I get rather obsessed about things. All sorts of things. I discover spaghetti squash and a perfect-results way to cook it and then proceed to eat it a dozen times a week, for weeks on end. Or happen upon a new tv program - like the Stargate shows - and watch 25, 30, 35 episodes a week for weeks, months on end, until all 300+ shows are watched. Or yoga, 2, 3, 4 times a week for months. Or books on anarchy, or homesteading, or greenery growing and grainery brewing, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
These obsessions come and go, and my elegant theory around it all is that because of my psychic shamanic sensitivities, whatever is happening in my body/mind/spirit gets amplified, and if it detects something is needed, things like motivation and will go pedal to to the metal until whatever need is occurring gets satiated. And then it's done. Finito.
For a couple of decades I was obsessed with performing and the fame that goes with it, with that transformation to bright, sizzling, vast energy that fills a person with brilliant light when they plug into it. Sometimes it was just as a model with the presence of a photographer. Other times it was on stage in front of 1000 people, bright lights shining heat, the rustle of the crowd like the sound of a lover's breathing, the small movements of their body telling you how to open them, how to receive them.
And then it shifted to the holistic work. Releasing into that space of vast, charged, deeply humming energy in such a way that all the people in the room could be taken with me, class space as space ship into the infinite Yes. Or adjusting the environment on all sense levels so the person on the table receiving energywork was invited, carried, linked into the energy space that lives just behind this ordinary one, supported as they found their own way to meet and inhabit the Yes.
And now that is falling away - that need for either myself or the people I'm with to be in a state of heightened awareness, to submerge into the mystical experience of the layers underneath the layer called World. It's been falling away for a few years now. Not because those heart expanding, mind blowing, body luscious states aren't YES. They are. But with each passing day, I get that it is genuinely the Yes that's calling to me, and that where I'm heading now is toward the yes. Which is very quiet. And inside. This human body. And the body of kitties. The body of plants. The body of stones and soil and rain and dwelling and apple and bowl and shoe and bed.
Who knows where this human called Katherine will end up? The movement is away from other humans. I wish it weren't. I so wanted to be a part of the tribe - loved, respected, a member who contributed in a deep and meaningful way. I guess that's the desire to be a hero that lives in all of us, yes? To bring back fire for our tribe. To save us from the coming storm.
But all that is falling away too. And is almost gone.
What's left is a new obsession, a simple one - to make a living in a useful, bullsh*t-free way. It's been building for a few years, rotating on a single question: what do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And for most people, asking themselves this question is pretty straightforward- learn carpentry and get a job, get credentialled and go teach (although in today's job market, this path isn't as clear as it used to be).
For three Mach-10 years that culminated with the right to attach several letters after my name, I was obsessed with higher learning, with science, with psychology and public health and social behavior and chronic disease. I still am. But it's rapidly becoming clear that I don't fit into the culture of that world.
Maybe it's the job I'm in. It's too visible. My freakness is too obvious to the folks around me. We leave an important meeting with high-level folks, and two minutes out the door, the CEO asks me: so what are your thoughts? And because I haven't had time to process, what comes out is something way beyond a recap of How The Meeting Went.
I've got it together enough to not speak about how all sorts of different health issues each meeting attendee was dealing with was lifted into the light, and how their different emotional patterns fit into each physical expression, and how that impacted the way in which they heard what my team and I were trying to explain to them. But the clinical, professional assessment of presentation and reception? Not currently something I can give on the fly. I need some time to shape it, to figure out what needs to be edited out. Otherwise the psychic shamanic cat is out of the bag, and it won't be read as psychic shamanic. It'll simply look childish or emotional or irrelevant or just freakin bizarre.
And it's a small office. I watch the discomfort of the folks around me - they know something is off about me but they can't put their finger on it. Am I immature? Am I arrogant? Is it lack of confidence that has me pulling back? Is it social ineptness that has me missing basic social cues? They don't understand that I've spent a lifetime discovering the hundred thousand other things occurring just behind the ordinary reality. That I'm watching things they can't see yet, hearing things they can't identify yet, putting things together in a way they haven't gotten strong enough to deal with yet.
This doesn't make me better or smarter or anything like that. By far, I am surrounded by folks smarter, savvyier than me. You seriously do not want someone like me building your bridge or developing your biologic cancer treatment. Me? I'm like the folks on Alphas or even X-men or even the cancelled tv show Lie To Me. It's just mutation that's been practiced and honed to a skill.
Did I just compare myself to a superhero? What the f*ck else can you compare this shamanic psychic thing to? Van Gogh and his mad visual acuity around color? Perfumers and their hyper-sensitivity to scents? These are all still about the known, accepted five senses, and the shamanic psychic thing is the spidey sense that lives inside of a human, with conduits through the nervous and digestive systems, receptors in the pineal gland and solar plexus, a kind of hijacking of different areas of the brain so that the inflow of data can be interpreted as visuals or smells or sounds or emotions.
So why aren't I a superhero? Why aren't people flocking to me in droves for this fantastic shamanic psychic whammy that I can lay on them?
There are dozens of possible answers to this. Some that blame me for being a crazy, deluded, incompetent wackjob. Others that blame clients for wanting the psychic feel-good, as in don't tell me the truth, tell me what I want to hear, tell me good things about flowing cash and loving soulmates and meaningful careers and effortless vibrant health.
But the truth of it is that these skills and abilities live inside me. I've honed them for years. It's a normal part of every day. And it doesn't work like other people think it should work. It's more like being a physician, a healer, than most folks realize.
It's not:
I Know Everything About Everything, And Can Make Very Very Good Things Happen To The People Who Give Me Cash to Sit In The Scary Eyes Metaphysics of My Divinely Appointed Tarot Card Reading and Connection With Angels and Dead People
But rather:
This is what is occurring, this is what set it into motion, and these are different options and these are the most likely outcome for each of them.
Not very sexy, is it?
And really, how successful is a doc who just says: lay off the cake and get your fat a*ss to the gym? And the ones that tell you the cancer is coming if you don't quit smoking or a heart attack is on its way if you don't lay off the Bo*jangles? Probably the least popular of all.
People want pills and treatments, they want genuine healing. They go in sick and want to come out well. That's what I go to my Korean acupuncturist for. But I'm not really that kind of healer. (I do healing work - the shamanic psychic thing has that piece to it, too, but the freakin scope of that is best saved for another post)
And so what am I? I'm more of an MRI. An organic MRI that sees physical, mental, emotional patterns. But how can I use this skill? What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them?
I have to make a living. Don't we all? My obsession with getting the BA and master's was around plugging into a career in a field I found fascinating and spot on with usefulness.
And yet I don't fit. In a way that I understand may get me fired. My current contract is a temp one that ends January 1. I most likely have a job until then :) because I'm not failing at the job they hired me for - I'm just more weird and less fantastic than they thought I'd be. But who knows? And who knows after that?
I'm applying for different jobs in the area, all public health chronic disease sort of gigs, but in larger companies, where I stand a better chance of blending in to the scenery, having my freakness be less visible (it's how I thrived in Cubicleland and Hiveworld).
The desire and need to be plugged into the Bright Mystical YES is gone. The obsession now is a life spent communing with plants, animals, weather, stones, of pulling even further back from World and into earth.
And yet the question still comes around, over and over: What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And how do I make a living doing it?
Corporate intuitionist? Garden shop worker? Animal shelter attendant? Jury selection consultant? Some form of IntegralShamanics healer I don't know of yet?
