related articles from our archive
Photo via Pinterest
World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Mother Earth
We are not the Masters, We are the Servants: Time to Reassess our Relationship with Nature
‘Nature and Me’: Realigning and Reconnecting with Mother Nature’s Wisdom- A Five Part Guide
Detaching Nature from Economics is ‘Burning the Library of Life’
