All around the world sacred songs are sung for healing and gratitude, there is a rich history of song in all cultures and nations of the world. The 'icaro' is a sacred song of the Amazon Jungle, a song sung during healing ceremonies by shamans and mystics and ayahuasceros. For those of us luckly enough to be working with plant medicines the icaros are given by the plants to be sung to those that need to hear their healing words and melodies. Once you start with these sacred songs they become like an addiction, always another one looms on the edge of your mind waiting to be brought to life when you least expect it. So now I am a collector of icaros and always on the look out for the next one I can add to my repertoire of strange songs in Spanish and Quechua.
The whispers about the incantation shaman first reached me in 2021. Had I heard of the shaman who brought the sacred icaros back from deepest, darkest Peru? You would love his work they said, by summer of 2022 my teachers, my students and my friends were all talking about the miraculous healing songs of the Amazon. Fine, I said to myself, taking the hint that the universe was trying to give me, repeatedly, if one more person mentions this man I might just find out about him. Which is of course what happened, immediately. Richard has a hundred stories about the amazing healings he witnessed in the rainforest and the people he has healed in the UK. I have only mine, my small story is that part of learning these ancient icaros is to receive them and for them to work on me, on whatever I wish to change about myself.
I sat on an old wooden chair in my box bedroom in Surrey listening to strange words, sung strangely over zoom and I was not expecting much to happen. Could it be that the disordered eating patterns I had experience all my life were about to change? Could a mere song create the transformation I was incapable of bringing about for myself? I could only hope and follow the instructions of my teacher to learn the first icaro I was given and keep practicing, but strange things happened. Whenever I went to practice the song I would feel drowsy and like I could float away. Consumed by the presence of the jungle I could only lay about at home wondering how I could get myself out to work.
During one of these episodes however something shifted and popped in my consciousness, I saw how I treated myself, how I berated myself for every mistake, every mouthful of food was connected to an emotion that ranged from celebration to self loathing. A space appeared in my mind that allowed me to see all these thoughts and patterns, suddenly I could see all the suffering I inflicted on myself. How was the universe ever going to give me all the beauty and joy I was seeking if I did not show it how I wanted to be treated by treating myself in the best way possible? Everything flipped in my mind, I would not be depriving myself by eating healthily, I was depriving myself of a life I wanted to live by continuing along eating badly and shaming myself for it. It all seems so simple right now but a lifetime of programming and conditioning had taught me all the wrong behaviours and thought patterns.
By the end of the course I had lost two and a half stone and completely changed my ideas about eating and dieting. It might seem a small thing to those who already know how to eat in an ordered way but to me this is a huge turn about. I have been working on myself for many years as a student and teacher of shamanic practice but I could never quite reach the bottom of this issue. I must have lost over thirty stone over the years of loosing a few just to put it back on again, and again, and again.