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“To the winds of the South, great serpent, wrap your coils of light around us….” I invoke the spirit of the four directions in the ancient ritual - ancient perhaps as time itself – to come and help us in our healing, to keep us safe. I reach up into my eighth chakra, pull down a beautiful veil, enfolding you and I in a profound peace.
You can feel it - the beautiful calm. I’m going on a journey for you - into the invisible world: it may be into your past; it may be into your future. I will tell you things that will seem like a dream. You may feel twitches, tinglings. You may find yourself momentarily sad and not know why.
When we finish our session, you may feel a subtle difference - a shift: things don’t seem quite the same. When you have touched your soul, embraced that part of you that will never be ill, that will never die - your life, your world can profoundly change.
Welcome to shamanic healing. Shamanism reaches back 40 to 50,000 years and has been known in every indigenous culture around the world. You may have seen pictures of Amazonian shamans healing the afflicted, or the medicine man of the American Indians. It is still practiced today, most actively in this hemisphere: in America among the American Indians and in South America, not only among native groups, but also in mainstream society. When one is ill, one sees not only the doctor, but also the shaman.
How does it work? Physics has shown us that every single thing in existence is simply vibration, and if we look deeply enough into the heart of the atom, the basic building block of all - we find, not solid particles, but phantom “marks.” It is astonishing to think that the very ground we walk on is, ultimately, no more solid than the air we pass our hand through. The Shaman, then, has learned, through a number of techniques, how to manipulate those “vibrations” for the healing of the person he or she is working with. But it is more than that: there are spirits “out there” in the invisible world - spirits ready to help us - if we invoke them. They are as real as we are. For the shaman, there are no natural and supernatural worlds: there is only one world with both a visible and an invisiblerealm. The shaman learns how he can “cross the river” and bring back something for his clients’ healing.
How can we know it really worked? You’re right to be skeptical. I was once such a skeptic.
Let me tell you a story. Maria, my wife, always told me I was “too much in my head.“ She was gypsy-beautiful, mysterious and possessed a natural relationship to spirit I could only envy. “If I have to explain it to you,” she would say, “You won’t get it.” She pursued many avenues over the years - saw psychics, astrologers, attended numerous workshops on a variety of subjects, read voraciously. I remained on the outside, an “interested observer.”
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she refused all traditional therapies, choosing instead vitamins, herbs, fasting, alternative practitioners, meditation - with limited success. Time wore on and she turned more and more to energy healing. She would fly all over the country to attend workshops; yet the prayed for miracle remained just out of reach.
Then, one day a friend mentioned she had met a shaman, Dr. Thane Ostroth, who also happened to have been our dentist for the past 15 years. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Thane was and is one of the most down-to-earth, intelligent men, I have personally known in my almost 60 years. Maria, immediately made an appointment, and soon had her first session. She said she felt real healing was taking place and scheduled another session. She felt better; I was delighted. “Would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about what you do?” I said to him,
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when I had my next dental appointment. He grinned, his now famous grin. He spoke matter-of-factly about shamanic healing - how illness has an energetic component that, when changed, can heal the illness. “Curiouser and curiouser!” exclaimed poor Alice. I, too, had now fallen down the rabbit hole. But, Thane I knew personally, so I took hope. Then she developed a pain in her shoulder that would not go away and things started to spiral. She weakened to the point where we finally took her to the hospital. She stayed for eight days; received innumerable tests, but no treatment. Under the care of hospice, we brought her back home. I called Thane. “At this point,” I said, “anything you can do I will be eternally grateful for; if nothing else, then your prayers.” Thane said he would work on her on Wednesday evening. This was Monday. I took some solace in that, thinking perhaps he knew something that I did not. She took her last breaths on Wednesday evening and died at 9 PM. I learned Thane had been working on her that evening, at about 7:30 PM, but had encountered something unusual: before we are born, before we have bodies, we decide, with our celestial parents, when we will come into this world, and when we will leave. The shaman can renegotiate the time of our departure. Thane had done this on numerous occasions, but this time he could not. He said he was told, “You will find out later.” This would hardly seem an endorsement for shamanic healing, but when there is true healing - as opposed to Western-style curing, the patient dies in peace: Maria’s hospice worker was stunned that, in the end, she never required any of the morphine she was prescribed.
Weeks passed. One of Maria’s best friends, one of her Angels, asked me if I would come with her to see a psychic; “She’s the real deal.” she said. So we went. I was stunned at some of the things the psychic said - phrases and words only Maria and I knew. But it was her description of the end that was so close to what Thane had said that really blew me away, that told me there was something here, beyond the experience of my five senses and my little mind. I knew, then, Maria’s lifelong quest, her thirst for Spirit was right. And a life lived without a spiritual connection, is not a life lived. But what to do? I asked Maria, through the psychic, “What should I do?” “Follow your heart,” Maria said. How to do that? I had always followed my head, as she well knew. I felt then, my encounter with Thane was no coincidence (I would later learn there is no such thing as coincidence.) I would pursue the shamanic path through my head and hopefully reach my soul. Thane was Maria’s parting gift. I had held her when she died, and nothing would ever be the same.
When Joe's not working his day job, he's fulfilling his shamanic calling by talking to groups, by helping his clients and others find their way to balance and healing, and by dreaming before the fire. You can reach him at 248.334.7763. For training or other shamans, see Stonewisdom.net
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