Cutting the Cords
I am seated quietly on a grass mat opposite a quiet man. The small room has African textiles and hangings on the walls. I had arrived at 13.00 and walked through the rather empty house in Clovelly and now sit in silence, waiting until the man looks at me directly after scanning me. I feel he has been looking around me, beyond my physical being and past me, back into the generations who stand lined up behind me.
Now his gaze returns to the present, with me in the centre of this space sitting on a mat. He has extraordinary eyes, and I find myself being pulled into them, linked with an invisible cord. Only when he glances down to the small leather pouch in his lap is this connection broken, and I sense a release of the magnetism. I am again separate, an individual in a small space with another. Still no words have been spoken as he opens the pouch and allows the contents to spill, apparently randomly, onto the cloth in front of me.
The objects – shells, bones and stones of varying shapes, sizes and colors, find their place. They have laid out the diagnosis to be read and shared and provide the basis for our continuing interaction. I have come to this sangoma, a couple of days after my 58th birthday with the specific intention and request for help in ‘cutting the cords’.
Cutting the cords…. Cords which seem to keep me attached, energetically, emotionally and vulnerably to my partner and husband whom I last saw 4 months ago, when he drove me to Geneva airport. Two days before he had called to wish me well for my birthday, and I had learnt of his intended visit to Brazil. Following my emotional reaction I had called the sangoma and now I was waiting to hear his assessment and the next steps.
I am rather dismayed and a little disappointed when he says – ‘We first have to work on your mother’.
My mother ! My mother died 18 months ago, a few weeks after her 80th birthday. Now we have to work on my mother to enable me to cut the cords with my husband?
This surprising information adds another layer to a remark made earlier the same morning by Senta, an intuitive medical practitioner working with magnetic resonance and energy equipment. I had a scheduled appointment with her, and the readings had shown an improvement in my heart, which I linked to the constructive steps I’d taken since my birthday. Then almost casually, she’d said…’There’s something here about your mother and Ronald…’ We’d left it at that but now, three hours later, the sangoma is also suggesting the importance of this ‘something’.
It’s not simply a question of cutting cords. There is something deeper, more profound – an energetic illness called sinyama. Which I inherited it from my mother and she perhaps inherited from hers. I needed to be released from this in order to get on with my life in total freedom. We would start the cleansing process that evening at sunset. I was to wear clothes which would be ‘worked on’ and discarded.
That night, 9th February 2009, there was a full moon and a lunar eclipse, perfect timing for starting a week-long series of rituals. In my journal entry on the 10th, I wrote:
I’ve felt a purification and purging going on today and last night with the full moon, the energy was very profound…. it’s good to be doing this and it will also release mom, as the ancestral healing takes place as I move forward. I’ve known at a deep level there was ‘something’ affecting me. I’ve been vulnerable for so long. It’s a relief to take this action now. The second session is this evening at 18.00. I’ll report back… I’m to take a pack of razor blades!
The second session included another steaming and the cutting of skin on my wrists, ankles, shoulders and three places on my back. Then the sangoma gave me a little more information about the sinyama condition. It can be dormant for a long time, then provoked by deep shock, distress or a powerful negative energy. It may not actually manifest in a lifetime but it is passed on. Not having children, fibroids is a sign of it.
I thought about all this. My fibroids, my hysterectomy six years earlier. I thought about the possible impulses which could have awakened the condition in me in its current form. Deep shock and distress in Bosnia certainly, following closely on the dark negative experiences of my two-year sojourn in Cape Town, when I now knew I had received ‘curse energy’ (which had been identified and worked on a year before).
Flashbacks…images… tumbling over each other coming to the foreground in my consciousness as I recognised each event, felt each emotion, saw the experience and received the impact in my solar plexus.
According to the sangoma, this has had a hold in my pancreas/liver/solar plexus area (which accounts for the very, very low readings I‘ve had with Senta.) And he says, it can be fatal. As I described in my journal after the second session, which included sealing and protecting rituals:
Its very corrosive, fire-based, eating away and my kidneys trying to balance all the time accounts for the shortage of water (at my annual visits to St Francis Health centre, I’m always surprised at the well below normal water content in my body stats).
The pieces of the puzzle were slowly coming together. The link with ancestral lineage was also a new insight for me. I needed to do this healing also for them. According to the sangoma, when dead, they are aware but unable to work on things, and can only work through the living. So, this ritual was important.
Before the third session, when we would commence the cutting of the cords, I wrote
Last night was sealing and protecting. And this morning I’ll be opened up.