It goes without saying that I wasn’t a very trusting child by the time I reached Middle School. I’d been through tortures that destroy people completely, and I’d experienced the bullying and mocking of my peers for something neither they nor I fully understood the source of. The world around me had shamed the concept of trust, freedom, happiness, and respect from me.
By this time, to most of the world I was a ghost. I was the quiet kid with few opinions and little to say. At least, that was how I appeared. Even – or maybe especially – to my family, I was very much an enigma. I let them see only what they wished to or were most comfortable seeing. I became a mirror of expectations to most of the world. There were few people who saw me as I was, and even fewer who accepted nothing less than the real me.
I kept those people, that life, carefully separate from my family and the rest of the world — a move I still regret, to this day.
So what does any of this have to do with being a Healer, or a Shaman? Everything. I tell you all of this not for pity or sympathy (I abhore both of those being directed my way). No, this is to help you understand my reawakening, how significant it is that I overcame this — how the Healer was reborn, and the Shaman made.
There is an old expression, “Physician, heal thyself.” I firmly believe that at the root of every true Healer is trauma, illness, or injury. To understand the pain, illness, and fear we fight, we must first overcome it. Much as the apprentice Shaman of yesteryear undertook a harrowing Spirit Journey — a journey into the both physical and spiritual wild places — the modern Shaman is tested by life.
My test was in overcoming my pain and bitterness at the past. It wasn’t easy, and there are still times I retreat behind the wall of silence I crafted as a defense when I was a kid and faced with those unable to accept anyone of a faith or viewpoint different from their own. There are still times when ignorance, bigotry, or violence take me beyond the annoyance and determination I can control, and clear into a spiritual vigilante’s rage. I am, after all, only human.
My open Journey into what I am began ten years ago, with the realisation that the empty hollow inside of me was proof of a lesson I had yet to learn. A lesson I could not learn where I was.
