The Beginning Of The End
Completely incapacitated for eight months (2003)
After working with Trans-Generational Soul Healing Work (Constellation work) for over seven years, I began to feel a unease inside myself. Something was not right anymore. I sensed that I was missing something important and essential with my healing work. At first, I tried to just brush that unease aside because we were doing such beautiful work. I discarded it as nothing. But that feeling would not go away. In fact, it only intensified with time. Eventually, it got so unbearable that I had to take a look at it. By then though, many months had passed. My body had weakened drastically with the constant pressure it was under which I had worked hard at ignoring. Literally, I had become a physical wreck. I had no longer energy in my body to hold myself up physically. Dr. Eileen Kenny, my dear friend and alternative health practitioner diagnosed me with silent pneumonia and did her best to treat me but nothing she did was helping. I, on the other hand, knew that my symptoms had nothing to do with a physical illness and were a direct result of me not listening for such a long to what I had been feeling in regards to my work.
Essentially, I was incapacitated for eight months, where I had no energy to stand or walk. I would mostly be asleep, absolutely exhausted, weak, with barely any energy coursing through my system. Eventually, a wonderful homeopath did some tests on the strength of my life force and told me that I barely had any. Knowing of the work I had been doing, he told me that by continually working within the field of the dead, it had demagnetized my own energy field to the point where I could have died would I have continued my work for much longer. So the illness, as it turned out, was a great gift. The homeopath recommended to seek out a shaman (indigenous medicine practitioner who is apt at working with the dimension of the dead) who would be the only individual able to assist me with what was going on with me. No one in the Western medical field, be it alternative or allopathic, would be able to help me, he said.
I was not very hopeful to find such an individual in our Western world but I went to my computer and began an internet search. And I was surprised. Apart from many Westerners passing themselves off as shamans, there were some individuals who I sensed were true shamans, one of them being Malidoma Some. He is of West African decent and has learned from a circle of elders in his native Burkina Faso. What I found on the internet about him impressed me and made me feel that I would be in good hands with him. It just so happened that he also lived in Northern California, not too far from Los Angeles, where I lived at the time.
I sent an email and was connected up with a couple, Ted Duncan and Rowena Pantaleon, who Malidoma had trained to perform healing work in his tradition as Malidoma himself no longer did individual healing for people. Trusting that Malidoma would put qualified people to work in his name, I went to see Rowena and Ted as soon as they had an opening. They performed a very (to me) strange African ritual, but surprise, surprise! I did feel better within two days and from then on, felt like I was gaining strength every day. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was because of their help and that ritual that my energy began to remain in my body, giving me strength again.
Studying and incorporating Shamanism - A Whole New Experience Opened Up (2003 - 2005)
Fascinated, I began to study what I could about indigenous healing practices. It was then that I learned of Martin Prechtel, another true shaman, living now in New Mexico, who practices ancient Maya healing traditions he had learned from a renowned and powerful shaman in a remote village in Guatemala. (I connected up with his former wife and another shaman from his village by total chance while traveling in Guatemala, having had forgotten all about him and that he had lived there. But that is another story to be told some other time.)
Eventually, I felt strong enough to go back to facilitating my work again, this time though in a different manner, incorporating indigenous ritual and ceremonial practices. This way of working was highly effective and we were able to access information and insights, we had been unable to get to before. We were able to reach deeper into the field of soul and touch collective issues while working on the individual level. It was extremely gratifying to work in this way, even though my business had dwindled, both because I was sick for such a long time that another woman had taken over my work at the facility I had been working out of, but also, because I was working on such deep levels with people that it scared a lot of them away.
I had a very small but trusted following in Los Angeles and the Midwest. And with those incredibly brave people - who, to this day, I hold in highest regard because of their willingness to explore the depths of soul with me - we were able to see, feel and experience soul in ways that are incomprehensible to the mind. That I have been able to experience this, I will be forever grateful to all those people who have accompanied me the last year of my work. I feel that I owe to a great extent my journey since December of 2005 to them and all that this deep work was able to facilitate in me.
After about a year of having offered my healing work again, that same feeling of something not being right had nestled back inside myself. This time though, I was acutely aware of it and was paying close attention. Soon thereafter the curve ball came flying....
To read about what happened next go to: Curve Ball (December 2005)
