CORONAVIRUS: WHAT WOULD A TRADITIONAL HEALER MAKE OF IT?

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 I was wondering what traditional or 'alternative' medicine would make of this pandemic we are experiencing. For a start, there are thousands of such ways, in which treatment tends to be approached individually rather than collectively. That is why, IMO, methods like homeopathy fail in lab tests: it is administered individually, and the faith of both the patient and the homeopath plays an important part. (The placebo effect, by the way, is a dynamic thing, it shows that real healing is at work, that is not dependent on just chemical cause-and-effect.) 

Astrology fails under scientific testing also, and a good thing too. As Jung pointed out, it is like a trickster comes in when we ignore the sacred and subject our healing or divinatory arts to the profane methods of science. That is why a good healer will keep his/her medicine objects well wrapped up from prying eyes.

What is most important to remember, and what is often very difficult to see, is that science is a story about how things are. It is not 'the truth'. Even in its own terms, it knows that it models reality rather than describes reality itself. Reality is not knowable because it is not literal. Whereas we tend to be literal, we want to know exactly how things are.

There is always this divide between simple-minded people who take their culture's stories literally - whether those stories are about heaven and hell or about coronaviruses - and people who understand that they are just stories, albeit sometimes useful and descriptive, and indeed often sacred. All we can ever have is a shifting set of stories about the world, that reflect the underlying dreaming of a people.

So coronavirus is a story. A traditional healer would describe this sickness quite differently. It would begin with the Spirit. What is it in the Spirit of this people that so many of them are falling prey to this illness? And this in the context of understanding that every person will also get this sickness for a different reason, that is unique to them.

Why did Boris Johnson, a guy with a history of robust health, get this sickness to such an extent that his life was endangered? There is a mythological dimension when the king is ill. 

In the Parsifal myth, the Fisher King recovers when the question 'Whom does the Grail serve?' is asked. And the answer is that the Grail serves the king. In other words, the king needs to be a conduit for Spirit, so that Spirit can serve the kingdom. Maybe he will emerge with a deeper understanding of his job and role. Johnson was also, in a sense, a sacrifice, and maybe the people will be less badly affected than they might have been because he gave his health. The leader is profoundly and archetypally connected to the collective he serves.

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I offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel, Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis, and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work. Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk 
 

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The recovery from an illness begins with a re-alignment to Spirit. If we are deeply aligned to Spirit, we are more likely to be physically healthy. This is axiomatic for me. It's not always the case, and sometimes it may just be our time to go. And the nature of our collective disalignment can be read in the 'cure': the stopping of the world, and the effect that has had. Before the lockdown, the way the world was seemed inevitable, one possibility, one direction, a juggernaut. Now that we have stopped, new possibilities for a slower, more earth-friendly humanity seem to be emerging. And stopping means we are able to listen in ways we could not before. So this is one way of looking at this collective sickness: it arose because we were trapped in just one possibility, we were strangling ourselves, and we had forgotten how to listen.

So a traditional way of thinking might say we will get well collectively, not from social distancing and vaccines, which belong to another story, but by stopping and listening. "What is this world if full of care, we have not time to stand and stare."

Our modern solution to this illness is purely material. It will work, up to a point. But we are not being asked by the government or its medical advisers to reflect on who are we, that this Spirit of sickness has arisen among us? It is also asking us to reflect on our relationship with death. Death, for many of us, is an extinction, and to be avoided at all costs. This is also fuelling and exaggerating our response. Death is not truly a problem, it is a part of life, it is a homecoming, it is a return to that vastly bigger context about which we can know nothing while we are entranced by the apparent reality of this dream.

And social distancing, about which we have become so anxious and so moralising. Would a traditional healer recommend mass social distancing as part of his treatment? It seems hard to imagine. And maybe, in an opposites kind of way, and thinking 'story', it is our atomisation writ large. It is telling us that we need to find a new sense of community, along with the slowing and the listening and the reflection on death. 

And there is the name 'coronavirus' (Covid is just an abbreviation of this). Again, think 'story' and you will find a deeper truth. 'Corona' means garland, wreath, crown. And yes, we have allowed it to wear a crown, we have allowed it to rule us. It is the enemy to be defeated. When you turn someone or something into an enemy, you give it a lot of power. You allow it to define who you are by your opposition to it. As Nietzsche said, beware that in fighting monsters, you do not become one. We have set ourselves against nature, we fight her for her bounty, and insodoing we have become monstrous..

So we set ourselves against coronavirus, she is a form of life, yet we want to eradicate her, rather than find a partnership. The word 'virus' reflects this oppositional stance: it is from the Latin meaning slimy liquid or poison. So we really have created a monster out of this sickness: we call it 'the poison king' and do not even know that is what we are doing, because who investigates etymology, which is the story behind words? The collective unconscious knows these stories, however, and on that level we know exactly what we are doing.

So a traditional approach to a sickness such as we are experiencing might well involve this sort of investigation. As you can see, a lot can be unearthed that tells us so much about ourselves. This is how sickness can teach us. Sickness will keep teaching us so long as we are not aligned with Spirit. In the case of our culture, so long as we do not even believe that we have a Spirit. This is why there are so many hard-to-diagnose soul diseases like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and auto-immune diseases etc. The first question that may need to be asked in seeking a cure for the coronasickness is do we actually want to be well? And why?