The Archetype of the Healer: Resourcing Through the Medicine Bag

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This October, we are exploring the feminine lifecycle archetype of The Healer. The Healer is the life stage when, either through motherhood or by our interactions in career and life, we eventually realize the need to draw inward and tend to ourselves through self-care and healing practices. We begin to tend to our own inner flame. The Medicine Bag is our access point for healing and resiliency resources.

Associated Lifecycle Stage: Mid-30s-40s.

Associated Moon Cycle Phase: Waning Gibbous Moon.

Associated Season: Harvest (Beginning Autumn Equinox). Harvesting the medicines.

Associated Womb Cycle Phase: Luteal Part 1. The feel-good rise in progesterone and estrogen. Harvest of the womb medicines.

Associated Phase in Cosmological Cycle: Planetary Evolution and differentiation of Living organisms--many medicines, Relations, and connections.

Associated Gifts: The Medicine Bag and developing self-care, resiliency, and healing skills.

The Medicine Bag: Resourcing for a Resilient Life

This month, we are celebrating the Lifecycle Archetype of The Healer, who is embodied and experienced in the early Autumn during Harvest. She represents the Luteal Phase Part 1 of the menstrual cycle and the harvesting of summer's ripe nourishment. The Healer holds the wisdom of the Medicine Bag, her secret stash of healing tools and resources. The magical thing about this Medicine Bag is that it is bottomless and holds an infinite number of medicines from which we can pull from. When we connect with the Healer, we connect with the part of ourselves that is highly resourceful and capable of self-healing by accessing our bag of resources that is always a part of us.

Resourcing is essential in the Somatic Arts because it provides us with connection and rich medicine with which we can receive strength, insight, and endurance to move through challenges, threats, and obstacles and deepen our felt sense practice. It is how we mobilize in times of danger. These can be internal or external, depending. An internal obstacle could be experiencing distressing flooding of emotion. An external obstacle could look like navigating conflict in a relationship.

When we learn the skill of resourcing, pulling from the infinitely resourced Medicine Bag, we can experience a connection to a resource that provides us with a specific frequency, message, and healing power. These are not experienced outside of ourselves but are the pathways of connection wherein we can experience unity and harmony with nature and the ways nature provides for us always. Within our own ecology, the water we drink becomes us and our cells, the breath enters us and gives us oxygen-rich nutrient that energizes our cells, and the microflora in our environment enters our bodies and lives within us symbiotically. We inhale the particulates of our spaces. Our environment is not separate from us.

We experience unity and understand that resourcing is not happening outside of us, even if we receive support and connection from an external resource. The point of the experience is connection; an internal experience/receiving support for our experiences on the human-animal walk. The realization that we are intimately a part of our habitats and ecosystems.

The Medicine Bag of the Healer is our Archetypal Place of Eternal/Infinite Resourcing

The Healer from the coloring book "The Potent Woman" by Srimati

Invitation: Somatic Felt Sense Practice

Resourcing from the Healer's Medicine Bag

Wherever you are sitting or standing, imagine sitting in the middle of a beautiful park surrounded by grass and trees. The sky is wide open and blue. From out of the trees, a mature woman dressed in a long robe walks toward you. She holds a simple brown bag in her hand and gives it to you. She prompts you to look into the bag. You open the bag and look inside it. The bag goes on into infinity. She tells you that whenever you need a resource, you can get one from this bag. If you find a resource, you can also add it to this bag and take it out whenever you need it.

Open your eyes. Look around your environment in all corners of the room or space. Notice if there is anything in here that brings you comfort or peace. It could be the presence of a tree or safe person, the sound of birds chirping, or something visually comforting. Place your attention here and feel the sensations of your body. See if you can expand into a felt sense of connection with this person, place, or thing. Are any pleasant sensations present? If it feels safe and good, give yourself a hug and say, "I am safe. It is safe to experience connection in my body." Imagine taking this experience and placing it into your medicine bag.

Any time you want to experience this sensation, you can pull this resource out of the bag.