Shamanic Power: How to get it, how to keep it clean

I remember when my shaman training group first sat down to a three day session on how to generate and manage shamanic power: Simon, our shaman teacher, announced that we were going to learn all about how to get power and keep power, and some of us were quite shocked, including yours truly. So I instantly put up my hand and said: “But I haven’t come here to get power. I’m not interested in having power. I’m just interested in helping people.” And Simon just replied,” And how are you going to help people without the power to do so?”.

It’s only more recently, now that I’m training people myself, that I can see that within my initial response lay the whole mess of the psychological development of the healer who wants to help everyone. It’s supposed to be such a laudable aim, no-one dares question it… normally. But without any actual power to effect lasting change on the material planes, this aim is about as useful as Miss World declaring she wants to spend her whole year in office ‘bringing about world peace.” Added to which, it is often, in my experience, more about relieving the discomfort of the healer than the one being healed.

I don’t even really like using the term ‘shamanic healing’, because it then puts it, in most people’s minds, in the same pigeon hole as any other alternative therapy, when it is far and way above and beyond it. I say this as a Reiki master that used to train other Reiki masters. Still, looking back, I can see… I didn’t have any power to effect lasting change. I could just make someone feel better for a while, and most of that was the just placebo effect combined with feelgood factor of having a loving interaction with another human being.

That’s not to say that alternative healing is useless…far from it, and I benefit from many such therapies myself, including homeopathy and cranio-sacral healing. I’ve learned that when alternative or holistic health therapy is combined with a working knowledge of anatomy and physiology, it can definitely mend us on a very deep level. But it cannot, and is not meant to, heal on a multi-dimensional level. The power to do that is the shaman’s, if he or she is taught properly.

So where do I begin to teach this subject now… a subject that we spent three days in workshop on and which had such a reverberating effect on our lives that for years afterwards we were still doing ‘homework’ on it – whether we wanted to or not?

Well, it would take a whole book – and possibly a trilogy. But here’s one golden rule:

Never give shamanic healing to anyone without being asked, by them, to do so.

If you give shamanic healing to anyone without their knowledge or acquiescence, it is an invasion of their privacy and thus a power raid on them and their destiny.

I’ll explain further…

Destiny

As discussed elsewhere, but it bears repeating again, that we each come into this life with a set of pre-arranged ‘appointments’ which pop up as important landmarks along the serpentine meandering of our life’s path. For example, our Higher Self has already arranged into which family we’ll be born, where we’ll be born, where we’ll go to school, university etc, major career moves, SIGNificant others, children and so on….

We also pre-plan any SIGNificant illnesses which will help our souls to grow in the way they need to. With most SIGNificant accidents, illnesses or diseases, the astrological SIGN of Saturn is very present, and Saturn is the best teacher of all because he doesn’t take any prisoners. His lessons are hard to learn but learn them we must, if we are to evolve spiritually. Saturn flies in the face of all the New Age, fluffy kitten, touchy-feely, wouldn’t-it-be-luverly opium dreams about reality and says:

“You can think what you like. But we are here now, and you need to see where you are. If you don’t recognise where you are, how can you find your way forward? It would be like trying to get to Birmingham from London when you are, in fact, in Edinburgh. You can turn the map upside down if you like, but you’ll still be in Edinburgh.”

The trouble is, most of us forget, as soon as we get here, what our appointments are. We may have some sort of sense of their destiny as a child, but that small spark soon gets smothered by the programming here.

So we may come across people that complain bitterly about an illness, and we may also want to heal them because it makes our lives better – we no longer have to feel uncomfortable about their suffering, in other words.

However, unless the person actually asks you to heal them, and also have some sort of knowledge about why they want shamanic healing as opposed to any other kind, you are robbing them of their power to fulfil their pre-arranged destiny. And as most illness or disease stems, in the ultimate analysis, from lack of power, you have just added to their problems by stealing what’s left of theirs.

This is just one golden rule – but it speaks to so much in the life of the healer that I would like to challenge you to watch yourself and your motivations, just to see how often you fail to pass this simple rule. I still sometimes fail it myself.