More about shamanism...
Your energy body is exquisitely intelligent, and highly sensitive. In the west, we are not taught to recognize our energy body as aware, nor to see our souls as existing beyond a complex network of firing neurons. But you are indeed a gorgeous soul with a long history.
It is a normal occurrence that during the course of your life, you have experiences that overwhelm or traumatize you in some way, and leave their mark. Sometimes in these moments, the experience feels too hard to cope with, so you pushed it down, compartmentalized it, in order that you could function. Experiences must ultimately be processed in much the same way we process food: We take it in, digest it through the body, absorb its nutrients (wisdom), then discard back to the earth that which doesn't serve us. In order to let it digest all the way through, we have to be willing not to resist any facet of the experience. But this can be hard to achieve, for most of us in the human experience. I don't know of any human, no matter how strong or wise, who hasn't been brought to their knees at one time or another by a deeply painful experience: a sudden profound loss, an unbearable rejection, abuse, intolerable circumstances. When things happen that are too much to face all at once, we sometimes push the energy down into the subconscious, rather than allowing it to digest all the way through, putting it on hold until we are ready to face it all. If allowed to be stuck long enough, this trapped energy debris over time can calcify and ultimately manifest as dysfunction and disease. Energy is meant to flow. When energy gets stuck, there are many natural ways to get it unstuck. Our own consciousness, when it simply observes and doesn't resist what is, has a powerful healing effect. Pure consciousness generates alchemy. (This is why meditation is so effective.) The body, both physically and energetically, knows how to heal itself. But sometimes our own trauma and resistance can get in the way of this natural healing process.
Shamanic medicine is on this earth for exactly this reason. It can get in, when nothing else seems to work. One of shamanic medicine's essential tools is Miqui (translated as "mulching.") The Miqui process operates in a highly intelligent, impeccable way. It goes to work, clearing out the accumulation of energetic debris that builds up over time in a person's body, and freeing up the stagnant places to flow in a healthy way again. Shamanic journeying is also an essential, powerful way to get underneath the stuck places, able to get past the resistances and unlock the stagnant energy for you, on your behalf. A shaman is essentially your advocate in the energetic realms, who can address and restore the places in the energy body that are running on errant programs and patterns that are not serving you.
It is your birthright to thrive. Every wound is possible to heal from. Your energy body is literally made of light. You are a light body. That magical body becomes grayed down and slowed down due to the karmic sludge that has not yet been fully processed or faced. When the seven main chakra centers of the energy body start to become cleared of their debris, they return to their full color frequency. It is like watching the fog lift. From the root to the crown, the chakras appear as red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, indigo, and violet - the colors of the rainbow. This is why the indigenous people call this your "rainbow body." When someone is working on clearing out their accumulated energetic debris, which causes their energy body to appear grayish, bit by bit their true colors literally begin to shine forth at their true frequencies, like a rainbow. (This is why the flag of Cusco, Peru, is a rainbow. The seven-color (seven-chakras) rainbow flag of Cusco is homage to the Incas who were committed to each person becoming a rainbow body, and viewed this as each person's birthright.)
