In September of 2015, I convened the first semester of the Community Healers’ Council. In that first semester, 16 people gathered together, one Saturday a month for 3 months, and we began to touch something that has been mostly lost to western culture: an experience of sacred ritual relationship with each other and with our living world.
The Community Healers’ Council is a radical experiment in community healing. It’s a ritual practice group for learning the skills of shapeshifting and restoration. It’s a transformational ceremony on behalf of the Ancestors, the Living Ones, and the Future Beings.
The Community Healers’ Council really is an experiment and I don’t know how it’s going to develop. I just know that we’re following an ancient pathway in our indigenous souls. And that there’s a deep sense of coming home. We’re being gathered into -or by- a field of consciousness that is, itself, a living instrument of evolution.
I’m going to be sharing the stories of our journey hereon my blog for two reasons. First, what we do and how it transforms us isn’t easy to describe (I’m not sure English even has words for some of it). I’m writing to help those of us who are living this experiment to land it more deeply within us. Second, I believe that the Community Healers’ Council is one of many new cultural forms evolving to help bring healing to our troubled world. Perhaps hearing about what we’re doing will be of use to you, in your efforts in that direction.
What is the task of healing in a world that is alive and aware?
The word healing is etymologically related to the words whole and holy. To heal is to make whole, and to render all life Holy. Healing asks us live in right relationship: to restore balance between all the parts that make up the whole, including making space for that which has been shadowed or excluded.
The dominant western mindset specializes in separating, not bringing together. We’ve created a society that looks at the world as collection of parts, rather than in integrated whole. We give some of the parts more validity than others, and we imagine that some parts can be healthy while others are not. We look for answers by finding smaller and smaller pieces, rather than by looking for the connections that hold it all together. And we are a long way from seeing the Holy in ourselves, each other, or our world.
The Community Healers’ Council comes together to ask, “What can we learn about healing if we hold the following to be true?”
- Our world is alive, inspirited, conscious, and aware.
- Patterns of energy and intention are as real as rocks.
- The ancestors and the future beings are as present as those of us in living bodies.
- The landscape is alive, and populated all variety of beings, including human beings.
- We can invite these other beings to engage and collaborate with us, and sometimes they do.
- We can alter our state of consciousness, and different states give us access to different kinds of information.
- Although we are all unique, we are not separate: we have collective selves as well as individual selves, and we can learn and do things together that we can’t do alone.
- Life is a vast and mysterious intelligence, of which we are a part, and which is also larger than any of us.
- Health and well-being come from living in right relationship with our own inner parts, with all our relations, and in alignment with that sacred creative force.
We’ve just begun to ask these questions, and to learn how to hear the answers. What’s clear is that the living landscape is stepping up to meet us in this endeavour. There will be many more chapters to this story.
The Community Healers’ Council meets in 3 month semesters, one Saturday a month, in Calgary. Priority registration is given to current council members, then past council members. We welcome all who are called into this sacred inquiry with us. You can learn more about the council here.