Soul Doctor Sans Medicine
South Americans often call their healers shaman after the high regions in which they live or the plant medicines that they administer. In the Andes many shaman prefer the term paqo. In Siberia, an area many people consider the birthplace of shamanism, a shaman is one who sees in the dark – one who helps you heal because they can see blind spots that you can’t. This is the definition that Mary Raymaker, a Jackson Hole-based shaman prefers. She sees herself as a spiritual midwife or soul doctor, who helps clean up old wounds without the use of medicine.
Even though the term shaman includes the word man, it is not gender biased. In fact, Raymaker trained with a tribe in Chile that has more women than men shamans.
“It is a very equal opportunity profession,” she says. “In fact a lot of times a husband and a wife work together as shamans to bring balance to the practice.
“They don’t talk about it as healing. It is about bringing people into balance. My job is to find out how people got out of balance using the energy field that surrounds them. “
Raymaker, like many energy healers, sees the energy field around us as a program running our lives. It determines where we are born, our friends, our enemies and our upbringing – everything we’ve experienced in life.
As children, we do not have blocks yet. But inevitably as we grow up, we experience pain.
“Whether we want to or not, we are going to go through things that are hurtful, painful and traumatic,” she says. “That first painful event dumps a heavy energy onto you and cuts it like a knife. The cut is your emotional response to what happened. And from then on the program is damaged and you keep bringing in that same painful situation where the person who will activate that pain within you over and over until you clear it out so that you can find your original purpose in life.”
The pain or damage creates dark energy that interferes with your purpose until you acknowledge it. This heavy energy causes blockages that throw us off balance, she says.
Quantum physics explains that energy flows into our fields continuously as electrons of possibility. Our thoughts and feelings tell these electrons what to do and they go out into the world to manifest those thoughts and feelings. Until you put your energy on the wave, the energy continues to circle back to you like a program.
Both positive and negative radiate out of people all the time. If you have, as many humans do, a negative bias, you will attract the negative. The shaman assists you to release the negative so that you can focus on the positive, allowing positive energy to circle back to you.
Once you clear out your pain, hopes and dreams are what are left behind and the law of attraction can help you manifest those dreams, she says.
In my session with Mary, I focused on how I felt when I acknowledged my pain and we practiced deep breathing to help clear my energy. It didn’t clear in one breath, but as we practiced deep breaths over and over, I felt a cleansing and a magical rebirth.
“If we don’t clear our blockages, we not only live in pain and negativity, but eventually there is only one place left for them to go – into the physical where they manifest as a disease,” she says.