Healing at the Edges of the Apocalypse

I’m going to start by going back today.

So much shifted in 2016 the night of the presidential election. Instantly I knew, along with millions of others that nothing would ever be the same. And that the momentum of “the arc of the moral universe” bending towards progress, healing and a better world and future was deeply interrupted. For weeks many of us mourned, walked around in a daze of trauma and began to withdraw from those who had voted for DT supporting racism, misogyny, antiLGBTQ, Christofascism and more.

Suddenly, the paradigms of reality had shifted. And we found ourselves in a new reality. Perhaps one that had always been there but with the veneer of hope and the assumption of progress, it had felt different before. Now, the stark reality was staring millions more of us in the face. I want to take a moment here to recognize that Indigenous and Black people in the United States have been living in this apocalypse for hundreds of years- they were not surprised, in fact they saw it coming.

Personally, I found it increasingly difficult to put out the writings I had been sharing on astrology, spirituality and healing. I wasn’t sure they were in alignment with where we were anymore. It felt like being forced into a new reality without consent and no option to go “home.” So in my mourning and disorientation, I got very quiet and still, contemplating what I wanted to share going forward with the outer world. I began the work of decolonizing everything I’d thought to be true about healing and spirituality. It is something I feel will be life long work- along with antiracism work and more specifically, anti-blackness work. Everything I thought I knew and understood about spirituality, “new age” information and healing had mostly come from an industry build on the foundations of white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy and filtered through their lenses and gatekeeping. Notice who the “experts” are and have always been in the collective field of healing, shamanism and new age (books, training, retreats, etc)- and still today, predominantly white.

What did the concept of healing even mean outside the narrative I’d been taught by experts who were also under the spells or conscious foot soldiers of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism? It is a question I continue to ask myself daily as we move through this ongoing (and TBH worsening) Sars2 pandemic as well as through the current climate apocalypse. If I had harbored any hope that humanity would come together to save ourselves and the planet from destruction due to unchecked global warming and extreme climate change- I was given a harsh reality check with the global response to the pandemic both at the leadership/government levels as well as the individual levels: I don’t believe humanity will do the right things collectively to stop or reverse global warming. Why not? Again I return to the systems of oppression which are also systems of exploitation: white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy.

My daily question for the last 6 years has been and continues to be: what does healing look like in the midst of an apocalypse? What do our wants and needs become when we acknowledge the apocalypse? What does this do to our own personal vision of the future for ourselves and our beloveds (partners, family, close friends) and especially for our children?

The strength and potency of my work is dependent on being able to see things that haven’t been seen before by my clients…if I limit what I can see so I only see the "good things" or the "safe things" in our shared ordinary reality, how can I then be open to see everything the Spirits are trying to show be to help my clients? I'm very clear now that I can’t ignore that I can see the apocalypse, I can’t deny its existence- to do so is to deny my obligations and promises I made to Spirit in becoming a Shamanic practitioner. And if you're still reading this, you're also someone who knows there's no going back to the way things were, normal is long gone.

I am very clear now who my healing work is meant for and why. My healing work is for those who also see, recognize and acknowledge the apocalypse and who feel out of place in a world hell bent on ignoring the truth of our current reality and its current projected path. I'm here for those who find themselves awake, living in a toxic, mass psychosis of “this is all fine”. I’m not sure it’s the whole, final answer but in this moment: I do healing work for those who are interested in being resourced and becoming whole while living through an unfolding apocalypse of our world.

Joseph Osmundson in his book “ Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead and the Small Things in Between writes:

In his book Image Control, Patrick Nathan argues that climate change is making us futureless, living at the end of the world as we’ve known it. A pandemic makes us live without a present, putting life on hold for the future when things will be better. No wonder 2020 presented such a challenge to us all, living without a present and understanding, too, the limits of our future.

It is at this intersection of time and space, on the edges of the apocalypse that I offer my Shamanic services and Family Constellations work.