My ideal client is intuitive,
creative, spiritual, and open to non-linear ways of thinking
and being. Put in shamanic parlance, my ideal client yearns
to connect to spirit or non-ordinary reality, though he or
she may not know it. I once had a client who told me
frankly, “I’m not sure if I believe in all or any of this
stuff", meaning spirituality in general or shamanism in particular.
“You don’t have to,” I told her, and you don’t. But many
people, knowingly or unknowingly, hunger for this type of
connection to the non-linear world, because it gives them
the depth of understanding and the strength to hang in there
and make profound changes in their lives in a way that the
ordinary linear mind can’t grasp or deal with.
Which leads to another
characteristic of my idea client. Put simply, my ideal
client is excited about the possibility of growing and
healing at a very deep soul level, even if (or even though)
the idea is frightening. My ideal client is excited about
“accomplishing the impossible,” even if he or she sometimes
(or often) fights the idea tooth and nail. Can I REALLY
connect to God? Can I REALLY discover my purposes and do
what I’m put on earth to do? Can I REALLY forgive my
parents/myself? I work well with people who are open to
living life without the limits our egos normally place upon
us because I myself am a natural maximizer and optimist.
It’s what I most appreciate about my own shamanic mentors,
and I offer the same to you.
My ideal client is willing to build
on his or her strengths and do what it takes to get even
better. I’m not talking about spending ten hours a day on
your spiritual, mental, and emotional growth. I’m talking about
taking five minutes to write down the results of a journey
or a soul retrieval, five minutes to meditate or release
negative energy. Okay, so maybe I’m talking ten minutes,
but really, that’s all that it takes.
My ideal client has courage and a
willingness to commit to what can be a long and up-and-down
process. By willing to commit, I am not talking about
spending a lot of money, coming every week. You can go for
weeks or months without wanting or needing a private healing
session, and in between sessions, I offer generous amounts
of follow-up.
In addition to these general
characteristics, there are two particular groups of clients
with whom, given my training and life history, I can be
particularly effective. One is writers and other creative
artists. I frankly believe that there is not much difference
between being a writer and being a shaman; both involve a
connection to spirit. To that end, I help writers connect to
the world where their deepest stories, characters, poems,
etc. “live."
The other group is school-aged children and their parents.
Most children at some point in their lives feel inadequate
in school. To put in in shamanic terms, schools are a major
source of soul loss, not only for so-called “special needs
children,” but for virtually all of us. Just as soul loss is
almost universal, there's barely a soul alive who hasn't in
one way or another been harshly judged and wounded by the
education system. As a shamanic practitioner with an
unorthodox education background, I can help alleviate this
soul loss and restore dignity, not only through shamanic
healing per se, but also by imparting information that can
help children make peace with their weaknesses and better
understand their strengths, Parents, too, suffer when their
children are harshly judged in school, so helping parents
often results in healing for the children as well.
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No. Shamanic healing is powerful
complementary healing, meant to be used in conjunction with
whatever other forms of healing and medication are
necessary.
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As with emotional and mental
“issues,” physical illness from a shamanic perspective is a
“symptom,” if you will, of something gone awry with the
soul—specifically soul loss, loss of power, or energy
interference (e.g., a spirit intrusion or other unwanted,
unhelpful form of energy). So far, I personally have had
better success in helping people a) find the hidden gift in
a physical illness; b) deal with other, related symptoms,
such as negative feelings, beliefs, and patterns of behavior
that no longer serve the client; or c) recover from major
surgery faster than might otherwise have been the case. That
said, shamanic healing can work for physical illness, and my
pledge to you is that I will either help you or refer you to
another more appropriate shamanic practitioner.
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In a sense, yes, absolutely. If you
haven’t yet experienced shamanic healing or watched a
shamanic practitioner at work, it can initially feel really
strange. For one thing, shamanism is an unknown for most us
raised in “western” culture. (The first five minutes of the
first night I walked into shaman class and we called in
the directions, invoking the spirit of the serpent, etc., I
myself thought, “Hmm, I don’t know about this; what on earth
did I sign up for?") For another, we live in a culture in
which everything that can’t be scientifically tested or
proven by logic is suspect, inferior, not to be trusted.
And yet in another sense, shamanism
and shamanic healing are no more weird than other intuitive
(or even mundane) moments that many of us experience (or
wish we didn’t experience, or would like to experience)
every day.
For instance:
- You’re standing in line at a
bank, waiting forever, and you can sense the stress of
everyone around you, without looking at their hands
or faces. Or you’re sitting around the family dinner
table, knives and forks clinking, people mumbling, “pass
the salt," and even though nobody’s saying anything and
even without looking at anyone’s face, you sense the
unspoken tension. You even say to yourself, “The
atmosphere in this
room is so tense you could cut it with a knife.” (Andean
shamans call this “hucha,” or heavy energy, and there
are many healing protocols for minimizing, or coping
with this kind of energy.)
- Conversely, you walk into a
room full of friends and a house that feels peaceful and
you immediately feel the “good vibes.” (Andean shamans
call that "sami," and when you transform the heavy energy
into light energy, you can accomplish amazing things,
healing not only yourself but others as well.)
- You have a dream and gain
valuable information about yourself; eventually, the
dream even comes true in the waking world. (Shamanic
cultures are dreaming cultures and, rather than viewing
dreams as the random firing of neurons, see dreams as
messages from the spirit world, love letters from your
highest self. Shamanic healing can help you mine
your dreams for all they’re worth.)
- You have a hunch, a feeling
about a particular person, and you say to yourself, “I
don’t know where that came from!” and ultimately, it
turns out to be true. (Shamanic practitioners might call
this “trusting spirit,” and shamanic healing and
workshops can help you get better and better at this.)
- You’ve been struggling to,
say, “get over” the loss of someone dear to you or come
to terms with another wound you’ve suffered from a long
time. You’ve analyzed the situation a thousand fold,
you’ve obsessed about it, looked for insights as to why
it happened, then suddenly (out of nowhere), it IS over;
you feel it in your body. Something is energetically and
profoundly different, (Some shamanic practitioners in
the Andean tradition call this reaching the “essential
level;” Jewish shamans call this the level of “sod,” and
one of the purposes of shamanic healing is to help speed
this process along, through ceremonies that remove
unwanted energy and gift you with life-changing energy.
)
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I’ll give you two!
- Sarah, child of an alcoholic
father and a bipolar mother, had a long history of
physical abuse, emotional abuse, abandonment, and
neglect. When she was 12, for instance, her parents sent
her away into the foster care of an aunt and uncle, who
ignored her as much as possible. Sarah’s new home also
included two hostile cousins who appeared to be jealous
of Sarah’s considerable artistic talents, intelligence,
and grades in school. Sarah decided that her
intelligence and creativity were too dangerous to use in
this family and deliberately “went underground” in order
to be loved. She stopped painting, which she adored and
did for hours at a time in her room as a young child.
She dumbed down in school as much as possible, and the
life force went out of her. “I became invisible,” Sarah
reports, “I wasn’t me anymore.” The invisibility
continued for decades, long after Sarah’s year with her
aunt and uncle was over.
Sarah’s formidable gifts and
fierce determination enabled her to reclaim her
creativity and her soul in her late 30s, 40s, and 50s.
By the time she sought shamanic healing, Sarah had done
a tremendous amount of self-healing. Sarah was painting
again, though not as often or as much as she wished. She
was proud of her creative life, but wanted to use her
gifts even more. She was also proud of her friendships
and her peerless relationship with her son. But she was
married to a very closed person and believed that
finding a man whom she truly loved was something that
was simply never going to happen. “I just don’t have the
skills in that department,” she sighed.
Part of a soul retrieval
ceremony includes journeying to determine a client’s
true life purpose and exposing what Clarissa Pinkola
Estes calls the “bargains without knowing,” the unspoken
poor contacts we make with ourselves and others that
help us survive but ultimately compromise our souls.
Sarah’s poor bargain turned out to be: “I will give up my life in order
to save my parents’ life.” Her purpose: To be “an artist
on every level.” “You are an artist, and your life will
be a work of art.” I told her in the wake of the soul
retrieval journey. “Write. Tell your story. Painting is
your life, and life is your painting.” With the old,
poor bargain or contract exposed, Sarah was free to tear
up the contract and live out her life’s purpose full
bore.
It’s been two years since
Sarah’s soul retrieval, and subsequent healing
ceremonies, including divination, restoring harmony, and
dream consulting . She is now dating a man whom she
loves and who cares about her more than she’s ever been
cared for before. Together they have built a tree house,
which doubles Sarah's art studio. She is busy decorating
the house and covering every spare inch of the walls and
stairway with paintings and poetry.
- Joy came to me with
a history of emotional abandonment and an eloquent
description of soul loss. “I was born with a spirit that
was very special. But inside me I have a very, very sad
child. Afraid, unstable. I never felt unconditional
love. I was only as good as my last song. I feel like
I’m living with only 30 or 40 percent (of my soul). I
would like to live with 100 percent.”
Joy felt caught in a
relationship in which she “mothered” her husband too
much. “I hate it and he hates it, too,” she said. “But I
can’t help myself. If I can strengthen my character
and allow the past to be history, I could be more functional
and not dependent on my husband to feel whole. I want to
feel that if something happened to my husband, I would
be fine,” she added.
A soul retrieval often begins
with a client checking off a list of soul wounds in both
the past and the present, including abandonment,
emotional abuse, criticism, neglect, perfectionism, and
failure. Joy checked off only one in both the past and
present, “anxious attachment,” It was a happy
revelation. Despite being the family scapegoat, Joy “never bought into the whole picture, the bad things my
parents said about me.” This independence of spirit was
further strengthened as the ceremony progressed and a
missing piece of Joy’s soul was returned to her, in the
form of a white buffalo—a powerful symbol of abundance,
helping yourself, and gratitude for what you have.
(Other soul fragments included Joy at age 3 months and
all of the notes of the scale and the spaces between the
notes). While I journeyed to recover some missing pieces
of Joy’s soul, Joy also journeyed to a beautiful place
in nature, where she met her parents who have passed.
She forgave her parents, and her parents told her
categorically that they were sorry for everything they
had done and, at the time, had done the best they
could.
A few days after Joy’s soul
retrieval, she and her husband had a conversation in
which she truly listened to her husband in a new way,
not rushing to jump in and mother him. "As a result of
the healing, I’m more receptive to what others truly
have to say. Growing up, what I said wasn’t important to
my parents, so I found myself talking, talking, talking. Last night,"
she told me," I heard my husband in a way I hadn’t heard
him before. It was an aha moment." She also spoke
from her heart and exacted a promise from her husband to give up
smoking cigars.
A few months later, Joy and I
revisited a traumatic dream she’d had a t the age of 10.
In that dream, Joy was playing on the playground in the
bright sunshine, when an earthquake erupted. Joy was
about to fall through the cracks in the earth, when she
reached upward for help and woke up. Joy had always
viewed this dream as evidence that, as a result of being
unloved, she had a “cracked foundation.” I challenged
Joy to find something positive in the dream. She re
entered the dream on a shamanic journey and found
herself rewriting it. “I let myself feel the warmth of
the sky. I was grateful for the friends I’d had in
school. Then I felt myself being lifted up by mother
nature, or my mom, into a huge bear hug.
I heard
 all the
things I always wanted to hear—how appreciated
I was,
how special I was. I was actually feeling a renewal.
I
realized I have a choice. I could go on for the rest of
my life mourning what I didn’t get. Or, as an adult, I
can look at what I, Joy, truly need, and go for it.”
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