Shamanic Egg Cleansing: a Gift from the Doñas

Tools for a Shamanic Egg Cleansing

       A few years ago I had a great opportunity to study with two traditional healers from northern Peru.  Given the name of the “Twins”, Doña Olinda and Doña Isabel were raised in the mountains and deserts near  Chiclayo, Peru; here they learned to work with the sacred lagoons of the Andes as well as the rich plant life in the desert along the sea coast.   They learned traditional healing from their indigenous heritage as well as some healing tools brought to Latin America by the Spaniards.  They blend all these things together in their medicine:  plants and prayers, energy healing, shamanic techniques.  They are curanderas and shamans.  

     As part of their teaching, I had the opportunity to participate in some of their healing work.  This is always part of the path of the healer: we learn by getting healing treatments and finding out what works for us.  We then take the best of what we have learned and use it with other people.

     I didn’t know it at the time but I really needed the work of Doña Isabel and Doña Olinda.  I had grown up not knowing how to take the best care of this body I had been given.  The idea of self-care was like a word in Swahili: a  foreign concept beyond my grasp.  I knew I needed to take much better care of myself, yet felt powerless about doing so.  There was low self-esteem at work:  I’m not worth the trouble.  There was a sense of futility:  what is the point when stuff is going to happen anyway?  In a weird way, it felt frivolous and self-indulgent to focus on self care when the world had so many other things at stake.  I had known for many years that I needed to take better care of myself, but I was stuck.  And so it went.

     It was in that weekend with the Doñas that this thinking started to shift.  In a shamanic journey around these questions, Spirit told me that my time on this planet is a journey of body as well as  mind and spirit.  It is a profound gift to have this human body and I have a responsibility to take good care of this gift I have been given.  I was also reminded that people who are dying often express great regret that they did not take better care of and enjoy their body more.  These ideas were very illuminating for me.  

     Perhaps the most transforming moment for me in that weekend came when the Twins did a shamanic egg cleansing (limpia) on me.  This is one of the most important healing tools they have:  they took a fresh (hen) egg, blew prayers into it and then moved the egg in circles all around my body, top to bottom.  As they did so, I could feel the power of their work, pulling out old stuck energy from me.  I started to cry and then could not stop.  For me it felt as if the egg was clearing old grief and pain that I had carried for 50 years.  Finally they finished by taking a branch of rosemary and sweeping down my energy field, in a process called a barrida.

     After they finished clearing my body, they broke the egg into a glass of clear water and did a reading.  From the photo here, you can see what this might look like: a  yolk sitting at the bottom of the glass, the egg white in a pattern above it and the water it sits in.  My egg was nowhere near so healthy:  the yolk was disintegrated and looked as if it had been in a blender.  If I hadn’t been crying before, I would have started then:  that egg was thrashed.  But the Twins sat with me and gently explained what they were seeing: old patterns from childhood, a near-death experience, my struggles with my parents.  They saw it all.  They helped me see it and understand my life and my choices in a powerful new way.

     And that work transformed me.  It was two weeks later that I woke up from a good night’s sleep and decided it was time to learn how to do better self-care.  I didn’t have a clue what that would look like, but I was no longer stuck in hopelessness.  I decided it was time to lose weight and in the process learned that it really does work (for me) to focus on calories and portion size.  After years of being sedentary, I started to exercise and found new pride in my increased mobility.  I learned Qi Gong and found great relief from the inflammatory arthritis I’ve had for 20 years.   I explored different stress management tools and found some that worked very well for me.  A nutritionist helped me realize that I have Celiac issues so I stopped eating wheat.

     Now two years later, my life has been transformed, in what my spouse calls the “new & improved Janet”!  I am 50 pounds lighter.  Sleep apnea is gone and high blood pressure has resolved.  My blood sugar is now normal.  I go to the gym 3 times a week for a Silver Sneakers exercise class and walk one mile without difficulty.  My energy is much better and I get through a normal day without exhaustion.  I can even dance a little and do some hiking:  all these things were impossible 2 years ago.  The horizons of my life were shrinking as I aged, but now they are expanding and I am exploring all the new things I can do.

     This is the gift from Spirit, offered through the skilled and loving hands of the Doñas.  This is the beauty of shamanic egg cleansing:  a powerful healing tool that finds that which is broken in us and helps make us whole.  

     Now this is work I do on others, passing the gift and the healing forward.  I offer it to you.

Janet

Resources

•  Shamanic Egg Cleansing by Kalyn Bastion Raphael

•  Woman Who Glows in the Dark  by Elena Avila

•  The Twin Shamans web page:  http://www.twinshamans.com/about_us.html

•  You tube of one healer’s egg cleansing:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbK6jd-U8I