What is a healing story?
Healing stories are both a being in their own right, as well as a way of working with healing. As a being, a story will come to help hold something that needs to be communicated in a way that the client is separated from it, to be able to look from the outside in and gain deeper insight. As a way of working, it is a judgement call that the shaman makes in relaying what happened during a healing for a client. Some of what we experience in our work is not meant to be shared; it only appeared so that we could work with it.
Healing Story as a Being
My favorite way to use Healing Story is with children, or to bring back a childlike innocence with engaging with the world. I will also teach my clients how to write a healing story, to shift the narrative of their life from injurious to victorious.
Healing Story as a Method
Whether I’m doing a custom healing ceremony, an extraction, a soul retrieval, or any other technique, it is my responsibility to ensure my client receives the experience as a healing one. That means I need to be the filter and the mouthpiece for the Spirits’ work in the session.
Informed by my prior training with Healing Story, my ability to share the work in a healing way largely comes from Sandra Ingerman, who is also a licensed family therapist on top of being a world-renowned shaman and shamanic teacher. The conundrum comes in not lying by omission, and not traumatizing with irrelevant events from the experience. For most of my clients who have worked with someone else, especially if they weren’t trained by Sandra (directly or indirectly), reframing what happened to them in a healing way is the first step. I don’t even have to begin any work yet, we just need to see the good in what has already happened. This works particularly well for trauma survivors, too. Here is my own experience as an example:
-
Before: It took three weeks for university psychologists to decide who would try to help me, my case was so complex. I felt like such a difficulty, a burden, an unsolvable problem. The person who did accept working with me had nothing substantial to offer that helped me feel better. I was devastated, left feeling hopeless, and it took five years before I was desperate enough to try to ask for help again.
-
After: Having learned about Healing Story, I now see it was Spirit telling me that traditional psychotherapy and medications were not the path for me. When I found shamanism nearly a decade later, after a nasty divorce, I could feel the belonging to my core, in my bones, and in my soul.
-
As someone who is neurodivergent, I feel most secure when I can feel both sides, the “no” and the “yes.” This was the perfect way for me to learn this in this lifetime, despite the hardships it brought. While I would not want to go through it again, I would also never want to change the way it happened either.