The Healing Wisdom of Africa

1. Healing Requires Addressing Visible and Invisible Worlds

The indigenous world offers to the modern world centers around the understanding of the concepts of healing, ritual, and community.

Holistic Approach. Indigenous healing practices recognize that physical ailments are often manifestations of deeper energetic or spiritual imbalances. Therefore, true healing must address both the visible (physical) and invisible (spiritual) realms. This holistic approach acknowledges the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit.

Energetic Imbalances. The Dagara believe that instability in the physical world stems from instability in the energetic world. Rituals are designed to repair disturbances in the unseen energetic place, knowing that healing there will bring about healing in the physical realm. This perspective shifts the focus from merely treating symptoms to addressing the root causes of illness.

Beyond Physicality. The Western world often prioritizes material affluence while neglecting spiritual needs. Indigenous wisdom suggests that true healing involves reconnecting with the unseen forces of nature, community, ancestors, and Spirit allies. This reconnection can alleviate the pervasive sense of loneliness and isolation that plagues modern society.

2. Ritual as Technology: Manipulating Subtle Energies for Healing

Ritual is the technology that allows the manipulation of these subtle energies.

Ritual Defined. Ritual, in the indigenous context, is not merely a ceremonial practice but a dynamic art that weaves together individuals, community, and the forces of the natural world. It involves gathering with a clear healing vision and trusting intent toward the invisible world.

Spontaneous Gestures. Rituals are characterized by spontaneous gestures, touch, sound, melody, and cadence, which are unpredictable in their outcomes. These spontaneous activities request the presence of invisible forces and participate in creating a harmony or symbiosis. This partnership replenishes each person by restoring his or her relationship to nature.

Art and Rejuvenation. Ritual is an art that weaves and dances with symbols, and helping to create that art rejuvenates participants. Everyone comes away from a ritual feeling deeply transformed. This restoration is the healing that ritual is meant to provide.

3. Community: The Foundation of Well-being

The general health and well-being of an individual are connected to a community, and are not something that can be maintained alone or in a vacuum.

Collective Orientation. Indigenous communities understand that human beings are collectively oriented. The health and well-being of an individual are intrinsically linked to the health and well-being of the community. This interconnectedness emphasizes the importance of social support and mutual responsibility.

Loneliness and Isolation. The absence of a supportive community can lead to intense feelings of aloneness and isolation, which haunt the psyche of the modern person. Only by being part of a community can these feelings be addressed. This requires mentors and elders who recognize initiatory passages and provide guidance.

Reciprocity and Belonging. Community functions through giving and receiving. Individuals contribute their unique gifts to the community, and in turn, the community supports and protects each individual. This reciprocity fosters a sense of belonging and shared purpose, which are essential for well-being.

4. Nature: The Original Home and Healer

Nature, therefore, is the foundation of healing, and the type of nature that surrounds a community at the time of doing a ritual determines the types of ritual that are appropriate and the content of these rituals.

Interconnectedness. The natural world is an integral part of an indigenous community. Village people envision the community as including the geography and the natural world that surrounds and contains the people. This close relationship is symbolized by the bond between a person and his or her place of birth.

Subtle Energies. Every tree, plant, hill, mountain, and rock emanates a subtle energy that has healing power. Spending time in nature provides a good beginning for change, as the natural world holds all the materials and tenets needed for healing human beings. Nature is the textbook for those who care to study it and the storehouse of remedies for human ills.

Spiritual Connection. Indigenous people believe that the physical world is a reflection of a more complex, subtler, and more lasting yet invisible entity called energy. If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent has been experiencing instability. Ritual is the principal tool used to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the structure of the physical world and bring about material transformation.

5. Purpose: Remembering Why You Are Here

People ignorant of their purpose are like ships adrift in a hostile sea.

Innate Gifts. People crave the full realization of their innate gifts and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius.

Remembering Purpose. Purpose is not something assigned to a person by his or her community but something that the individual has framed and articulated prior to coming into a community. This purpose is known to the village even before the individual's birth.

Community Support. The community takes upon itself the responsibility of nurturing and protecting the individual, because the individual, knowing her or his purpose, will then invest energy in sustaining the community. There is a certain reciprocity at work here.

6. Mentorship: Guiding Youth to Their Genius

What the indigenous world offers to the modern world centers around the understanding of the concepts of healing, ritual, and community.

Awakening Genius. Mentoring is aimed at increasing security, clarity, and maturity in the young person. It seeks to develop the genius within a young person so that the youth can arrive at his or her destination—the sharing of one's gifts within the community.

Reciprocal Relationship. The mentor is not a teacher but rather a mirror. The mentor sees in the young one's struggle what he or she has been able to overcome. The pupil sees in the mentor the destination of his or her own journey, and there is a unique reciprocity in their relationship.

Community Involvement. The mentor focuses on the character and/or spirit of the young person and seeks to bring that person's unique gifts to full fruition within the community. The mentor is, in a sense, the midwife of the adolescent's spirit.

7. Elders: Guardians of Wisdom and Tradition

The elder is as important to the community as the newborn, in that they both share a proximity with the Other World, the ancestors' world.

Repositories of Knowledge. Elders are repositories of tribal knowledge and life experience, essential resources for the survival of the village, anchoring it firmly to the living foundation of tradition. The old and the elder are the most revered members of the village community and its greatest preservers and nurturers.

Mediators and Guides. Elders mediate in the business of continually correcting individual human lives. They are the ancestral ear in the village, guiding oblivious wrongdoers to act in a healing manner toward themselves and others.

Accountability and Responsibility. Elders are more accountable than anyone else in the village, and this accountability is even greater in the Other World than in this world. This is because every day brings the elder closer to the world of Spirit and thus more distant from this world.

8. Initiation: Embracing Adversity for Transformation

Initiatory events are those that mark a man or a woman's life forever, that pull a person deeper into life than they would normally choose to go.

Life-Transforming Challenges. Initiatory events are those that define who a person is or cause some power to erupt from them, or strip everything from them until all that is left is their essential self. These challenges present opportunities for growth and transformation.

Community Recognition. What is lacking in this rich life experience is a community that observes the individual's growth and certifies that one has passed through an initiatory process. This enables a person, in powerful periods of growth, to behold voices within confirmed by voices from the community without.

Three Stages of Initiation. The initiatory process can be understood as a three-stage process: the early stage (the trouble or ordeal has just started), the middle stage (a period of extreme disruption), and the end stage (a view of the shore).

9. The Dagara Wheel: Balancing the Five Elements

The elements of nature, especially the trees and plants, are the most intelligent beings because they do not need words to communicate.

Cosmological Wheel. In Dagara cosmology, the image and structure of the circle, or wheel, organizes perceptions of the world. The wheel refers to the cyclic nature of life and is a microcosm of the circular nature of the planet.

Five Elements. The Dagara cosmological wheel consists of five elements: fire, water, earth, mineral, and nature. Each element represents a unique set of qualities and plays a vital role in maintaining balance and harmony.

Elemental Balance. For the wheel to be balanced, there must be an overwhelming representation of water. Just as the earth is essentially water, and just as the human body is essentially water, a community needs a large number of water people to maintain its balance.

Last updated: April 14, 2025