Recently, I was listening to a fellow healer describe with considerable excitement an unusual healing experience which had happened to her that day. It was a spontaneous healing and extraction that her spirit allies had undertaken on her behalf. As a result she felt transformed and a bit disoriented, an effect really deep healing work often produces. In summing up her experience, she said, “This is the sort of thing that happens around So-and-so!”, naming a world-renowned shamanic healer. Clearly not the sort of thing one would expect to happen around an ordinary, run-of-the-mill practitioner like herself!
The Shamanic healer in question is a strong personality, deeply flawed (as are we all) and utterly human. Yet profoundly powerful healing events happen around this person routinely.
Perhaps it is the strong personality. Shamanic healing requires focus, that one holds an intent firmly throughout the work no matter what happens. A strong personality helps with this, no doubt.
Maybe it is the completely fallible humanity. Awareness of oneself often leads to humility, very helpful – crucial, in fact – to the undertaking of shamanic healing.
I would conjecture, based on my own practice, that folded in with these qualities is the flavour of the healer’s relationship with spirit. And of her relationship with herself. This is difficult to measure, but easy to see. If the healing work is going well, the relationship with spirit is healthy, green and springy and full of life force. The healer is given to spirit. Here be miracles.
If the healing work (or just life itself) is not going so well, look to your relationship with spirit. It may well look a bit dry and dusty (or often post-apocalyptic in my case, but I am given to internal dramatic hyperbole, so take that with a grain of salt). In this case, pick up the thread in the dustiest, most post-apocalyptic place and follow it back to its source. There you have the chance to look the monster in the eye and offer acceptance, an embrace, true spiritual nourishment. For the source is very likely to be in your own soul somewhere. And it is rarely “other”, and very likely to be an under-appreciated and under-nourished part of yourself. I realise you know this, but think it is worth saying again.
My advice is that you follow the thread. When this process begins to feel risky, do not give up, but do enlist help. A friend, fellow healer or shamanic practitioner can offer you the protection and support you need in order to face what feels like monsters in your self, your life, your relationships – wherever they may raise their heads.
Persevere, and persevere wisely. Here be dragons, that is true. But here is the truest, deepest, finest work of human being. And here be miracles as well.
That all being said, and your relationship with yourself being just fine, a relationship with spirit requires nurture, and that implies some sort of discipline. This is the part I do not particularly want to write because I am so flawed in this area. I hate having to do the same thing every day. But I have to admit that having some sort of spiritual discipline, something that I do which reminds me on a regular basis that I am part of a greater whole, something that reconnects my consciousness with nature and with my friends, allies, teachers and guides does green up my soul, re-open wellsprings of joy and cause life to run at least in a more interesting fashion.
It is not enough to think about spirit. I must do.
It is not enough even to intend; I must act, speak, dance, sing my way back into awareness, back into expression of my own truest, deepest, finest self.
When that expression is flowing due to regular practice, the ground is opened up for the miraculous. Which brings me back to my fellow practitioner. This person has been forced by conditions in their own life to take the time given on a lengthy daily commute to and from work to reconnect. This happens five days a week as the practitioner speaks with the clouds, the winds, the landscape – thanking them for their gifts, seeing them with an open heart, and blessing them with a lively and full imagination in play. This is like digging the soil in a garden, adding compost and manure, carrying water as needed. Anything planted there springs into life. As does the seed of a request to be whole and fully alive when planted in the soil of this dedicated soul.
Small wonder, then, that miracles seem to spring up unbidden in this person’s life!
ForestPathShamanicWorks 