The Ascetic, the Therapist, the Priest and the Possessed

What these people have in common is they’re all healers in a way. I’ve promised to write about the energy work I do, and I’ve been hesitating on either writing about it, or in some cases doing it. Part of my dilemma is I want to take it slow, the other is I’m still trying to make sense out of it. How does one write about such an important and huge topic and still sound genuine, when one doesn’t fully comprehend it oneself?

I’ve been truly blessed in my recent years to make the acquaintance of people who practice the healing arts. Genuine people. They hesitate to call themselves healers directly and I’m beginning to understand why. I agree with their choices for doing so. Their choice in some ways is my own. Why? In some respect, the practices I’ve been doing aren’t solely my own. In other ways, it takes two: a cooperative experience. It’s not something I do to someone, but rather something I do with someone. It’s also highly individualistic, what I do for one person would not work for another, but rather there would be a process of discovery to determine what the correct course of action would be.

New Orleans Healing Center Grand Opening

Today is the grand opening of the New Orleans Healing Center on the corner of St. Claude and St. Roch in NOLA. While Hurricane Irene batters the east coast, the center is the culmination of the restoration of certain goods and services that were missing after another hurricane: Katrina.

For many it has been a labor of love getting it off the ground. There have been countless meetings, gatherings, planning and fundraising over the years to make it a reality. There has been outreach to communities surrounding the center to discover what services are needed in areas where much of the infrastructure was destroyed after Katrina. But it tries to do things a bit differently by aiming to achieve sustainability and healing to both immediate and long term needs.

New Orleans Healing Center

I’ve previously written about how in 2005, on our 10th wedding anniversary, Katrina went over us while we were vacationing in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera (Death Ahead, Detour Next Right, Oungan François and Let’s take the free ANW pillow and go). That experience set the stage for us to travel to New Orleans (NOLA) the next year and me attending a conference. The year after that in 2007 we started getting involved with New Orleans Healing Center, an idea to create a community center to promote healing and sustainability in an area that needs it. It’s not just a community center, but a collection of different business, ideas, a street university, food and other things promoting healing and needed services.

For years now, my wife has worked tirelessly, along with dedicated individuals in New Orleans as well as others to make a vision become a reality. We went to meetings, she worked daily. They started out as ideas, salon meetings, hard work and dedication. They worked to secure funding. They worked to make it sustainable. They worked hard.

Haunted by Ghosts

I’m not telling a ghost story, not that I don’t have them. It’s true that there were ghosts that frequented the rooms and halls of my college dormitory, but that will have to wait for another time.

There are times I feel haunted by ghosts. Not the kind that go clink in the night, the spirits of the departed, I have a working relationship with them. The ghosts I speak of are my own. They are not external entities, but internal to myself. This is about the ghosts that we carry around with us, the memories that haunt.

When I was growing up, times were different, our nation was different. I would hear jokes, often with racial epithets in them. As the world and I changed, I would grow more and more uncomfortable with what was being said, eventually telling people I didn’t want to hear the jokes. They were offensive. This is one of my ghosts.