View of the World Underlying My Healing Work
You can completely disagree with me about how reality works and still benefit from the healing work I do. Belief in some particular model of reality is in no way necessary for shamanic healing to be helpful in your life.
The model I use is that there are four layers of reality, and we each exist on all four layers. Both my training and my own personal experience confirm this model.
Physical: There is the physical realm, which we all know. Science is very good at describing the physical realm. Obviously, we all have bodies that exist in this realm.
Energy: Then there is the realm of the energy – the energy that moves through the physical world. This has been given various names. In Star Wars, it was called the force. In acupuncture and Chinese martial arts, it is called “chi”. Personal energy such as chakras, auras, and meridians are in this realm. This is what people are tapping into when they have uncanny expertise, just knowing what needs to be done next. Most strong intuitions come from our awareness in this realm. This is where most psychic phenomena occur.
Spirit: The next layer is what I call the realm of spirit. Part of the spiritual realm overlaps with the physical world. The spiritual realm also includes huge areas which have no physical counterpart. This is the realm where people see angels and ghosts and other spiritual beings. This is also where people have out-of-body experiences. The places that religions describe that don’t exist on earth are in the spiritual realms; for example, heaven, hell, the land of the dead, the land of the hungry ghosts, Valhalla, etc. This is a vast realm, almost beyond imagining.
Many people don’t have a lot of conscious interaction with the realm of spirit, but the truth is we all experience it within ourselves all the time. We experience the well-being or pain of our own spirit throughout our lives. It is strongly intertwined with our emotions and a crucial part of the experience of being human.
Divine: The final layer is the Divine. It is called all sorts of things. It is vast, indeed infinite. Finite humans don’t have a chance of describing the Divine accurately, so I won’t even try. We each contain a drop of the Divine, which I call our soul. This part of us is always perfect and never needs healing.
The spirit holds the soul in the body. The more our spirit is damaged, the less thoroughly our soul is grounded in our body. We can see this in others. People who have undergone terrible repeated traumas sometimes have an empty look in their eyes, as though no one is really there. This is because their spirits have been so badly damaged that their soul is only barely attached to their body.
The more healed and whole our spirit, the more our soul is embodied in our life. This is the work of shamanic healing – we heal the spirit and make it whole, thus helping our own divine nature glow more brightly in the world.
What Is This Type of Healing Work Good For?
Preparing for a Healing Session