I have long been actively pursuing a
spiritual life through meditative practices. For many years, my
spiritual life has remained separate from my professional life. There
is not much room in the intellectual paradigm of modern medicine for a
true spirituality.
I also had the growing sense that the scientific training I had received was not getting to the heart of the matter in many cases. I felt that the inability of the medical model to address the spiritual needs of people was a glaring omission, but I did not know how to address it. I had come to the conclusion that organized religion had lost its way, lost its connection to real wisdom.
About a decade ago, after turning fifty years old, I began trying again to connect with my intuition through the study of dreams. I had done a bit of this in college, but forgotten about it. Taking as a point of departure the Robert Moss book, Conscious Dreaming, I began to write down my dreams, making myself get out of bed in the middle of the night to write in a special notebook. I felt that there was supposed to be a direction in my life with which I had not yet connected.
At about the same time, I had the occasion to have some conversations with a psychic woman, Belinda Womack, who had been helpful to my wife. (I remain forever grateful to Belinda for helping me find the direction about which I am now writing.) She is able to speak directly with the angels. Having anything to do with a person who was so far “out there.” was a bizarre and uncharacteristic thing for me to do. Nevertheless, I had some consultations with her. Among other things, she told me that the angels informed her that I am a healer, and that I should be using my hands, touching my patients in order to heal them. I didn’t think much of this idea. First of all, I didn’t think I had any capacity to heal using my hands. Second, psychiatrists have a strong taboo against any physical contact with patients, even though we are doctors. The idea stuck with me and I wondered about it for some time.
Then, in writing down my dreams, I had one that seemed to be a clear message:
I was walking through a deserted city. There were no people, no cars. I saw a billboard with three words written on it: MOVE, MOVE, MOVE.
I asked the dream: “What am I supposed to do?” Then I was led down into the basement of an old house, through a secret passageway into another old house, up the stairs and into a kitchen. There was a wise, older woman there. She began teaching me how to cook.
Having carefully written down this dream, I began searching my brain to figure out who this woman could be. It so happened that I had been listening to tapes of a weekend workshop on healing, which a friend had loaned to me. I went to the website of the teacher and saw that she was the woman in the kitchen, Rosalyn Bruyere.
I immediately signed up for a workshop with Rosalyn, in Phoenix, in October, 1999. When I arrived at the hotel, I had no idea what sort of thing I had gotten myself into. This was completely unlike any medical meeting I had attended. There were massage tables set up in the meeting room. Everybody seemed already to know each other, except me. None of them were doctors. (It turned out there was another psychiatrist in the group, whom I met a day or so later.)
Someone would get on the table and a group of four or five people would gather around and place their hands on the person. I did not know what they were doing. They didn’t rub or press, just left their hands there. After a while, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, they would all step back and one of the “healers” would inevitably say: “Well, I think she’s cooked.”
It wasn’t until I was telling my wife about the workshop after I got home that I realized the connection between the dream about learning to “cook” and the commonly used phrase, “I think she’s cooked.”
That was my initiation into the art of “cooking” people to heal their illnesses and injuries. Since that time I have continued to study with Rosalyn Bruyere and her more advanced students.
After several years of learning and practicing hands-on healing, I was increasingly frustrated with the fact that other people I had met seemed to have better psychic skills than I. It was common for some of the students to talk about conversations with spirit guides and teachers who no longer have bodies. This was not just a question of my feelings of inadequacy, but of facing the issue of the real possibility of finding access to greater wisdom directly, for myself, and not having to rely on my teachers. It is very clear that Rosalyn, for one example, as well as several of her more advanced students, learn about how to heal patients from spirit teachers. As you might imagine, the very idea of talking to spirits was a bit strange for someone trained in the scientific method. After some time, though, I became convinced of the reality of this phenomenon and began to wonder how I could do it.
I came across the writings of Hank Wesselman in 2004, in which he describes some rather incredible stories of discovering other worlds through altered states of consciousness. This came to him spontaneously. However, he felt it necessary to get specific training in these methods, and did so through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. I went to their website: www.shamanism.org, and found a workshop in basic shamanic techniques which was being held at a convenient time for me.
I drove to Memphis, Tennessee for this workshop. Once again, I was entering a strange and different world, not knowing what might happen. This time I really was the only doctor in the group. We met in a state park near the Mississippi River, about thirty of us. We followed the program essentially laid out in Michael Harner’s book, The Way of the Shaman. After some initial difficulty with journeying, I found that it was possible to do what they said, even easy for me. Since I didn’t know anyone there, and thought I probably would never see any of them again, I felt free to drum, dance, chant and generally act in an undignified fashion for two days. It was great fun!
The workshop was critical for me personally, as well as helping to move me in a direction that has proven to be very helpful for some of my patients. Since that time, I have continued to take workshops offered by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. So far I have studied the basic techniques twice, extraction, and soul retrieval. There has been such a richness of experience for me in this study that it would be hard to convey. Let me just offer some material from that first workshop as an example of what I mean.
At the time I was set to attend the first basic workshop, I had an intuition that something big was going to happen to me in my personal life at around the time of the Autumnal Equinox. I could not get clarity about what was going to happen, but it was going to be big and would involved a “shift of energies.” I could not tell if it was to be about my professional life, my marriage, or about my connection to the spiritual group of which I had been a member for thirty-five years: the Gurdjieff Foundation.
One of the first exercises we did in the workshop was to ask a question of a Power Animal. We did this in pairs, so I gave my question to my partner, who then journeyed to the Lower World to find a Power Animal to address the question: What is going to happen to me at the time of the Equinox?
My partner returned with a message from his Power Animal, the cougar. It was to be a “flowering” for me, and it would take the form of a separation. There was a visual image he described, of a big “Y” shape, like a fork in the road. He did not know in what area of my life this would happen. This was encouraging, because, if there were to be a separation, it would be a new beginning, not just a loss.
I took a journey for myself later that weekend, again as part of the workshop curriculum, in which I asked for further clarity about the question. I was shown a scene in which it appeared that a great wind came up and blew everything from one place to another in one fell swoop: all the vegetation, the animals of the jungle, the trees, everything at once went from one place to another, instantly. It seemed like a big power shift to me, again, not a loss but a transfer.
Further, in our journeys to the Upper World, we were to meet our Teachers. These usually present themselves human or angelic beings, not animals. While I am not willing to identify my teacher, I can say that the name he told me identified him to me as a key figure from the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff, the mystic whose teachings I had been following for many years. This was astounding to me and completely unexpected.
Then came September and events unfolded in a way that made sense of what I had experienced. There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Gurdjieff Foundation of Ohio at which my wife and I, who were on the Board and were among the most senior members, were put in a position where it was impossible for us to continue to be associated with them. It was a devastating event in one sense, to lose the connection with the organization and people with whom we had been working for so many years. But as the events unfolded, as the members of the Board proceeded to say what they had to say, I realized what a gift I had been given just a few weeks before. This was the separation, the parting of the ways, and it was to be a flowering for me, a transfer of power from the organization to me personally. I no longer had to look to the organization and its leaders for my direction, for approval. I had become an outcast and in the process, the freedom was exhilarating.
Since that time, I continue to work with a group of people who had been studying the Gurdjieff Work. Together, we work to find our own way, incorporating what we had acquired from years in the Gurdjieff Work, and also, now assimilating ideas and practices from other traditions. And in my efforts to find my own way, shamanic journeying has been an enormously practical help for receiving instruction and direction.
As Michael Harner, the founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, says: Shamanism is very subversive. He means that when an individual can talk directly to the spirits, even to the gods, there is no need for a priesthood, or a hierarchical organization.
Shamanic journeying has provided the missing piece in my approach to healing. In this way, I am able to connect to guidance with a much greater view than my own. In this way I am beginning to comprehend and to experience how healing it is for a human being to have a spiritual life.
