Healers and teachers of all sorts need to take the red pill, and stand apart from the collective currents of the day. Not that those currents are necessarily wrong, there is often some truth in them, but frequently simplified to the point of falsehood. Are you a Tory/Republican-hating, anti-vaxx, apocalyptic environmentalist? If you are part of any of those currents, then the chances are that you have taken the counter-cultural - in this case shamanic - blue pill of the day. And note how oppositional all those currents are.
The counter-culture, which goes back 60 years, is founded on rebellion. That cannot be a lasting paradigm. But it vitiates much of the modern shamanic world: the attitude of opposition, of knowing better, can give us a sense of who we are, and a sense of virtue. Of course there are critiques of society and its politics to be made, that is part of our job description. But the standing apart, the disengagement, has no place if you are any kind of teacher or healer. It is a spiritual bypass.
A traditional healer would not have lived in opposition to his/her polity and traditions, but alongside, though not uncritically. Maybe most importantly, our sense of who we are needs to be rooted in our hard-won connection to Spirit, which can take decades, rather than in the easy opposition to the authorities of the day, who we need to be working alongside.
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