I have been thinking a lot lately about what put me on the path of being a healer. Being a healer is an intensely personal journey that requires great soul searching and experiencing life in its extreme sense, at least the way I have gone about it. If there is one thing I have learned, there is no greater hell than living in mediocrity…of not following YOUR inner voice to the fullest expression of who you are…so much of the physical and emotional pain that I have seen in my practice is that severing of the fullest expression and the living in a tightly held box of the mind….Dante Aleghieri says in his Inferno, the first of part of the Divine Comedy….
“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”
And he to me: “This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”
As a teenager, The Divine Comedy and in particular the Inferno drove me out of my internal small hell world into an idea of something larger that drives us. Having been devoutly Catholic as a child and young adult, I could relate to his devotion through the Church, it was as if I still lived in the Middle Ages. I was aware of passion and desire in his words that went unexpressed within me. The words below in many ways carried me into the path of the healer, healer of myself and to ultimately to healer of others. For:
“To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,
And Following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far,
through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
It is a gift to be a healer and to help others. To have the opportunity to sit in the wonders of hell with others and transmute that energy into the heavens of the stars.
To stand at the gateway of life and death and usher in a new way for another and the world is beyond reckoning, and we are all being called to do it now. And to do it in connection with each other. No one is ultimately alone, and I am here to make sure there is support in the process. I am grateful to be a part of this journey.