Chapter 3
My healing room is a spare bedroom down the hall from where I sleep. It would have been the master bedroom; I use it for my healing room because there’s a bathroom in it for clients and a big walk-in closet for storage. I covered the wooden floor with a Persian wool rug with a teal blue motif, and on top of that I put a Peruvian prayer rug that was gifted to me from a Peruvian shaman friend. Two big pillows double as chairs if I sit on the floor. I keep a folding massage table in there so I can stand and work on my clients. A few low tables line the walls with crystals: lots of amethyst, several large geodes, a small statue of Mother Mary and directly to her right a small statue of Michael the Archangel.
There are two armchairs in there, and I moved them forward as most new clients liked to sit for their initial consultation. I lit a small bundle of sage in a blackened abalone shell and wafted the smoke with a harvested hawk feather into all the corners of the room, in all four directions, then above and below and all over me from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. I picked up my favorite rattle from the side table and stood in front of the second altar I maintained in the healing room. Two altars might seem like conspicuous consumption, but I want and need as much protection as Spirit might muster on my behalf, so keeping an altar where I slept and another one where I worked makes perfect sense.
Besides, both altars were beautiful works of art in their own right. This one was a plain table of polished oak, with an altar cloth of brilliantly colored Guatemalan fabric with all the colors of the rainbow and the colors of platinum, gold and silver woven through it. These are the ancient colors of protection, the colors of the flag flown in Atlantis over the Sons of Light when they marched out against the Sons of Belial.
The Sons of Light were the Good Guys. The Sons of Belial were the Not-Good Guys.
Both sides are still very much around.
That’s what keeps me in cigar and whiskey money.
I bowed my head and closed my eyes and began to chant the ancient Lakota power song given to me by First In Front, long ago…”Hey-ya, hey-ha-ho…”
I shook the rattle, a ball of dried leather, filled with corn and maize kernels, mounted on an antler handle. The steady rhythm of the rattle fired off deeply grooved synapses in my brain and put me into a light trance, the first step in crossing over into non-ordinary reality, as some modern shamans like to refer to the Spirit World, or the Other Realms.
The basic tool of the shamanic practitioner is the journey. That’s when I send my spirit into the Spirit World to negotiate with the spirits, to fight, to heal and, right now, to gather information. I always like to know something about the clients that are coming to see me. I once neglected to make a preliminary journey and that lapse nearly cost me my life in this incarnation. I’d opened my front door to a drug addict possessed by a demon I’d crossed swords with in the spirit realm; that demon sent a possessed human with a knife to finish me. One of the lessons you learn early in the Work is that you must protect yourself in this World as well as in the Next.
Which is why a Glock 19 lived under my bed and I cultivated certain other self-protection skills as well.
From behind closed eyes, I saw with my inner shamanic vision. My spirit rose up out of my body and flew through the air to my favorite portal into the Spirit World. It’s a beautiful old oak tree, with a small hollow in it, on the shores of Lake Harriet. It’s a tree that stands watch, over all those who pass by, on the shores of a lake sacred to the Lakota. I flew into the hollow and then went down, down, down…through the roots and then further down through a tunnel of earth that grew broader as I approached a pin prick of light that grew and grew and grew into a portal. I stepped out onto a grassy hillside overlooking a broad expanse of forest and mountains and lakes beneath a brilliant blue sky.
This was the Lower World, the world of Nature and spirit animals; home to the power animals that walk with all of us, whether we see them or not, from our birth till our passing into the Light.
An enormous white tiger sat on her haunches beside the portal.
“Hola, Tigre,” I said.
“Hola yourself,” the white tiger said. “What have you brought me?”
I pulled an ornate ivory comb out of my pocket. “For you, my beauty.”
She bared her gleaming white fangs. “Would you?”
“I would.”
I ran the comb through her immaculate and perfect fur, as only the fur of a white tiger in the Lower World can be. She’s a feminine spirit and she likes her beauty aids. I never argue with the Divine Feminine, especially a spirit that embodies all the power and the wisdom of a white tiger.
She purred a deep rumble in her throat.
“So,” she said, after savoring the pleasure of her combing. “What is your intention?”
“A client,” I said. “Coming to see me…”
A voice behind me that sounded like he’d spent a lifetime in the Bronx making book on the horses said, “Owen, Maryka, female human type, thirty two years old, divorced, a child, what else you wanna know?”
I turned and grinned up at the big black raven perched in the lower branches of the oak tree beside the portal. “Hey, Burt. How you doing?”
“Doing? How you doing, Marius?”
Tigre stretched her back. “He’s doing for me.”
Burt laughed a raven’s laugh. “You remind him of the wife he’ll never have.”
“Oh, don’t go there, man,” I said.
They both laughed.
“You have the makings of a good husband in you,” Tigre said. “It’s that which you resist the most that you should examine.”
“I’ll examine that another day if you don’t mind,” I said. “So Maryka?”
“Do you want to see or do you just want me to tell you?” Burt said.
“You know she’s possessed?” Tigre said.
“From her family,” Burt said. “There’s attack, past, present and future…someone close to her. There’s a cloud around it…professional. Karma and past life issues, too.”
“When isn’t there?” I said. “What travels with her?”
Tigre tilted her head. “It’s not with her now…one or two steps removed. This is the first step towards something hidden.”
“She’s looking for help,” Burt said. “She read that article in the paper.”
He cawed with amusement. “Not much for being down in the weeds are you, Marius? Better watch out for that self-aggrandizement…”
“It’s not self-aggrandizement if it helps educate those who need,” I said.
“Yes,” Tigre said. “And you’re getting more clients…”
“More people who need help,” I said.
“Don’t smoke so many cigars,” Tigre said. “You want to be more careful with that.”
“Sacred herb and all that,” Burt said.
“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing. “I thought I was supposed to be pure, but not too pure?”
They both said at exactly the same time in two different voices: “We never worry about you being too pure, Marius. It’s the other we watch for.”
“Thank you, my friends,” I said. “Is there anything else I should know right now?”
“Yes,” Tigre said. “This is more than it appears.”
“And…?” I said.
“Just remember that.”
Burt cawed and tilted his head. His eyes flared briefly with the white Light of the Spirit within him. “I’ll remind you if you forget.”
They always did.
“With love and gratitude, my allies,” I said.
“He’s always so formal, huh?” Burt said.
Tigre laughed. “See you on the Other Side, Marius…”
Yes. They would. I entered the tunnel and flew back to my body, settled into it and opened my eyes in my healing room.
This would be more than it appeared.
It always was.