The True Depths Of Healing
When people picture energy healing, they often picture hands hovering a few inches off a body, working in the space around a person. They are visualizing the outer edges of our energetic structure. There are deeper levels, and at the deepest we find the place where our vital immunity resides.
Proper Energy Body Cultivation moves in stages, slowly yet consistently, progressing over time at a speed that allows the learner's nervous system to integrate each level before moving to the next. Every person is unique, and there is an art to finding the right pace to make consistent progress without overloading the circuits.
You start by learning to feel the breath in the belly. Then the lower dantian as a reservoir. Then qi moving through the channels and how to open and close the energetic gateways. As you become more proficient, you work at progressively deeper levels within the energetic circuitry of the body. You learn to lead qi through the blood, the organs, and eventually how to circulate it through the bone marrow.
When you can do that, you are working the interior of these circuits at the deepest energetic level available to us. You are nourishing the channels from inside the bones themselves, from the place where our immunity resides.
When you lead fresh qi through the center of the vertebrae and the long bones, washing the marrow, you are working directly on the tissue that generates your physical and energetic defenses. This is why bone marrow washing has been at the center of closely guarded martial arts traditions for centuries, and why the practitioners who know how to do it properly tend to age differently than others.
How To Get There
The first requirement is practice. This work is meant to be applied and embodied. Developing a cognitive understanding of energy body architecture and the proper methods of cultivation is important, but it is no replacement for consistent daily practice. Once we learn how to practice correctly, 15 minutes a day is all that is required to create an enduring shift in our energy body circuitry. That is a small investment for a huge reward.
The second is finding an effective method of confronting the obstacles that will inevitably arise on your path. The practices are powerful, and they dislodge long repressed energy that has been trapped deep within us. This is where Shamanic Journeying comes into play. Throughout the apprenticeship and later in the specialty courses that I offer, we are continually refining the process of removing blocks to the effective flow of life force energy through our system. As you progress through the levels of course study, you acquire more and more tools with which to unlock the next layer of healing.
A Continuous Unfolding
People sometimes want healing to be an event. One session, one course, one clearing, and then it is done and behind them. That's not how it works.
Creation is not a finished event, it is an active, ongoing, unfolding process, and we are part of it, which means that we unfold too. There is no final version of you waiting at the end of the work to be arrived at, we are works in progress, always.
My own practice looks very different than it did ten years ago because I am different now than I was then. I have grown, healed and evolved. My practice is alive, and as I continue deepening my personal healing, I increase my capacity to help others.
My Work Evolves Because I Do
I only teach what I embody. I receive instructions in my personal journeys about the next course I am supposed to teach, and before I bring it forward to share, I work within myself to master and embody it. The internal part, the embodiment, takes months. It is this unseen part of the continuous work that I do on myself which catalyzes Shamanic Spirit Medicine to be a living method that continually grows and evolves, renewing and regenerating itself.
The most valuable thing I can give you is the capacity to do this for yourself, for the rest of your life, whenever the next layer surfaces for you. To teach you how to embody a living healing modality that incorporates authentic Energy Body Cultivation with the ability to journey for yourself. To show you how to shift the hidden agreements that have been holding you back, how to recover your own soul parts, how to heal the conflicts buried in your ancestry and how to develop true Inner Vision so that you can continue to meet the depths of your healing as it unfolds.
This doesn't mean you do it on your own - far from it. Support is available at every step along the way: from me as a teacher, from others within our community of students, and by requesting a formal healing session. There are times for all of us when we hit a wall and may need assistance from someone else. The best healers and teachers recognize this within themselves as well as in others. It is what keeps us real, keeps us humble, keeps us human.
If a teacher or a healer pretends that they are already complete, that they have healed all there is to heal, walk away. Because that is a person who is not honest with themself and therefore cannot be authentic with you. Interdependence is the nature of all human life, of the entire Web of Life. If we stop growing, we stagnate. Maybe it is something we aren't able to see for ourselves because we are too immersed in the situation to get perspective, or maybe we unearthed a layer that is just too painful to confront on our own. Whatever it is, asking for help when we feel vulnerable takes courage.
What To Do When You Hit A Wall
Whatever the reason you hit a wall, the key is recognizing it for what it is and knowing how to navigate it effectively. You do deep healing, something profound shifts, a pattern that had run your life for decades loosens its hold, and you see a glimpse of your full potential. You feel inspired, energized, and have the sense that you have finally arrived.
Then you become aware of something else, something underneath the layer that you just resolved. Something older, deeper, heavier, or more frightening. Something you did not remember was there, and which you maybe wish you could put back in the dark place where it was hiding. This is what I call the wall.
Sometimes we are eager to confront the next layer, but sometimes we resist it because it can feel like too much. We feel what we walled off a long time ago, something we walled off because we never wanted to feel it again, and we might want to put it right back where we found it.
The Choice Point
When we fully recognize what is happening, we can confront it honestly and say "I am not ready to look at this right now." That's fine, it's appropriate, and it is something I do often. I name it for what it is, acknowledge the need to resolve it, and put it aside for a later time when I have the bandwidth to address it properly. Within a few days or a week, the space opens for me and I bring that layer of healing to completion. There is no need to push through something before its time. After putting it down for a moment, if we still feel overwhelmed by what we uncovered, that is the time to ask for help.
But if we are not aware of where we are in our process, if we are blind to the wall itself and shove what we uncovered behind it without fully acknowledging what is happening, the part of us that built that wall starts to play games with us. We can blame others, or the work itself, or pretend that our healing should be complete. This is the same part of us that created the wall to begin with trying to take over again, trying to make us feel safe by projecting our pain outwards in a sideways manner. It is what the psyche can do when standing at the edge of something it is not yet prepared to face. The logic mind tries to protect the identity it created in us by making the doorway to healing look like a bad idea.
"Real Healing Never Closes the Door Behind It
It Opens the Next One"
If You Are At The Wall Right Now
Some of you reading this are standing at the wall right now.
Know that you do not have to go through it today. There is no schedule here, nothing to push through. Pushing at something before you are ready creates its own distress. Resting at the wall is perfectly fine. That is the medicine of winter time, and as long as you are honest with yourself about where you are and why you are choosing to rest, your time off will nurture and prepare you for the time when you are ready to resolve what you need to confront.
And know that you have support on your journey if you want it. I am here to assist with session work if requested. But you have to ask. Ethical healers never overstep boundaries by poking into territory another is not yet ready to face. We observe and share about the specifics of what we see below the surface only when invited.
Beyond The Apprenticeship
The Apprenticeship gives you the foundation and the core methods of Shamanic Spirit Medicine. For some people that is a complete path in itself. But it is not the end of what there is to learn.
The courses that came later evolved as my own practice evolved. Healing Our Ancestry, because I kept seeing how conflicts between the bloodlines of our personal ancestry are carried forward as conflicts internalized within us. Inner Vision, because I keep refining my capacity to perceive, and have been guided to share these methods for training and healing at a depth far greater than where most practitioners are satisfied.
Every one of my courses exists because I hit a wall, resolved what was behind it, and found healing on the other side. It is a gift that keeps giving, even when the challenge of confronting old pain that we buried for years seems too large for the moment.
There is always more to heal, more to learn, and more ways to grow - and there always will be.