Healing vs Curing: Exploring the Difference
In the early days of my shamanic practice I had it in my head that shamanic healing could cure any ailment, be it mental, emotional or physical. Oh, the power. Oh, the ego. Oh, how naïve. My desire to access this kind of ability was likely born out of the helplessness I felt watching my 43-year-old mother’s unsuccessful and incredibly painful two-year battle with cancer. These kinds of experiences stain you.
Over the years I’ve crossed paths with quite a few people who felt similarly powerless in the face of suffering hoping to find a miraculous cure for either their own or a loved one’s malady.
In 2003 I received my first invitation to engage in shamanic healing for a life threatening situation. “Jason,” the 19-year-old brother of my brother’s girlfriend at the time had mysteriously slipped into a deep coma. His medical team struggled to diagnose the cause of his comatose state, which made treatment decisions challenging. It turned out that Jason had severe brainstem damage of unknown origin in the area known as the pons, which left him unable to breathe on his own and paralyzed. His condition was dire.
Jason’s family’s lives were quickly turned inside out. They were in shock, vulnerable, and desperate to help him – desperate enough to ask me to intervene.
The weight of the responsibility was super intimidating, but my naiveté coupled with my desire to be of service helped me cross that threshold. Thus began an intensive nine-month dreamtime internship into the world of shamanic healing. It was such a profound learning experience that I wrote a book titled Slaying the Mouse as a way to not only share my unusual dreamtime connection with Jason, but to help me process the entirety of what happened.
My shamanic encounters with Jason were peppered with incredible happenings – some of them unbelievable, but the experience that stayed with me more than any other is an exchange I had with one of my ancestral dreamtime helpers who goes by the name Raventalker. Months into my frequent visits with Jason I remember expressing to Raventalker my disappointment in Jason’s sluggish progress.
“Some things are out of our hands,” Raventalker explained. “Jason’s circumstances reveal the difference between healing and curing. Everyone can be healed, but not everyone can be cured.”
What I’ve come to understand is that whether or not a complete recovery from an illness or debilitating injury – what I’m calling a “cure” – can happen is the domain of a very wise part of you referred to as your higher consciousness or oversoul. From the indigenous perspective this non-human part of you is ‘dreaming’ your human self into existence.
My direct experience of the oversoul field, my own and those of the folks I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years, has shown me that there’s a method to its seeming madness. Sometimes miraculous cures happen, sometimes they don’t. If a cure doesn’t happen there seems to be an opportunity for a greater learning experience.
The following excerpt reveals how Raventalker helped me understand Jason’s lack of progress:
“Please be assured,” she said, “that everything is unfolding for Jason as it should. Sometimes an oversoul chooses very difficult life circumstances for itself.
“The lesson for those of us trying to be of service to Jason is to trust that there’s a reason why things happen the way they do. And for Jason, the reason is between him and his oversoul.”
The capacity to heal, as Raventalker said, is available to all of us. I’ve learned that symptoms exist to get our attention. When you listen to the story of a symptom you’re given the opportunity to learn about some unconscious process that’s playing itself out in your life, but isn’t serving you.
For example, one person’s stomach ulcer might be trying to tell him that he’s expending a great deal of energy trying to control things he doesn’t have control of, like the future. Or another person’s migraines might be telling her the story of unconscious resentment she feels because she’s routinely giving her power away to others in exchange for acceptance that she’s craving but not getting.
From the shamanic perspective healing happens when you change the narrative that your symptom reveals to one that’s more authentic to who you really are rather than the bullshit you’ve come to believe about yourself over the course of your life. In many cases, when this happens the symptom has served its purpose and is no longer necessary.
Successful healing – with or without a cure – can result in greater understanding, personal evolution, a healthier perspective and behavior, and ultimately a greater sense of peace and acceptance. For Jason, healing eventually gave him the courage to face his paralyzing fear of death and to sail right through it.
Ultimately the best way to understand the mysteries of your human experience is to develop a direct relationship with your personal oversoul field through a regular practice of meditation or shamanic journeying. The good news is that a seed of your oversoul plants itself in the dreaming of your heart when you take your first breath and stays with you until you take your last. So you don’t have to go very far to find it!