In the energy world, travelers may find themselves navigating varying terrain in the journey and quest to choose an appropriate practitioner for support and efficacious healing.
Yes, this is part of the ongoing BYOH [Be Your Own Healer] series! Yes, CK’s still advocating BYOH – the more the better! Yet not every skill and resource for healing is internally honed. So where help is needed, help is important!
Here’s a topographical map for the world of energy healing:
First, wade the New Age swamp. Loose jargon, ungrounded, potentially wacky people, practices & ideas. Perhaps crystals, wands and potions floating along and lurking about in tepid, muddy waters.
[Note: There’s nothing wrong with crystals, wands or potions – if they’re anchored in a grounded, viable practice.]
Best to keep wading – probably not the best place to stop and tarry!
Leaving the swamp behind, the shell-shocked and water-logged traveler wanders into a dry, parched
desert. At first – a relief to leave the plethora of strange, floating practices behind.
Yet, no reasonable place to rest, no water or nourishment readily available. Gradually the thirst for healing re-emerges and the walkabout brings the traveler to the desert’s edges.
There, scrub brush and shallow rooted healing modalities dot the horizon. These modalities are everywhere and they appear to flourish!
Described quite generally – referencing attunements and initiations that make certain energy flows available to the practitioner. Sometimes self-generated – the practitioner receives the energies spontaneously, through meditation, channeling, contemplation, etc. Other times initiations are performed by another member of a lineage, authorized to download the frequencies to others.
This can look like salvation – and for some it probably is. After all, it’s not the swamp, and it’s not the desert.
There’s a feel good quality to the attunement-based modalities. There’s a feel good to being told that everything is happening for ‘the highest possible good.’
[Note: Whatever the hell that means! It’s possible that someone has enough internal alignment and coherence issues that ‘highest possible good’ means something pretty low-level. Words are cheap!]
Remember when ‘life coaches, executive coaches, business coaches’ were few and far between? There was a sense of competence, cache and clout that came from affiliating with a coach. Right? There were really powerful success stories, and people knew people who had achieved incredible results. It was easy to get swept up in the excitement and want to ride the wave – GottaGetMeACoach!
Now coaches are everywhere. And the viability of coaching has been diluted, distorted, turned into 6-easy steps, 4-important skills, and a multi-billion dollar industry. Lots of people are playing [and paying], but not necessarily finding the 6-easy steps quite as easy or effective as advertised. Plethora may not imply quality or efficacy!
This expansion has happened in the energy healing field as well. Some programs are prolific – a healer on every street corner!
For travelers, this proliferation at the edge of the desert seems a good, solid place to walk in to energy healing work.
Feel goods are had, energies are cleared. And then it begins to feel like not quite enough, not quite anchoring or long-lasting. Shifting takes place, perhaps, but not an evolution. The roots are too shallow to hold much water, growth and evolution arrive in fits and starts.
Turning away from the desert edge and shallow-rooted forms, the traveler may then wander into the deep, dense forest of practitioners who grew out of complex, academically rigorous study.
Graduates of degree-based programs, deeply entrenched in the academic model – reading, researching, writing papers, group projects and experiments. Masters & PhD’s in Integrative and Holistic Healing.
This forest is huge, filled with old growth structure and standards. Perhaps the ivory tower in the forest is the measure and gold standard of efficacy for a modality and practitioner!
Except modalities are learned, practiced, applied, internalized.
Academic materials thrive in the intellect, healing modalities (when truly mastered), are embodied. Yes, the forest holds the ivory tower, but perhaps lack the keys to the kingdom.
Academically trained practitioners are sometimes described as well-intentioned, kind-hearted people with a thousand tricks up the sleeve, yet lacking a cohesion, conviction or mastery of modalities. [Note: this is sometimes a matter of tenure in practice, and at other times it’s because the skills are learned, but aren’t embodied and intuitive.]
So the traveler continues on the journey leaving behind the forest and emerging into a vast, sunlit field.
Present in the field are experientially rigorous, finely honed practitioners standing in applied mastery, offering respite and boundaried, efficacious support.
Consider this: Martial art students spend years rising up through levels to achieve black belt status. The form is studied, the various movements and techniques practiced exhaustively. With repetition and practice, these skills are internalized, owned, intuitive, spontaneous, and performed organically with full, conscious awareness.
Healers in the field practice their craft in this manner. They study, learn, practice, apply. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
In the field, mastery is not conferred or awarded, it is acquired and cultivated.
These healers do what it takes to achieve mastery. The work may include, but extends far beyond any initiation, attunement, download. Using intuitive gifts as inspiration for the deep commitment to acquire knowledge, skill, expertise. Moving beyond unconscious competence to facilitate and support a healing process. Expanding academic knowledge and book learning into fully embodied practice.
Travelers, use the map. Think it through. Use internal awareness and choose carefully before handing money to the corner healer, wading into a New Age swamp, or doing an impromptu session at a party with the friend of a friend who’s just had an attunement. Consider whether a practitioner’s schooling is balanced with applied practice and real world experience.
An embodied healer is vibrant, vital, informed, aware and deeply networked with other capable, competent practitioners. An embodied healer generally has a very active practice.
Where to look? No worries – an embodied healer is always out-standing in the field!
Keep your vital energy flowing!
