Sickness … is Dismemberment!

The Darkness of Illness

As I come up out of a month of cough-racked illness, sickness, and little deaths, feeling the depth of breath refilling my lungs with lifegiving air, energy beginning to flow through my weak and worn limbs and a lightness about my whole sensation of being in my body, I realized that this illness, this sickness of body and soul, was in itself a dismemberment. In shamanism, spirit works with us – through journeys, dreams, revelations. These are clearer and more frequent the more we practice, meditate, celebrate, and dissolve ourselves into the hollow bones that can vibrate and resonate with the energies of wisdom and light that surround us all the time. Part of this creation process, this becoming, moving, changing, evolving, transforming is the challenging process of dismemberment, dissolution, deconstruction, and dis-creation that clears the way for new growth, more light, clearer vision, closer connection. The path of shamanism is not for the faint and half-hearted.

The Light of Revelation

I listened for a second time to a recent Shaman’s Cave episode on Shaman Illness and understood more clearly the role of illness in the shaman’s life. I had opened myself to a spiritual invasion as I pursued a calling that I am somewhat resistant to in the path I am on. Today, as my body enters into the exuberantly uplifting stages of health and recovery, I realized that this recent illness, while a lesson learned, was also a dismemberment. The unhealth, fear, hesitancy, lack of confidence and resistance in me to moving into this expanded energy of healing work needed to be torn out, coughed up, spit out and released from the bones in my body, the beating in my heart and the breath in my lungs. Only as I experienced the death that was working in my body – seeing my mortality, my human limits, my physicality, my unwellness, could I expand out beyond my own borders to work with my teaching guides in new ways; accepting and working with a new level of power, comprehension, clarity, and confidence in my journey. And walk with a new and deeper humility. I certainly hope my spiritual ears are open wider, and my senses are honed deeper to hear, seek and follow the unerring, powerful guidance of spirit. This is my heart’s prayer as I rebirth into recovery, becoming something new, different, deeper, more attuned, clearer. I hope. I trust. I breathe.

The World of Light

The world is a wonderous sun-filled place this morning. All is wet with the dewiness of rain and thunder, hail, and storms as we passed through the dismemberment of unsettled weather the day and night before; washing the land, pelting the plants, and sparkling the landscape with the light of a new dawn. This is rebirth. We all experience it. We go through many instances of death and dismemberment, the storms of being torn apart by life events until we cannot see the whole for its bloodied parts. And then the healing begins, the sun creeps slowly across the horizon of our own personal dawn and things begin to take on new shape and clarity, sparkling in the rain-washed light.

Let it happen. Toss with the storm, fear with the waves, cry out to the sea of doubt around you and take the journey before you. There is a new dawn, a new birth, a new uncharted path opening before you. This is the path of the Shaman, the path of us all, the path of death and discovery, dismemberment and regrowth. Expand with it, break the old shell, shed the old skin, and feel the sun drying your wings, caressing your soul, lighting your life, and powering your vision.

Recovery is Rebirth.

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