Thoughts 6.21.20

There's a quote that says, life isn't measured by the breaths you take but by the breathtaking moments. Life is but various transitions and that's been the hardest part of lessons learned for me... That although someone passes, I must know that they are simply on their next phase and it's never, ever a good-bye. The role of a shaman isn't to convince anyone. We don't recruit, persuade, or try to convert people. We exist only to help heal people, sometimes spirits and souls, on all levels of existence, physical and metaphysical. The role of a shaman is to serve as a resource, an alternative healing to situations when everything has been exhausted. It is a protective step to secure the health, safety, and longevity of a person. The physical world has its doctors, counselors, and physicians but the spiritual world, no doctor can put that through a microscope or MRI and diagnose spiritual illness. In the same reasons why someone would take a trip to the clinic, shamans aren't usually requested for good or positive reasons. We're usually met with individuals going through trauma and personal challenges. It is our destiny to help people cope through these times and provide healing to the best of our ability. Sometimes I feel like I barely know what I'm doing. I barely know if what I do is working, if it's helping or not. I never know what to say to a family going through challenges... You have to provide hope because if not, there's absolutely nothing else to give to the family or individual who sought help from you during their time of need. For some people, you as a shaman is their last hope. In these past years, some families and individuals have shared the most vulnerable moments of their life and feelings with me and in these moments you really see how much love and care they have for their loved ones. You see that final fight in every singe person and family. It's in these stories they share with you and the amount of love you see that makes you want to help even though you know deep inside sometimes it's dangerous, spiritually anyway, for you. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to happen to transitioning souls. We understand that the soul is an eternal flame, an everlasting shapeshifter existing forever. In a time of great trauma or sickness, not only do we help and heal the spirit, but also in the process, help others connected with the transitioning soul to find peace in a difficult time.

One of my greatest and most powerful lessons of being a shaman is getting the opportunity to see one's existence not just unified in its physical state but also in time, as an endless energy. People call death, the end. But I welcome it and understand it to be a transition, a journey forward, or should I say rewind, back home. The person is simply going home only to begin again. I've come to understand not just death but trauma as a revelatory moment in our existence. We accept everything that is and go though sadness, depression, and anger. We don't just move on but we learn to live on with the death or illness of our loves ones. But this also means we have to focus on the positive energies of the beauty and lessons of existence and the cycle of this life. In my short lived years and especially even shorter years of being a Hmong shaman, I've come to understand that every birth, rebirth, life, and death is linked endlessly and each stage is but one more transition that we all share and will always be a part of.