Every Illness Carries a Lesson. Journeying to Learn It Can Speed the Healing.
One of the techniques I teach in Shamanic Self Mastery, my Level 2 shamanism course is how to discover the wisdom of an illness — to journey for the lesson an illness carries, so that we can resolve the imbalance beneath it and help the body return to health. When we understand what an illness has come to teach, we often speed the healing itself.
This is true of a personal illness, and it is true of an illness that moves through the whole human family at once. Either way, when we ask to be shown the wisdom an illness carries, what we receive is rarely random — and it is often something we very much needed to hear.
The Eagle View
When I journey on a question like this, I ask to be shown the "Eagle View" — the broad, high perspective. And from that height, the first thing illness tends to reveal is just how interconnected and interdependent we truly are.
Living in the modern world, we easily lose sight of our place as one part of the larger Web of Life. For people in a small, traditional society there was no illusion of isolation: our mutual dependence on one another and on the living world — for food, water, shelter, medicine, safety — was simply a fact of life, and our shared responsibility as custodians of the land for future generations went unquestioned. Today, when nearly anything can be ordered to our door and so many needs are met without a single meaningful human exchange, that awareness fades. We forget how much we depend on one another, and we forget our role as caretakers of the Earth.
Illness Reveals Our Interconnection
So many of us feel isolated, and yet we are profoundly interdependent. Illness — and the fear that comes with it — has a way of bringing that truth back to the surface of our awareness. At this point in our history, it can seem we are only able to be shown our interconnection through fear, because we have so thoroughly lost sight of its gifts.
Illness reminds us, with real urgency, that when we touch one strand of the Web of Life, the whole Web vibrates. What we do is never done in isolation; the effects of our actions ripple outward through the entire living world. We are being called to step back into our role as custodians of the Earth, and to take responsibility for the wider impact of how we live.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is a second lesson, and it lives deeper. The great waves of fear that an illness can stir up point to something in our collective shadow: a repressed knowing that we have been mistreating the Web of Life for generations, a quiet guilt about it, and an underlying dread that one day our treatment of the Earth will return to us.
We don't like to speak of this fear. It stays in the shadow, below daily awareness — and because it stays there, it remains a vague, unspoken unease, a sense of impending doom we can't quite explain. But when we turn and face it, when we shine the light of awareness onto it, we begin to understand: the fear arises from our own guilt at having abdicated our responsibility to care for the living world. Beneath that guilt is a belief that we don't deserve to be here, and beneath that, a fear of punishment — that the world will somehow exact retribution.
But retribution is not a natural part of the Web of Life. Vengeance and retribution are human inventions, born of guilt and fear. The Web does not seek to punish us. It seeks balance.
From Fear to Grounding
This is the heart of the wisdom. When we become consciously aware of how interconnected we are, and step back into our natural role as custodians of the Earth, we re-establish a connection that has long been frayed. We find our oneness with the Web of Life again — and from that oneness comes grounding. Once we are grounded in that truth, we are no longer so easily uprooted, frightened, or manipulated through our unconscious fears.
That is the gift hidden inside the fear: an invitation back into right relationship.
So this is the wisdom an illness can carry. The question it leaves us with is a simple one: will we listen? Will we let it return us to our connection with the Web of Life, and step back into our responsibility as caretakers of it?
The practice of journeying to find the wisdom within an illness is part of what we explore in Shamanic Self Mastery (Level 2), and it is one expression of the larger Web of Life work: learning to listen, to heal our own strand, and to tend the whole.
— Scott Silverston