GUEST EDITORIAL

By TIMOTHY COPE

IT CAN be dicey—this business of working as a healer. And I am using the word, business intentionally. While it’s wonderful for a practitioner to become accomplished on this or that healing path, when knowledge and skill are transmuted into commodities for the marketplace, those paths can become minefields.

For many of us, the difficulty may be rooted in what the economic realities of doing our work reveal to us about ourselves.

Being paid, per se, is not necessarily the problem. Healers the world over have always been paid for their efforts, as have other people who have truck in the sacred. It is a misapprehension to believe they are not. People (even healers) have to eat. People (even monks and nuns) must be clothed and sheltered. Just because there is no rate card posted on the kiva wall, no quid pro quo exchange of cash for services after the ritual, that does not mean that no attention is being paid or that there will not be reckoning further on down the pike. These considerations can be so tightly woven into the social fabric of the tribe or village as to not be readily visible to outsiders. But they are there.

How much to be paid is another matter entirely. It is a delicate balance. If we ask too much, we exploit our clients. If we ask too little, we exploit ourselves. It is a truism that many healers tend to err on the side of self-exploitation. Perhaps it is easier (and safer) for us to think we are worth too little than it is to risk having others think we think we are worth too much. Where is Goldilocks when we need her?

For some of us, another challenge arises when we choose to make our healing practice our day job. We may have the sincerest intent to undertake the work with love and compassion. Indeed, we may have compassion as deep as the ocean. We may have love as wide as the sky. But we may not have the ground we need to run a business. (There’s that pesky word again.) With the rent coming due and the wolf howling, if not at the door, then on a nearby ridge, occasional thoughts may surface as to how dependent we are on our clients for our wellbeing. Further thoughts, barely audible to our own awareness, may whisper suggestions on how to encourage our clients coming back, perhaps not so much because it is in their best interests, but because it seems to be in ours. After all, next month the car insurance premium comes round. With the world in such a state and our minds so noisy, we may find it difficult to embody the hollow bone, the clear conduit for spirit, of our aspirations.

Perhaps for some people what lies at the core of these various dilemmas is a deep-rooted belief that business is inherently anti-spiritual. Business involves money, and the love of money, we are told, is the root of all evil. By inference, anything commercial is somehow not countenanced by the Divine.

However, in the shamanic worldview, all things have a place on the circle. Everyone and everything is numinous. The All-That-Is is just that. Hence vendor and healer, client and customer, are all sacred beings, and what passes between them is sacred too—whether that be a laying-on-of-hands, a soul retrieval, fresh veggies from the garden, or a personal check.

Perhaps those of us who make our spiritual work our business need to recognize that we are indeed business people. Perhaps we need to devote as much time to understanding the subtleties and complexities of business as we do our healing disciplines and modalities. Perhaps we need to realize that the marketplace is as sacred an arena as our temples and our ritual circles. Perhaps we need to strive for mastery as much when we walk The Business Way as when we walk our Spirit Way. And perhaps if we are able to do these things, in time we will come to find that these two ways are the same.

Timothy Cope is a shamanic practitioner living in Minneapolis. He is on the faculty of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and gives workshops throughout the Upper Midwest. He can be emailed at: timothy@rattledrum.com or called at 612-721-5566.