
Overview of Three Years
As human beings, we go through various stages of development from the womb to 12 years of age and beyond. The first 12 years of our lives are crucial to who we are physically wired to become as adults. Successfully navigating these developmental stages allows us to become fully embodied, grounded, independent and healthy relational adults who are empowered to live into our potential and life purpose. But when these stages are interrupted, when we don’t get what we needed in the womb, as infants, as small children, however well-meaning our families were, or when cultural or social factors influence what is possible and not possible for our young lives, and when trauma disrupts our lives early – all this re-directs the flow of our lifeforce away from our potential, our purpose, so that as adults we do not feel the freedom and power of living our best lives.
Additionally, we live in societies and a planet riddled with social inequities, environmental dis-ease, and increasing toxicity at all levels of our existence. It is urgent that we re-imagine how to live in balance and harmony with each other and all life.
The Soul Healing Way is designed to lead participants through a three-year journey of reclaiming our freedom and power to live our best lives in relationship with each other and our planet.
Year One: I Come to Get Me
The first year of the program is the heroic journey from womb to adolescence; what didn’t go right for you during those years? What were you missing? What didn’t you get that you needed, and you’re still missing, needing, seeking? Through specific shamanic journeys, energy medicine meditations, embodied visualizations, storytelling, and a community of witness, we will re-generate the young child ego, transforming it so that it can better face the deeper transformations of year two.
These journeys and meditations are powerful medicine; that said, they are also gentle, and enact a slow transmutation of the old into something new. This is why we need a three-year timeframe to allow a gradual and gentle process of change. You do not have to know what your ‘story’ is, and we won’t spend time in that story – shamanism invites us to take our intentions for change into the spirit realm and invite spirit to meet with our unconscious to bring in the medicine for change that is most needed. In other words, we will not be dredging up the past, but calling in, with the help of Spirit, the childhood of your best dreams.
Year one is a nurturing, gentle, sacred and loving time that allows you to be the nurturer and healer of your inner children – of your own precious child self. Year one allows us to go back into the cocoon to re-imagine and re-configure the foundations of our self.
Year Two: Healing the World in Us
We cannot really change our lives as long as the young child ego is hurting. So many people move towards change – they take a workshop, they drink ayahuasca, they go to therapy – but as soon as scary feelings, images, thoughts, begin to rise, they stop. And then repeat a while later, when the same thing happens. They say, “I think I need something different,” or, “I didn’t like that therapist” when what they are really saying is, “I don’t want it to be so hard, to be so scary, to feel so bad. I don’t want to deal with all that stuff from my past.” And so the cycle of their pain and suffering continues because it truly is too hard to meet. The reason it is too hard to meet is that the young ego did not get what it needed to be strong enough to deal with conflict, to withstand the discomfort of big emotions, to be sturdy or grounded enough to face what is scary or uncomfortable or unspeakable. There is a ‘can’t’ instead of a ‘won’t’. A ‘can’t’ means we really are not able to do something, not because we don’t want to, but because something in us is not capable at this time. The more we heal our child ego, the more strength and capacity we have for facing the scary stuff of healing the hurt of the world that lives in us.
Year two brings us to the hurt of the world that lives in us, usually buried inside the stories we carry and live out: I’m not good enough; I can’t stand up for myself; I don’t trust people; I’m not loveable; I don’t have the right to exist; the world is out to get me; and other hard hard stories. And importantly, through our shamanic and alchemical work, we learn how to release these stories, and make space inside ourselves for ourselves. Year two takes us on a journey of liberation.
Year Three: Healing for the World
Sometimes people say, isn’t this work a luxury? Real change comes from changing structures, policies, getting out into the streets and protesting, doing something. The Soul Healing Way response to this is that there is no either/or – both are necessary. Specifically, if we do not do this work too, of changing our inner structures, the outer structures will continue to manifest the conflicts and distortions we carry around inside us.
This is why we must strengthen the child ego, clear and transform the hard stories generated by personal and cultural traumas, and become reconnected to our multidimensional selves and the unified field of consciousness – the sacred web of life – in order to be able to carry out healing of our world.
We cannot imagine a new Earth if we are stuck in the hurt of the old one. By repairing our connections to the Earth, we can retrieve spiritual technologies that enable us to heal and transform human social structures and bring healing to the sacred web of life of which we are all a part.
There is very little in our mainstream Westernized and colonized social landscapes that encourages us to get altered and retrieve the parts of ourselves that we need in order to bring the power back on inside us and in the world. What do I mean by power? The power I am referring to is a primal one: the power of connecting to our multidimensional selves, of remembering our connections to the Black Void, to Original Being, to the first beginnings when we ignited and became light that became flesh. Power as visceral connection to all life. Power as the force that moves us to live our dreams, speak our truths, stand up on behalf of ourselves and each other, give birth to what we have not yet imagined, and do all those things necessary to co-create a just, joyful, sacred, wild, and sustainable world.
Year Three brings us face to face with the hurt of the world outside ourselves and through continued transformational work, including healing of cultural traumas and ancestral lineages, we will bring together all that we have learned in order to lay hands on our cultural and planetary woundings. Year Three we become healers of ourselves, each other, and our world. Year Three we co-create a New Mythos for the New Earth.