Melanie Esparza - Week 3

This week’s topic is something that I’m somewhat familiar with although there are some differences in my culture. When I was younger, I used to believe that spiritual healers were a thing for the superstitious. Although my mom had told me of her earlier personal experiences with “curanderos,” I believed that it must have been a case of coincidences lining up and some exaggeration. My mom had been sickly her whole life, but things took a turn for the worse when I reached high school. She was severely sick for roughly two years, and despite the best efforts of countless doctors, no one could figure out what was wrong. It wasn’t until she saw our culture’s equivalent of a shaman that my mom was told she had a brain tumor caused by a curse. He gave my parents details about the curse and where it had originated as well as cleansing and protecting my mom. Within a month she found a doctor that found her tumor and began to treat it effectively. There were details that lined up perfectly with everything the curandero had told her. That was the day that I knew that some things can’t be explained by modern science. Fjelstad’s Possessed by the Spirits was a very interesting read that explored the role of mediums and how they are affected by their interactions with spirits. I particularly enjoyed the paragraph discussing yin and yang illnesses. Fjelstad wrote, “Yin illnesses are caused by spirits, whereas yang illnesses are considered to have ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ causes. Although yang disorders can be treated with secular medicine, yin illnesses can only be cured in the supernatural world.” I have seen firsthand how powerful spiritual healing can be in a situation where the best of western medicine has failed. Mind and body are inextricably connected, and we need to normalize the practice of healing the mind. This reading made me think a lot about how illnesses are diagnosed and the way that the spirit’s role in physical health is hardly taken into account. How many mental and physical illnesses might there be that could be treated with spiritual medicine?

References Cited 

Fjelstad, K. (2006). Possessed by the spirits: mediumship in contemporary Vietnamese communities. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.

Image source: https://relaxlikeaboss.com/spiritual-energy/