On my path to working with others in recovery from narcissistic abuse and healing the fragmented soul I have come up against the word “healer” quite a lot. Being a healer is something you are, not something you go to school to learn how to be. Our greatest healing abilities come from within us and no amount of traditional or even nontraditional education can create a healer.
A healer is one who heals from within and helps others to access their own innate healing abilities. Of course we all have the ability to heal ourselves but often we need the guidance of one who can help us access that ability and use it wisely.
I’ve had people ask me what schools I have gone to in order to learn shamanic healing. A shaman is not educated from the outside. A shaman does not require a teacher. The shamanic path is something that chooses the individual through the process of rigorous initiation.
Although I have worked with people who call themselves shamans, their role in my life was to help me to see the tools, experience and wisdom I already possess inside and find the courage to step more fully into my power.
I remember lying on the shamans table as he was working with me and I became aware of something that felt like a knife in my back. I was in this process of deep breathing and managed to tell the Shaman that there was a knife in my back. Of course it was a symbolic knife, representing where I had been stabbed in the back, but the sharp pain was very real at the time. Instead of using his power to remove the knife he told me “you have the power! Take it out!” I took a deep breath and imagined myself, outside of myself” pulling the knife out of my back and as I exhaled, a very strong exhale, I pulled that knife out and it was such a relief I started laughing. I was laughing not only because I no longer felt the pain of the knife in my back, but because I realized my power to change my circumstances.
I had just left a very dark individual who I believe was working with some kind of dark magic or witchcraft. I found books about witchcraft in his possession and noticed his energy getting darker and darker. I had nightmares that he was trying to kill me and I actually came to believe he was. I’m not paranoid by nature, but you had to have been there. I write about this experience in my book “Spiritual Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse.”
When I was working with the Shaman I asked him to look into this man’s energy because it seemed to still be clinging to me (typical of narcissistic abuse.) When the Shaman accessed this man’s energy I could see his face change. He asked me “Where did you meet this man?” I told him where we met and the Shaman told me “You don’t need this training! You are already there! This man is very dark and evil and you have come up against him and succeeded. You have passed the initiation!”
What this Shaman did for me was to show me my own power and the initiations I had already successfully passed through. I realized that I was initiated through the process of aligning with dark, sociopathic and narcissistic people and coming out ahead. Each initiation made me stronger, more capable; a better counselor, a more powerful shamanic healer.
Yes; I have gone to college and studied psychology but I did not learn what I knew I needed to know in order to be the kind of healer I, by nature, already was. The initiations I walked through refined me. They peeled away all the false illusions of who I believed I was and showed me who I really was. I was not that weak, helpless child anymore. Perhaps I never was! But I believed I was weak and helpless. And that belief followed me into my adulthood and my relationships. It is not that I stopped being weak and started being strong. It was that I realized who I really was! The weakness was only an illusion that caused me to give my power away to others.
As a student of psychology in the Universities, we learn how to teach people to develop confidence in themselves. As a healer we help people to find the part of themselves that is already confident. There is nothing to develop; only something to discover! We already have the power within us! We just need to know how to access it! And part of accessing it is to peel away what is “untrue” and align with the truth of who we are. The illusion of our own weakness, neediness, helplessness and unwholeness, must be peeled away so that we can see what lies beyond the illusion….the true self!
When we are in our true self we are no longer in the illusion of our own weakness and inadequacy. Sometimes we move in and out of these states of being. But as we continue to align with the path of truth, we spend more time in our true self state and less time in the illusion. In our true self state, we are not trying to become something or gain something. We recognize what we already are and we align with that.
I have developed a technique, used in the state of hypnosis, to help you access your true, empowered, SELF and align with it so you can really experience this aspect of yourself. While in hypnosis, you are in an altered state, where the small, insignificant self loses its grip on you and your empowered self can reveal itself. In this process we can go back in time and bring the empowered self to your helpless inner child, and we can move forward in time and see the results of your living from your empowered self. This is a very powerful technique that can change your life; just as learning that I had the power to take the symbolic knife out of my own back, changed my life.
What if I were to tell you that everything you strive to be, you already are? There is nothing you need to become! You simply reveal what has been lying dormant within; that part of you, you really weren’t aware of. Can you imagine how your experience of life would be different once you realized your own power?
If you truly wish to heal yourself! Discover the inner healer! Don’t go looking for a therapist, a shaman, or a healer who will do it for you. Find someone who will help you to learn how you can do it for yourself! This is how you empower yourself. Giving the healer the power to heal you creates dependency. What most people really want is to be self reliant. It is not that we don’t need others. But we need to understand the role we want others to play for us. The most powerful people you will ever bring into your life are the ones who show you how powerful you already are!
