1. You might find yourself between “this” and “that.” The shaman or medicine woman plays two roles: she is ground control for your launch and your landing in ordinary reality. She tends to the body, the grasps and grips that come with the release, and the orientation. If gifted, she functions as a vessel and flight attendant, taking you to and meeting you in various Buddha fields, celestial, and underworld realms. Just when you thought you were utterly lost, enter the medicine woman’s warm, loving face, laughing at the very notion of being lost.
2. You might find that you live at, say, 132nd near Lenox and there are a lot of men who tell you how to get to 132nd in hushed and awed tones like holders of a great secret. You might try to say to them, “Yes, every day I leave my house on 132nd and head towards Lenox,” and they will slowly, carefully explain to you that someday, in this life or the next, you will make it to 132nd with many prostrations and a lot of honorifics. You will likely convince yourself that you are confused. You will decide that the street sign is wrong. You will take on many practices and travel long distances to get to132nd Street. Something will feel very off about the whole process, which will confirm that there is indeed something very wrong with you and that you need to get to 132nd Street as soon as possible. One day, you might decide to stay home and determine that even if this isn’t the greatly touted 132nd, you are too exhausted to keep searching. You won’t be arrogant about it; you are simply done with the whole process. You will go through a wholly different series of interactions with Yama, the Lord of Deception—you will be called delusional, too big for your britches, and you will be tested. You might say, “No biggie, this is fine for me.” Right about then, a little late you might add, people might come by your house and say, “Congratulations! You made it to the legendary 132nd Street.”
3. You might find that you are riddled with ailments, discomforts, and disorientations. This is because there is no place for that healing headlamp to shine, so you turn it inward. And when you turn it inward, there are all the qualities of a healer— that you are so deeply impressionable, so potently receptive, and have a sensing organ, like a web crawler that seeks what needs to be healed. But this sensing organ, meant for the many, when turned in on yourself, spotlights the normal, everyday healthy bacteria and makes it look terrifying.
4. You might notice your tendency to magnify things, making them scary. Applied well, the healing increases the positive. Applied poorly, it increases the negative. Like mites under a magnifying glass, things we live with every day just fine under that kind of scrutiny make you want to wash in bleach, constantly trying to remove the human stain. Focus on the aim to offer your gifts.
5. You might be a hypochondriac, which is the unfiltered “taking on” of the memetic world of diagnoses. Don’t absorb them. Remember the real healers are such because they don’t see illness; that is how they do what they do. Go to your happy place behind the curtain of projected maladies that the world offers as a way to keep people disabled and easily governed and take a bath in emptiness.
6. You get suffocated easily. Healers do what they do by “being” space. The confinement most seek in relationship, security, and predictability looks like a cement cell to the healer working with spiritual wanderlust.
7. You might find that you can’t fit in no matter what. This is because you have an added dimension that doesn’t fit into the seat with the safety belt. Don’t be ashamed that you have to ask the world for the extender. They are too small; you’re not too big.
8. You might find that you are a walking paradox. You are horny and frigid, too loose and rigid, introvert/extrovert, gentle and tough. That is because to heal, you must have the entire spectrum available.
9. You might discover that you process differently from others, almost like a narrator feeds you information. “That person is sad and tends to grip when they feel loved, but that is to block it out.” In other words, your mind might sound like a news commentator. That is okay. That is equanimity.
10. You might find that you can only meet people in the space of healing, but outside of that there is not much connection. True healers must remain in their dimension and meet self-selected people as they enter. Otherwise, they lose their powers, and the extraordinary becomes way too ordinary.
11. You are not, however, “susceptible” to bad people. You are here to love and heal them through compassion; that is your superpower. It buffers you from the common ailments of being taken advantage of and feeling a fool. There is no protection like generosity.