Recently, I’ve been receiving a lot of inquiries based on the same topics. I take this as further validation of collective transition, and over the next few months will be responding to many of these questions collectively. Please continue to submit questions about private matters, and I will be glad to feature, those, as well. To that end, I’ve had several inquiries of late that deal with physical and psychological conditions. Finding that each of them shares the common concern on how beliefs affect our health, I am choosing to address them in a single overview of how health conditions are viewed and approached in a shamanic context. This response is not a template for approaching every energetic imbalance. As there are often similarities in conditions, there are always unique differences.
There are some common beliefs around perceived poor health, the first being that the condition is “bad.” Within the consciousness of that life form and in the spiritual consciousness, itself, there is no concept of good or bad. The condition just is. Demonizing states of being is like saying “trees are bad,” or “the sky is good.” It is an attempt to create disjoint from something that is otherwise neutral. When we call something bad our body and mind has a reaction to that statement. Think about the terminology used to describe conditions and consider what feelings are evoked by words such as, “illness” or “sick.” Do you feel supported when you say them? Does saying them make you feel better? Generally such wording only reinforces the compromised state of health, because that terminology leaves us feeling emotionally less. When our emotions engage that determines how something influences us. If it makes us feel happy, we feel well. What makes us feel sad, angry, depressed, leaves us feeling sore, tired, and weak. In that light, specifically how we feel dictates our reality, feelings being the reaction to how we think. Casting life force into a good or bad polarity does not help the healing process. If anything, doing so hinders it. To that end, regarding such a condition as energy that is no longer functioning at its highest capacity in that location is more useful. In short, it’s energy in the wrong place. Allowing it to move to a place where it can be functional or released back to All That Is, is the focus.
Another belief that we tend to hold toward our perception of health is that the illness knows that it is harmful and is willfully creating harm. There can be unique factors around this, but in most cases that I’ve worked with the condition did not realize that it was causing harm. In fact, it did not even realize that it was in a non-useful place. This isolated view of self also is frequently witnessed in depossession and in psychopomp work, and is resolved by having an open discourse with the life force on the current state of things, the effect it’s having, and one hopes, by then facilitating its movement to a more useful place.
It’s not easy to change our vocabulary or our beliefs for expressing how we feel about physical or psychological conditions. In some cases, elaborating on how poorly we feel is socially more accepted than celebrating how great we feel. The phrase ‘misery loves company,’ doesn’t stir strong emotions for no reason. Creating discord is a lot easier than engendering harmony, and that is no more true than in matters of wellbeing. Regardless, allow yourself a head start in changing your unconscious perspective on health. During my recent pregnancy and postpartum I found Sandra Ingerman’s How to Heal Toxic Thoughts: Simple Tools for Personal Transformation very useful in creating a way to speak how I felt in my mind and body that alleviate them, and I highly recommend it for that purpose. Putting new thought patterns and methods in place for how to create health will be more easily done in a state of calm. That is not to say that it is too late to address these when feeling compromised. We are always ready to begin, and we’re always ready to feel well.
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Intentional Insights is a Q&A column inviting you to look inside yourself. If you have a question that you would like for me to address in my column regarding a brief Soul Reading or questions about spiritual healing and shamanism, please send them to me at Kelley at soulintentarts dot com, or contact me to schedule a full-length Soul Reading.
