Walk In Balance.

When I was asked to suggest a title for this column, several names came to mind. However, the decision to select "Walk in Balance" was easy to make, and a clear choice. Less about hypnosis specifically, and more about a way to approach life and healing in general, "walk in balance" is a key phrase for me in guiding and informing my work with clients.

For Native American healers and shamen, song and dance is an integral part of their "medicine." This has always resonated with my understanding of healing. The western allopathic model that has developed over the past 150 years is rather limited in its unspoken consensus that healing happens best in square rooms with florescent lights and metal chairs and hospital beds. Add to that lots of needless cutting of the body, tubes and wires, and a cornucopia of pharmacopia, and you have "doctoring" as it has come to be known in our culture.

I have had the privilege and honor of studying with, and hanging out with, a number of native, indigenous healers. The chant which "Walk in Balance" comes from allegedly comes from the Cree People, who learned it from the Grass People. It goes:

   Witsinaye Hey-Oh Hey-Aye, Witsinaye Hey-Oh,
   Witsinaye Hey-Oh Hey-Aye, Witsinaye Hey-Oh,
   Witsinaye Hey-Oh Hey-Aye, Witsinaye Hey-Oh
   Witsinaye Hey-Oh Hey-Aye, Witsee Hey Hey Hey, Oh-way

(For a beautiful recording of this chant, "Oklahoma Homecoming" by Dr. Scout Cloud Lee, Magical Child Foundation, RR3, Box 265, Stillwater, OK 74075).

One core meaning of this chant is: when we come to this beautiful planet, our mother earth, we arrive with karma, but we are essentially in balance. As we go through the various traumas of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, we are often knocked out of balance. Perhaps a helpful way of understanding all "illness" and "disease" is that it is the condition of being out of balance. An excellent way of remembering to come back in balance is through singing/chanting (audible mantra, prayer, etc.). We all walk, using our two legs. These connect us with the ground, as well as giving us mobility.

So, the teaching is: When the left leg comes down to meet the earth, it is a reminder to us of what it is we have come here to receive (in many energetic understandings of the body, the left side is the feminine, or receptive side). When the right leg comes down to meet the earth, it is a reminder to us of what it is we have come here to give (the right side being the masculine, or sending/penetrating half).

And when we take honest appraisal, how many of us, and our clients, are often in situations of giving too much, and not being able to ask for, and receive? Or the opposite -- taking too much, and not giving enough back.

In the beginning of your next hypnosis/healing session, it might be useful to pre-frame whatever issues are going to be addressed by asking What is out of balance? And then setting the intention to Walk in Balance.

Peter Blum, C.Ht. is a certified member of the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association[TM] [e-mail]