Photo Credit: Ellen Cleary
by Dr. Michele Semerit Strachan
The Circle of healing is a gathering of people who all feel they received a special calling and transmission of knowledge/wisdom to heal. We are on a path to which we are called. The ultimate authority on our work is the calling. The ultimate development is our deepening communication with the calling.Â
All illness is the resistance to the calling, the holding on to anything that will protect us from the total dissolution of self that Oneness with Calling requires. If all illness is a resistance, if all healing is a reconciliation with self, with the Creator, and with the blueprint for life and evolution, then what is the role of the healer?
In the African tradition, the teacher is the student and the student is the teacher. The healer is a mirror for the patient; AND the patient is a mirror for the healer. In this way, everyone has a healing role to play. And the intended healing that an illness calls for occurs best in community.
As someone specifically called to the healing path, we each have a role that is specifically patterned on the joys, the trauma, and the awfulness of our specific lives. We are called simultaneously to go deeply into the particulars of our life AND to disappear from the encounter so that Spirit or the Creative Force may move through the aligned and clear opening we have become to touch directly the BE-ing who is seeking, through us, a greater alignment with the Creator”'s plan for his/her life.Â
In the Circle of Healing, we explore what are the structures and institutions that can best support the development of practitioners who really embody that the healing comes from the patient, what are the best ways to recreate community that heals, and how do we collectively reclaim becoming the authority on community cultural healing of our own people.
