CAN INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS BE OUT OF BALANCE?

For the last month or two particularly, but really for the last twenty years, I've been sitting and pondering with the way I do healing work. I don't do much of it. Someone said to me recently that you need to do healing full-time to become good at it, and that accords with the indigenous tradition he is exposed to. I can only think there is something imbalanced in that tradition. Maybe that is the kind of thought we don't think very often, but when you look at the major traditions like Christianity and Islam and Buddhism, it's not exactly difficult to find things they've got wrong, particularly on an institutional level. So why wouldn't it be the same with some indigenous traditions?

I have encountered indigenous fundamentalism plenty, and why wouldn't I, because humans are humans wherever you go? Often we seek simple certainties, and justify it with terms like 'tradition' and 'lineage' and 'elders', when what we really mean is 'authority'. Let's be specific, these guys who think you need to be a healer full-time to be the real deal are Huichols, from Mexico.. Just for the sake of discussion. Maybe this guy has misunderstood, though I doubt that. Maybe there is machismo involved: machismo is a perennial male thing of which I know Indians are capable. Amongst the Chippewa Cree, I have been told, some of the men will lead one sweatlodge after another, without a break, to prove they can, until they can do no more. And, of course, to do that is to miss the point. I was around one of them, he certainly knew his stuff, but he would regularly drive himself to the point of exhaustion. Quite unnecessarily, in my opinion.

When I've done some astrology, or some serious talking with someone, or some healing work in which something shifts profoundly, I need time and space afterwards to re-group and rest. Such work draws deeply on me. I love it, it moves me to tears, it provides a central meaning to my life. Beyond the immediate need to rest, I can only average a few such encounters a week, at most. They change me, such work goes deep, it continually expands who I am and what I can do. Of course I can go the extra mile if necessary and do a whole bunch at once, like I have done at festivals in the past, but after that I may not be fit for much for a week afterwards.

There is also the need to live a regular life in this world to stay balanced. This is my main point of contention. From what I have read, healers/shamans usually lead regular lives on top of their calling. They have to earn a living, they probably have a family. They are not Catholic priests. We all know where that kind of one-sidedness leads. Spiritual bypass, in a word. The ego-identification with a spiritual calling, and our regular humanity being channeled down twisted pathways. I cannot think of anyone who has set themselves up as a teacher/healer as their main thing when young, say 30s or 40s, for whom it hasn't become an ego-building thing, and that doesn't seem to change as they get older. This twists everything.

We need ordinary life, because we are here to incarnate, not to transcend. For us, this is the great medicine of shamanism: it is an earth path, the sacred is to be found in the natural world, not somewhere else. We humans are nothing but the natural world, not something beyond.

So do not treat this healer calling as a profession, it is something we do as and when, as Spirit sends people our way. It is to be quietly cherished. Trust whoever turns up, and trust it when no-one is turning up. I ended up talking about something different to what I intended, more on the way I do healing work next time. But I trust what I end up writing about.