What happens when a medical intuitive, firmly trained in medical practice, merges to do a hand divination? What will she see? What do any of us see when we merge with a spirit helper to do a hand divination, having also had a long, enculturated awareness of human physiology and its weaknesses? How do we respond when our clients come to us because they also have this orientation and seek spiritual help for concerns that ordinarily would be found in a medical practice?
I received a very interesting report from someone who is quite clearly an accomplished medical intuitive. She is well trained, and enjoys a career in a hospital where her intuitive skills have prompted her to refer people to other medical professionals for examination. Through her referrals, patients were discovered to have hidden health problems that had not been recognized. Because of her gift, people have received critical medical treatment that otherwise might have come too late.
This woman's report is significant because it challenges all of us to carefully reconsider the spiritual work that we are doing. A curious problem is appearing today in the contemporary world because today's practitioners are likely to be also, at least somewhat versed in contemporary healthcare. Most everyone has seen a physician for something. Difficulties arise not because medicine views the body differently than shamanism, nor is it a problem that shamanic practitioners know something of the medical paradigm. Both ways of seeing are tools. The problem is how we use them.
Today's healthcare rests on a paradigm of physiological understanding of biological causes and effects. A 'paradigm' is a broad construction of reality. Cultures, and even eras of human history accept paradigms through which the world is generally understood. Through the eyes of the practitioner we will follow here, we have the opportunity to see for ourselves the difficulties that arise when spiritual and physiological paradigms collide.
Paradigms change. Throughout history, ways of understanding reality changed when enough information gathered to show not only a new, internally consistent way of understanding, but one that seemed to provide a 'better' explanation than those that came before it. This then, becomes a new world view: a paradigm. The successful outcomes of medicine, for instance, brought enough of a challenge to the spiritual paradigms to cause cultures to largely let go of spiritual ways of understanding illness and shift to a medical one.
Many of us today have grown up within such a culture that understands human wellness and illness from a medical and physiologically oriented paradigm. However, today's shamanic practitioners are attempting to bring our largely forgotten historical and pre-historical ancestral wisdom back to the present time. And, it is a different world. Today, we are separated from each other such that we pass each other on the sidewalk without acknowledgement; we are alienated from an Earth that is no longer recognized as a living whole; we suffer disconnection even from ourselves... This, and more, constitutes the illness of the present era. We yearn for a wellness that is no longer being accessed, and the turmoil and suffering of our planet and its inhabitants screams to us that we have somewhere lost something necessary for our survival. In our struggle to step forward, shamanic practitioners are stepping back.
We have been reaching back to a shamanic, spiritual paradigm, which has presented some unique challenges. Successfully regathering such an ancient world view is not simply a theoretical challenge; it manifests in each step we take. What does the shamanic practitioner 'see', for instance, when she or he brings their spiritual, shamanic divination practice to the human body? We grow up within a physiological and medical world view, yet the shamanic practitioner proceeds to peer into wellness and illness from a spiritual perspective. The collision of paradigms cannot be avoided.
Let’s take a look at how one practitioner stepped into her spiritual work, yet brought with it her medical way of understanding. She reports;
"I got to practice… on a woman in my drum circle. She laid down and I got to the merged state with my spirit helper. I knelt next to the woman and rattled a little, took some deep breaths and closed my eyes. I started with a kind of quick total body scan with my hand directly over her and feeling the energy. I could sense areas of warmth and areas which were cooler. One place on her body, over her heart, wanted my hand to linger, so I did. I got a visual in my head of an object which looked like a large seedpod. The energy here was more vibratory, I could sense a quickening in the woman. I noted this and moved on.
I didn’t feel anything else quite as drastic as the energy over her heart but I did feel changes in temperature and density of the air over her body. Some places my hands wanted to linger and some my hand quivered more than others. I went back to the heart area and asked my helper if this was something which would need extraction. I was told ‘No’.
I returned to the room (from sharing her consciousness by merging with her spirit helper) and told the woman what I saw and felt. She told me she had just been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and had started medicine for it. I know that when I saw the seedpod, my immediate impression was that she might have a growth or tumor in her breast. I didn’t say that, and am glad that I just told her what I saw and felt, rather than my interpretation of it. I am also glad that I trusted my helper and didn’t try to extract anything, in this case, from her heart.
… I have done Reiki for years and I feel energy with my hands. I have, in the past noticed even at my job at the hospital, that when I put my hand on people to take a blood pressure or something like that, I get sensations about their state of being both physically and emotionally. I have been very judicious with this yet have made simple remarks which surprise people that I am so intuitive. Many times I have sent people from my (medical unit) to the emergency room without definite evidence that something is wrong and they are admitted with serious issues. I sent one man in the very beginning stages of a stroke and saved him from a very serious outcome. I also sent a man to his doctor, based on a hunch, and he was diagnosed with cancer...
As I write this, I am realizing that that is me who has that ability, not me (who is) merged with my spirit helper. Is this a totally different thing? Would a person who has a natural tendency for intuitively knowing, be able to access that ability while merged? Or would the helper be in charge and my abilities put aside?"
This is such an excellent question! This medically trained professional is in the midst of a profound paradigm shift; one which all shamanic practitioners face after growing up in a contemporary, medically oriented culture. Squarely facing and truly working with this shift means teasing apart different ways of comprehending reality, and this can be a challenge.
Shamanism does not work with a cancer or stroke. Why is that! Don’t people go to see a practitioner precisely because they are finding problems in their life? Why not medical ones? Yes, they do. And that is why this practitioner’s experiences – and her questions – are so important. She raises issues that underlie all of contemporary shamanic practice. Her challenge here, is also our own: to know the difference between medical and shamanic paradigms so as to know what is shamanic healing.
Cancer and strokes appears in a human body when viewed from a completely different paradigm from that of shamanism. It is a view that sees tissue, blood, bone and all the rest that makes up human physiology interacting in causes and effects that result in wellness or illness. However, everything about shamanic healing is based on the recognition that important matters - including wellness or illness in people’s lives - may change following the healing work of practitioners and their spirit helpers. What is happening: it seems like a contradiction!
Anything that shows up in a person’s life, whether it is in their body (such as a medical illness), their mind (such as psychological suffering) or their life circumstances (such as misfortune), may be related to a spiritual problem. May, yes, but not necessarily so. What is important to realize is that spiritual and medical issues are not the same thing. Spiritual issues may be related to any existing ordinary reality concerns, and they may not. When we are exercising our shamanic awareness, whether we are merged with a spirit helper or not, it is the spiritual aspect of what is before us that we are sensing and working with, not a physical, psychological or social one.
There is no doubt but that this practitioner has a gift: she is what many would refer to as a ‘medical intuitive’, with an extraordinary perceptive and diagnostic sense about the body’s functioning. Intuition is an ability that may serve a shamanic practitioner, but intuition is not shamanism itself. Intuition is an unconscious psychological ability to observe and recall complex multitudes of delicate, overlooked, and subtle details of present and former experiences and knowledge, and recombine these quickly into a realizations for which even Sherlock Holmes would arch his eyebrows in delightful surprise. Many people can do this, in fact, most of us have at one time or another tapped into our intuition. However, understood from a shamanic paradigm, shamanism is not just intuition.
This practitioner is very familiar with the medical side of things. This has been her career. Yet it precisely because of this training that it may difficult for her to separate her spiritual practice from her medical one. The potential complication is that ordinary reality knowledge and awareness can cloud and confuse spiritual awareness and spiritual knowledge. Whether we are merged with a spirit helper (such as when doing a hand divination) or not, the shamanic practitioner's ordinary reality abilities - such as physiological knowledge of structure, function and illness in the human body - must be set very much to the side.
Much but not all of our human vision and understanding, gathered from years of learning about and living in the physical world, is quite different from what the shamanic ‘ear’, and ‘eye’ can hear and see. Many of our human abilities are in a completely different reality altogether from those of the spirit world. What is wonderful is that the same human being who can gather knowledge in ordinary reality, can also slip into nonordinary reality and see differently. From this ability came the shaman.
The shamanic practitioner we are following here is a medically trained professional, and from her perspective, the immediate hypotheses (a growth or a tumor) are quite understandable. Then, she learns of previously diagnosed atrial fibrillation. However, all of this is mixing shamanic and medical paradigms. She is approaching her work with a shamanic merge, and still wondering about medical illness! The shamanic paradigm wonders about such things as a potential loss of power, the absence of a soul part, or the presence of an intrusion (which an extraction would remove), or more. These are spiritual matters, not medical.
The practitioner asked a good spiritual question: is extraction necessary. OK, let’s look more closely at extraction. In extraction, it is the spirit helper who is doing the work, not the practitioner. During a hand divination (the part of extraction that looks for problems when merged with our spirit helper), our helper is observing spiritual matters, not medical ones. 'Cancer', for instance, is not something that a spirit helper will see, since cancer involves a medical and physiological paradigm of wellness and illness due to specific kinds of cellular, biochemical and physiological causes and effects. Moreover, if a shamanic practitioner is merged deeply, he or she is barely present at all. Strong merges open the door for a spirit helper to do its work. This demands that the practitioner is only ‘along for the ride’ to the degree that he or she can redirect the spirit's activity in cases of ethics or safety. Any more than this and a practitioner interrupts and confounds the spirit helpers assessment and healing.
I believe that some of the confusion between medical and spiritual paradigms in this instance goes back to an understanding of merging itself. Merging is not simply being 'empowered' with a spirit helper's abilities, because this would mean that the practitioner’s consciousness is very present, and in fact, being empowered! Merging is just the reverse: getting the practitioner's consciousness completely out of the way so that a spiritual entity can utilize his or her body for its work. This leaves us with an interesting irony: we become better as practitioners the more we are able to remove ourselves from the practice.
So what does this mean for us? Our spirit helpers work with the spiritual dimensions of existence. We practitioners work with all the ‘ordinary reality’ complexities. They do their job, and we do ours… especially when this means stepping out of the way so that they can do their work.
Curious. To step forward and bring shamanic healing to ourselves, each other and our world, we must set aside our despiritualized medical, psychological and social paradigms. We have seen their advantages, however the limitations of such a world are proving too much for our Earth to handle. Shamanism is being remembered and brought back to an era where the paradigms that guide humanity now have critical consequences.
Our efforts as shamanic practitioners to facilitate the healing of our clients means reconnecting with a world view that sees health as being whole, knows the Earth as inextricably interconnected and living, and recognizes physical, substantial reality as only a small portion of all that exists.
Stepping forward means stepping back.