I Am Not Your Healer

First published on my now defunct private Patreon community on December 23, 2018. I now continue regular musings in my private email newsletter. Interested in signing up? Click here.

I am not your healer. 

I am a medium that channels. Channelings may create shift, change. Better words for me are facilitator, space holder, catalyst, witch, spirit worker. You change yourself. You heal yourself. Being in relationship with me may help, may be a vital push. May be a turning point. 

‘Healer’ seems to bean identity based on an ability or desire to people please, and for others to gain use value out of them. This is often both problematic and maladaptive, and causes harm to both service provider and service receiver.

I believe that – generally speaking – in the climate of contemporary western witchcraft and occultism, to publicly and loudly self-identify as a ‘healer’ is at its best naïve and ill-informed, and at its worst wildly arrogant, deceptive, and manipulative.

Other individuals whose work largely focuses on improving the lives of their clients (I’m thinking psychiatrists, physicians, therapists, counsellors) don’t identify as ‘healers’, though they are in professions centered on helping and in some cases healing or curing others, or in symptom management. In my experience, it’s more common for those professionals – rightly – to perceive themselves as people who are doing their best with the always limited expertise and information that they have, in the hope to make someone’s life and experience a bit better. 

To be a self-proclaimed ‘healer’ is for that person to base their identity on the impact they have on others, rather than what they actually do as an action or service. And that – regardless of intention – puts a lot of weight on the client or service receiver: a weight I feel is deeply inappropriate. The service receiver should be free to focus completely on themselves, without any need, desire, pressure, or compulsion to please or validate the ego of the service provider. The client is there to have their needs attended to – the good kind of self-ish that often is so hard to access because it can feel so shameful to admit that we need to make ourselves our own focus for just a moment.

‘Healers’ often target vulnerable people, who may in their unwellness be desperate and eager to purchase snake oil at any cost as long as the salesperson is good enough. It’s easy to demonize the client for being gullible or being easily duped, and to praise or shrug off ‘healers’ for simply surviving under capitalism, but I think a lot more is at play than simply these factors, and find it much more useful to focus on ‘healers’ than simply receptive parties who are just looking to improve their physical, emotional, and spiritual health. 

The term ‘healer’ also assumes that ‘healing’ is a movement towards being ‘healed’; embedded in this frame is the assumption that true/complete/pure ‘complete’ absolution or ‘healing’ is even possible. 

It isn’t. 

We will never be fully healed.

There is no perfection to be attained.

To strive for it is a fast track to negative self-talk that can result in depression and malaise for not healing well enough, fast enough, sustainably enough.

‘Healing’ is not and cannot be an end point, because once we’ve made progress on one thing, something else inevitably comes up.

It’s a snapshot, a freeze frame.

Our lives are always moving, always in a state of flux. There is always something to ‘heal’ from, there is always a way we can contort ourselves into something we feel we need to cure, as though both sadness and happiness aren’t equally appropriate responses to life and trauma. 

The dichotomy between ‘healed vs unhealed’ is implied here, and creates a bizarre holier-than-thou hierarchy that aligns healing with enlightenment. It is often further implied that the only thing holding the unhealed back from healing is their choice not to take dime-a-dozen ‘healers’ up on the offer. This skepticism or lack of resonance with ‘healers’ is often then pathologized. There is an undercurrent here of personal responsibility for health, and an offloading of the failure of community and collective onto the shoulders of the individual. This is often a heavy burden.

What does it mean to be ‘unhealed,’ anyway?

Can anyone truly claim to be fully ‘healed’?

From what, exactly?

I don’t know anyone whose mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health could use absolutely no improvement; this is simply life, and I feel it is impossible to avoid ebbs and flows, the rising and falling of moods and bodies as the interplays of love, care, conflict, and harm touch us, come and go. The impetus to rush towards ‘healing’ can keep us feeling shame, feeling guilt, feeling internalized ableism about our pace and capacity for whatever feels to us like improvement and progress. If we don’t meet our goals – maybe we hold onto the pain and trauma of rape or family abuse for years afterwards – the current culture of ‘healers’ would lead us to believe we have only ourselves to blame. Those sick and in pain, and struggling with disabled bodies and minds often already have enough to wrestle with.

Sometimes, in order for our health to truly be sustainable long term, we need to wade and swim in the muck a little bit, feel all the nasty things in order to let them go. Sometimes this is the appropriate response, and is necessary for long-term integration. 

Seeking someone else to ‘heal’ us is also often an act of refusing to step into our own power – and folks who self-identify as ‘healers’ are also complicit in this disempowerment of their clients.

In my opinion, the worst kind of spiritual workers want to keep all of the power for themselves, rather than to skill build with their clients and guide service receivers to realize the potency of the power for transformation already within them. For people who are sick, hurting, or struggling, to be disempowered is also an additional blow to a spirit often already crushed by the heavy weight of unwellness.

Clinging to ‘healer’ as an identity marker also hurts ‘healers’ themselves. It cuts them off from the freedom of being ‘unhealed’ and in pain; it enables them to embrace spiritual bypassing.

It keeps them stuck in a quagmire of control, of needing to determine an outcome for someone else (often for the sake of their own ego) before even stepping into a situation.

To be a ‘healer’ is to be overly preoccupied with the achievement of ‘healing’, to need to regulate and curb another person’s process more than is possible or can be reliably guaranteed. Furthermore, this often means the ‘healer’ is walking into a session thinking they know better than the client does what is wrong or what hurts or where needs attention, and how, and what will happen once that attention is given. Sometimes this may be true, other times not so much.

There is also the mess of being stuck in people-pleasing, and getting validation from our impact on others: a validation to the ‘healee’ that they are indeed experiencing the paid-for service of healing. 

Specialists and skilled workers exist, and are often hired or consulted with for their particular expertise. I’m not saying that talented spiritual workers don’t exist. I’m not saying that the services of talented spiritual workers result in no impact whatsoever.

Contact with a spiritual worker who is talented, experienced, and able to connect with you and your spirits can be incredibly healing, empowering, cleansing, and sometimes life-changing. I believe in that. 

However, to enter into a spiritual and/or business transaction and promise someone, If you give me this amount of money I will give you transformation and healing, just like that, super easy, like a vending machine, is irresponsible, unethical, and shouldn’t be promised by anybody. 

No one can promise to transform another being. Any type of spiritual work is always collaborative – it involves an interplay of many beings’ energies, and as such there is always an unknown factor in this work.

Do I promise transformation in my courses? To some extent, yes - my work is good, my content is good, my teachings can be and are transformative for many people. This is true and has been true for years. And while I am a catalyst, while I provide a framework, a container, a stage - it is not me who ‘heals’ or transforms anyone directly. They show up, learn to trust themselves, learn new skills, and transform themselves.

When transformation happens for my clients, I consider myself humbled, honoured, and blessed.

I am in awe of their vulnerability and strength. It is never about me.

I hold space, I create space, and I channel spirit when I can and when it’s called for. My skills here are crucial to the experience, so I don’t want to say they are irrelevant – they’re not – but I describe my work in what I do, in the actions I take and the methodologies I employ. My methodologies may not be a good fit for everyone; may ‘heal’ others while causing others harm; may not be the right medicine for all people in all circumstances. 

It seems worth mentioning that my background in Spiritualism has touched me, has influenced my framing of this work. In Spiritualism, energy healing services are an aspect of most religious and spiritual events, but these are always called simply ‘healing services.’ The facilitators do not self-identify as ‘healers.’

The pastor asks if anyone feels called to serve spirit at that moment. What is meant by this is whether or not anyone wishes to use their body as a channel and vessel for the spirit(s) and energy of the dead and the earth/universe in order to facilitate the transference of ‘healing vibes’ into the person seeking to receive.

Some people may be more successful vessels than others, but it is understood that what they are doing is being of service to spirit and to their community.

They hold power and move and transform energy but the power to heal or be healed doesn’t reside within them, they do not draw their identity from it.

It’s been interesting writing this while moving in and out of veterinary emergency rooms, where I have to insist on care in some instances, and trust that my little one is in good hands in others, and leave him to sleep alone in a cage so he can be monitored by health professionals.

These are medical environments, and no amount of simple prayer would have stopped my cat from dying.

I know that my spirits aided in a spot becoming available at my usual vet, and in poking me hard so my intuition was ringing an alarm bell. If I didn’t listen to those nudges from spirit and my intuitive feelings, my baby would be dead.

But he would also be dead if all I did was pray over his body, or if all I did was do a healing ritual for him.

I had someone message me on Instagram saying they would do a protection ritual for him if I wished (I gladly accepted this generous offer), but sometimes magic and spiritual healing isn’t enough.

Sometimes, our spirits tell us: go to the fucking doctor!

Where does that leave spiritual seekers looking for transformation?

Sometimes, in a confusing space! While there is so much to be said for having decades of experience (I have two), ultimately my end goal is not for students to rely on me to ‘heal’ them, again and again, over the years - my goal is always, always to teach my students to heal, trust, and transform themselves.

The power to heal you… is within YOU.

Never let anyone tell you otherwise.

(But um, yeah - don’t forget to go to the doctor! Take your meds! Go to therapy! Get vaccinated! Spiritualiity and science work best together.)