Didgeridoo Therapy

The didgeridoo is one of the world's oldest musical instruments, originating in Australia thousands of years ago. It is a wooden wind instrument that is played with continuously vibrating lips to produce a resonant trance inducing drone while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing. This requires breathing in through the nose while simultaneously expelling stored air out of the mouth using the tongue and cheeks. Playing the didgeridoo strengthens and tones the tissues of the throat, and can also provide good exercise for the respiratory system, as well as a meditation aid. According to a study published in The British Medical Journal, playing didgeridoo helped reduce snoring as well as daytime sleepiness and could improve sleep apnea. People who have experienced didgeridoo therapy have reported that they sleep more soundly and have a stronger feeling of wellness in their daily lives. Read more.

Drum Therapy for Depression

A Finnish study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry finds that drumming alleviates depression. Twice a week, with the help of trained music therapists, the participants in a 2011 research study learned how to improvise music using a mallet instrument, a percussion instrument or an acoustic, West African djembe drum. Study results demonstrated that participants receiving active music therapy in addition to standard care had a significantly greater improvement in their symptoms than those receiving standard care alone after three months of treatment. Researchers believe the addition of music therapy allows people to better express their emotions and reflect on their inner feelings. It has been argued that music making engages people in ways that words may simply not be able to. Read more.

Core Shamanic Beliefs

Shamanism represents a universal conceptual framework found among indigenous tribal humans. It includes the belief that the natural world has two aspects: ordinary everyday awareness, formed by our habitual behaviors, patterns of belief, social norms, and cultural conditioning, and a second non-ordinary awareness accessed through altered states, or trance, induced by shamanic practices such as repetitive drumming. This second-order awareness can be developed over time or appear all at once, but once it is discerned the world is never the same. According to shamanic theory, the ordinary and non-ordinary worlds interact continuously, and a shamanic practitioner can gain knowledge about how to alter ordinary reality by taking direct action in the non-ordinary aspect of the world. Read more.

How to Make Prayer Ties

The sacrament tobacco is used cross-culturally as a unifying thread of communication between humans and the spiritual powers. Offering grandfather tobacco carries our prayers to the "Loom of Creation," thereby reweaving the pattern of existence in accordance with those prayers. Prayer ties are spiritual symbols created by wrapping tobacco into a cloth while praying and meditating. Upon completion, the prayer ties are ritually burned, opening a path of communication between the human world and the spirit world. To learn how to make prayer ties, read more. 

The Revival of Mongolian Shamanism

In the book -- "Tragic Spirits," MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger chronicles how the revival of shamanism has shaped Mongolia in the last two decades. From storefronts in Ulan Bator, the nation's capital, to homes in rural Mongolia, shamanism has become a growth industry. The return of shamanism, she asserts, represents more than the straightforward return of a once-banned religion to Mongolia. And it is more than just a convenient method for people to earn a little income by working as shamans. Rather, she says, shamanism became more popular precisely because, in a poor country recovering from Soviet domination -- where Mongolia's occupiers had wiped away its records and the physical traces of its past -- shamanic practices have offered some Mongolians a way to reinvent their own history. Shamans offer clients the opportunity to meet with the spirits of their distant ancestors and hear "fragmented stories about their lives in the past."