There is a timing and a flow to healing.
For about a year I’ve been working with my therapist to find different ways to process trauma and heavy energy. On several occasions she suggested that I expand my energy field and create a larger container than my physical body can comfortably hold.
She made this suggestion numerous times, and I just didn’t get it. It sailed straight over my head. I never tried it. I never played with it. I wasn’t curious.
Her advice just didn’t resonate until this fall when I was preparing to teach a four-day intensive in December. Before an ancestral healing workshop, the ancestors of the participants start to lean in for healing. Because they are eager, they begin to show up in the energy field of the class with their wounds and their pain, ready for attention. As the leader of the class and the primary human holder of the space, it affects me to varying degrees.
As a shamanic healer and teacher who specializes in ancestral healing work, I am in agreement with the holding the field for ancestral healing. Over the years, I’ve developed tools to manage it. The ancestral healing class in December was the largest and longest class I had offered to date, so things were stirred up. Everyone’s ancestors were leaning in for healing, and about a month before the workshop, I was overwhelmed.
It took a toll on my physical body. I was especially anxious, and I had problems sleeping. Several nights I woke up with a pounding heartbeat. I felt ungrounded and scattered. I was in energetic pain.
About three weeks before the class, I journeyed to my helping spirits to get more information about how to better manage it. They communicated very clearly that day with several helpful suggestions. They showed me that my physical body was a bottleneck. Unbeknownst to me until that moment, I was attempting to hold space for myself and others in my physical body. They reminded me that our energy field is infinite and by shifting my perspective to hold space in my energy field, it would relieve the pressure from my body and create a much larger field of holding.
This was basically what my therapist had been trying to tell me for the previous year. But for whatever reason, I was not ready to hear it until I was. The pain caused by the ancestors leaning in was the direct experience I needed to bring greater clarity.
We can know something intellectually, but we don’t really have an understanding of it until we experience it as a knowing in our body and in our being. My therapist describes this as gnosis (or knowing). A friend uses the term “heart mind” as opposed to “head mind” to explain this concept.
Because of the discomfort I was in, I was ready to embrace the methods bright by my spirit guides in the journey, and I listened to my knowing.
Often we may have to clear other things closer to the surface and around the edges to make way for the deeper healing to occur. If we remain present and keep working with what appears, we make progress. These core patterns were not created in one instance. Most of them build up over time, so it’s natural that there are layers to be released.
I connected with my helping spirits and the wisdom of my soul in that journey and stepped into divine truth without resistance. The healing that had come before made it possible to embrace the new way of expanding my energy field and holding a large container of sacred space more comfortably.
Sometimes a wave of grief or sadness can arise that it took us so long to do this piece of healing. When this arises, I counsel myself and my clients by saying, “it’s okay. You weren’t ready before, and now you were.”
Everything happens in divine timing. In trusting, we find the opening created in a moment of grace and step forward into the knowing.
This work is real, and it matters.
January 29, 2022