Every Illness Carries a Lesson
Learning Its Teaching Can Speed Our Healing
One of the techniques I teach in Shamanic Self Mastery, Level 2 of my Shamanic Apprenticeship, 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 or imbalance that afflicts the entire Web of Life.
The Eagle View
When I journey on about something big, like imbalance in the Web of Life, I ask to be shown the "Eagle View", the broad, high perspective. From that height, the first thing revealed is often a message about 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 a lived daily experience, and our shared responsibility as custodians of the land for future generations was 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 can fade to the background, becoming more of an intellectualized concept rather than a lived experience. As a result, it is easy to forget how much we depend on one another, and 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 often accompanies it, has a way of bringing that truth back to the surface of our awareness, especially when we need physical assistance to regain our health and vitality.
What we do is never done in isolation. Even if we are not aware of it, the effects of our actions ripple outward through the entire living world. Imbalance in the way we live as modern humans impacts the Earth as a whole. 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, not just for our personal health, but for the health of the entire Web of Life.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
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
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.
This is one example of the wisdom that 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 of the Apprenticeship). It is also one way in which we can help do our part to return balance to the Web of Life.
— Scott Silverston