Years ago after a healing session, my shaman said to me almost as an aside, a simple statement of fact: "You are a healer."
It took me aback because that is not how I think of myself. I know healers. I work with healers. My sister and sister-in-law are yoga teachers, massage therapists and energy workers. They're definitely healers. I do yoga, but I don't teach it. I have some experience in energy healing, but I am no Reiki Master. What could he mean by calling me a healer?
When I started this website, I made the statement that I am committed to 'raising the vibration of whatever I touch.' That is how my work often feels. I usually don't know what that shift in vibration will manifest. Evolution often happens in pulses, with contractions between expansions. So sometimes it doesn't look like anything happens, if my influence happened alongside the contraction before the next expansion. I often move on quickly, so I may not be there to see the expansion. I have learned to trust that it happens on its most healing timeline.
In the last five years I have been called to provide space and land clearings. I began by accepting my sacred assignments as usual, and ended up in over my head again and again. The situations were almost always more complicated than they initially appeared. One home had had a suicide happen shortly after it was built. Someone approached me to ask me to clear the ghost in their barn, but the real issue was that their property was the site of an historic battle. A simple 'I don't feel comfortable in my apartment, can you help?' turned into me stirring up a nasty nest of demons in and around the building. Through these processes, I learned a lot, and also realized I needed to learn a way of doing the clearing work that didn't involve clearing the energy through my body. Human bodies don't hold up to that for long. I was grateful to my shaman for being available to put me back together after each of the clearings, but it didn't seem sustainable over the long haul. But I did begin to think of myself as a healer on a land scale as I navigated this learning curve. I may not be a healer of people, but perhaps there was room for 'healer' in my sense of self.
A big shift toward understanding the meaning of healing came when I took Michael Stodola's Devic Land Clearing course. He helped me to solidify the concept of co-creation, and started the healing process of undoing my sense of having to take on these big clearings on my own. As Daniel Foor of Ancestral Medicine says, some tasks are beyond my pay grade, and I need to accept that just because I know about it doesn't mean it's up to me to resolve it. While we were in the course, our group cleared the demon nest, which I had left alone until I could work out how to take it on safely. I'm happy to report it's now resolved!
Another more subtle shift has been working on my understanding over the last few years since I took the course, and it has expanded my understanding of my purpose. In the land clearing ceremony, one of the final steps is to restore the space to its original blueprint of perfect creation.
Do you sense the dissonance between restoring something to its original perfection and raising the vibration of something? It started out perfect, and just needs to be restored to that state. To raise something's vibration suggests a) it needs help b) it didn't start off perfect. When I originally stated that I'm here to raise the vibration, I felt as though it was my job to 'do' something to raise it. I am learning that to be a healer is to recognize the original perfection of a person, place or situation, and work co-creatively with the forces that are larger than me to restore it to its original perfection. There is less doing, more trusting, more allowing.
A couple of years ago I felt called to go through a process of discernment about the projects I wanted to take on, since a few of my projects hadn't been as enjoyable as I would have liked them to be, I came up with this list of questions to ask myself:
Is this project life affirming?
Does it feel expansive?
Does it inspire healing?
Those questions were another step in the direction of releasing my need to enact my will on the world to lift things up, and the slow realization that everything (and everyone) has an original foundation of perfection, and there are healing forces in the world conspiring to bring them back to that state. This has affected what work I say yes to; it has impacted my parenting style (I spent many years of my children's childhood feeling personally responsible for guiding them in the 'right' direction. Now I'm more inclined to trust that their souls have their own direction and my job is to love them along whatever direction they take – easier said than done!); and it has opened up the possibility that I just might be a healer.
This is not to dismiss the layers and layers of conditioning and direct harm that the systems we live in have inflicted on us, causing us to forget our original perfection. That is the work: first believing that perfection exists (organized religion and capitalist marketing both insist we're flawed and need someone or something else to save us, and that's a LOT of conditioning to release), and next trusting that remembering and returning to that perfection is possible. [and of course there is no bypassing the heaviness in the world – as I've said before, that shit is real. But that doesn't mean there isn't a long forgotten original perfection underneath the demon nests.]
I confess it is easier for me to get there when it comes to built environments and areas of land than it is for people, but I do wholeheartedly accept the theory. And where better to start but with myself? I have spent the last couple of years practicing loving myself (check out Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant) while also actively healing my ancestral lineages, which has helped me come to terms with my ancestors' and my part in colonizing the land we live on, but also facing and acknowledging the wounds of my lineages – and receiving the gifts they offer.
I'm not yet sure what will be asked of me in my new role as a healer, but I have gathered many powerful tools and skills in my journey to where I am now. The journey isn't over, but I am more than ready for what comes next.
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