Swimming with Elephants: My Unexpected Pilgrimage from Physician to Healer

by Sarah Bamford Seidelmann

  Grandmother Lee approached me and said: “Sarah, I am so proud of you for writing these books and doing the work you are doing. I was a lot like you!” At this point, not wanting to wake Mark with my crying, I snuck out of bed, still in a sort of twilight state, and crept into my healing room. I curled up on the floor next to my altar under a blanket and shut my eyes, willing myself back into the dream. My grandmother returned immediately: “Sarah, I struggled so much and all I ever wanted to do was relieve suffering, just like you! I saw so much pain and I could feel it, just as you can. Keep going! You are doing good work!”

  All I could do was say thank you over and over through my tears. Her dream visit came at a time when I desperately needed this boost—this encouragement from a kindred spirit to keep working on my writing and to stay the course. I crawled back into bed, spent from crying and so grateful.

  CHAPTER 19

  Everything Is Alive

  Surely it is cruel to cut down a very fine tree! Each dull, dead thud of the axe hurts the little green fairy that lives in its heart

  Beatrix Potter, The Fairy Caravan

  I am sitting in a beautiful spot on a hillside in rural California at another Foundation for Shamanic Studies workshop. There is an enormous boulder beside me covered in soft, thick, green moss. Through an exercise, I am able to open up a conversation with it—a portal of communication with this stone. It has a lot to say. It isn't speaking out loud, however; instead, I can hear its voice through my heart. I begin by asking it what it has to teach me. Its response is completely surprising.

  “You should have seen the Gold Rush and all of the horrible things people did to each other in their lust for money. Just awful. I'm so happy here in this place; it's so beautiful. If there is one thing we stones are, it is patient.” The stone laughs, then asks: “Can you remove all the moss covering me? I love it when I can feel the warm rays of the sun on me.”

  I oblige the jolly stone. It laughs and carries on the whole time I am scraping off the moss with another stone. It is full of advice for me as well: “Love is a give-and-take—it's all about giving and receiving,” suggesting that love is inherently reciprocal. And it offers career advice: “You could help people with their homes and the objects in them. You have a talent for that. It could be healing.”

  After three hours together, it is time for me to leave and we say our goodbyes. As I walk away, I have a sudden deeper realization that the world is not the way I once thought it was.

  On the trail back to my room, returning from my new stone friend, I see the thousands of stones along the path—both large and small–and I am overwhelmed by the need to be polite. Hello, hello, hello! Good evening! Hope you are well. Oh, sorry; didn't mean to step on you so hard. And suddenly I truly know in my heart what I have been trying to comprehend in my mind—–that everything that is, is alive. But how, I wonder, can I move through the world now that I know this?

  As I walk along, surrounded by my new friends, I recall the words of Madeleine L'Engle in her book A Wrinkle in Time: “I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”

  When I returned home later that week, I found that it wasn't just the stones that were alive; everything in my house was alive as well. How could I honor all of it and see what it needed or wanted? How could I get to know and honor each item? I began to understand how important it was to release and thank objects that no longer served me, so they could feel wanted by and useful to someone else, or so they could move forward in their own evolution to be recycled into something new.

  I began to let go of even more of my possessions—things that had stopped giving me delight, things that felt heavy when I looked at them. A few T-shirts, suits, full-length ball gowns, and stacks and stacks of self-help books that I'd joyfully plowed through in the years preceding my sabbatical.

  As I divested myself of clutter, I thanked each item for its service and then blessed it as I released it—to Goodwill, to the recycling bin, to the garbage, to a friend. Thank you. May you find a good home! Blessings! As I let go of more and more layers, I felt better and better. I found that I could appreciate and engage with the things that remained. Thank you, wonderful salad bowl! I'm grateful for you, beloved grey sweater jacket!

  A week passed. It was November and, while idling at a stoplight downtown, I saw an enormous evergreen tree on a flatbed truck bound for our downtown square for the holidays. I felt the presence of this tree so strongly. It was as if I were seeing a dear friend rolling down the highway in an open casket. Why do we do that? Why do we destroy or sacrifice trees like that for our own celebration? Then I softened, wondering if perhaps it was an honor to be placed there to be admired. Maybe the tree wanted this as well. It was so confusing. I wept in my car, feeling like a stranger in my own city. It felt as if I knew too much—and yet not enough.

  And I had yet another lesson to learn about this totally alive world I had discovered. I had to learn about the leaving of it. And the teaching came from an unexpected source

  Our eleven-year-old pug Buttercup's tongue seemed to be hanging out more than usual. At first, we thought it was just something adorable about pugs as they age, but then we started to notice a growth on Buttercup's lip that extended under her tongue and began to erode her soft palate. She didn't seem to be in any pain—or if she was, she wasn't letting on. The vet, however, told us she was dying. I felt wracked with angst, wondering how I could help her. If her condition became more painful, how could we relieve her suffering?

  A few days later, I was gifted with a dream. Buttercup was approaching a gigantic birth canal and womb. In a wacky, weird dream way, it was my womb, too. And the only way I could help her get back up into the womb was to relax. She was making her way (backward) up this canal. When she finally got back into the womb, she was filled (as was I) with a kind of ecstasy that permeated every single cell. Pure bliss. A holy climax of sorts.

  The message to me: Buttercup doesn't need my help to die. She knows very well how to make this journey. In fact, this return trip will bring her so much joy and pleasure that it will be nothing short of amazing. I had it all wrong. Death is nothing but a joyful return. To help her, I just needed to relax. I scribbled in my journal: “Return to the womb or death is instinctual and brings great joy; it's a journey we must take alone. It brings much joy if we allow it.”

  I relaxed around Buttercup. I slowed down. When we went on our walks, I could see how she, too, wanted to move more slowly. There was an old evergreen at the trailhead near our home where Butter always loved to pause, sometimes for what seemed like an inordinately long time. Now she lingered even longer. As she grew closer to death, it seemed that her pleasure in this world grew deeper and deeper. She sniffed and examined everything with great longing, curiosity, and patience. She seemed to be giving me instruction on how to live—to pay rapt attention and to soak it all in.

  CHAPTER 20

  Soul Retrieval

  Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

  José Saramago, Blindness

  In near darkness, I'm lying on a thin yoga mat on a wood floor, my eyes covered by a soft wool scarf. A fellow shamanic student who is also a fellow physician is endeavoring, with the help of his spirit guides, to find my lost soul parts so they can be returned to me. We're lying parallel to each other, surrounded by other pairs of student healers. The drumming carries him away while I lie present and curious. What could have been lost?

  I suddenly notice that he's on his knees hovering over me. He cups his hands together and places them over my heart. I sense a strange feeling like electricity or a gentle forcefield as his hands connect to my chest. Using his breath as a delivery device, he blows the found parts of my soul back into me. As he does, I feel an expanding sense of lightness and warmth that begins in my chest and spreads outward. The drumming rolls to a close and I slowly sit up.

  He quietly shares in
a rumbly whisper that my first missing soul part appeared to him as a babushka doll—those nested, hand-painted Russian dolls also known as matryoshkas. And there was a second soul piece that appeared as a leather-bound journal with a bear on its cover that was sitting on a desk.

  Our instructor indicates that it is for me to decipher why those parts of my soul had fled or what they represented—with my spirits’ help. So I embark on a shamanic journey that afternoon to find out what those parts of my soul represent so I can welcome them back. I travel down my familiar gravelly tunnel to meet up with Mother Bear and learn more about these returned parts. Lo and behold, these colorful dolls un-nest themselves and become marvelous, loving, dancing babushka ladies. A whole row of them dances and merrily potters about. They tell me that they are the mothering parts of me who enjoy cooking and caring for my family, being a nurturer, and bustling around the kitchen making wonderful things to eat.

  In the shamanic view of the world, our souls represent our essence, our life force. We are conceived whole, with our souls intact. As we live our lives, certain situations, traumas, encounters, or experiences may cause parts of our souls to leave us to avoid a painful experience. You may even surrender a part of your soul voluntarily, offering it to another out of love or compassion.

  Without those parts of our souls, however, we're not fully ourselves, not fully actualized. Shamanic practitioners know how to seek and retrieve these missing soul parts and ask them if they're willing to return. When soul parts return to us, more of our life force returns. According to many elder shamans, soul loss is the most widespread cause of disease on the planet.

  So the marvelous, rosy-cheeked mommas I met on my shamanic journey were sending me an important message. Maybe I'd needed to leave medicine because I longed for time to be a mother. For many years, I'd longed to nurture, love, and care for my children, and to make my house a home. My babushka soul fragment probably fled, I intuited, during medical school and residency, when I realized I'd have to forego some of those nurturing and homemaking desires if I wanted to survive as a full-time medical resident-in-training. I found it ironic that the part of my soul that appeared as babushka dolls was retrieved by a fellow physician who was an extremely masculine male, as if this archetype were the very image with which I'd attempted to align in order to thrive in medicine.

  In the weeks following that shamanic healing, I discovered a spontaneous renewed interest in cooking healthy meals for my family. I reconnected with the joy of concocting wild meals, making them up freestyle from what I found in my refrigerator and pantry—a handful of cilantro, couscous, and (why not?) some raisins. Our kids were thrilled that I was more present to nurture them with the food I made, though they weren't all thrilled with the couscous.

  But the matryoshka mommas weren't the only essential part of me that returned that day. It turned out that the leather-bound journal sitting on top of a desk represented my writer self. I reflected back and knew precisely where I had lost that part—in my freshman college literature course when I received a B+ for a paper on which I had worked diligently for weeks. My failure to get an A indicated to me that I wasn't meant to write. Now my writer self was back and that idea excited me.

  CHAPTER 21

  Sunglasses and Brass Knuckles

  What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  Mark invited me to join his group in Arizona for a long weekend of healing. For several years now, Mark had been involved with an energy-healing class. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to understand what he'd been doing with his group and to deepen our connection with each other.

  As we were preparing to leave, I asked Mark what I could expect to happen during the weekend. His response was that it was really hard to explain. I knew his group didn't do shamanic healing in the way I understood it. They didn't call upon specific loving and compassionate spirits by name, as I have learned to do. Instead, they used energy to heal, but he didn't seem able to explain what that actually meant. I understood his challenge—a lot of these experiences are difficult to put into words.

  We ate lunch at a tiny roadside diner and, as we headed back to the car, I counted dozens of vultures swirling in vortices above our heads in the thermals rising off the desert floor. Vultures are wild sanitizers, Nature's clean-up crew. I sensed a lot of healing was about to happen.

  Organ Pipe National Park, near the Mexico-Arizona border, was unlike other deserts I had seen before. The land was hilly and dotted with glorious, huge, multilimbed cacti reaching skyward. At the visitor's center, Mark and I were totally taken with the educational displays. They had wonderful natural specimens of feathers, skulls, and scat. We lost track of time. Finally, one of the organizers’ assistants came looking for us because we were two hours late. We hastily drove to the camping area and leapt out of the car to find the session already underway.

  Sitting on lawn chairs in a circle under a temporary shelter from the blistering sun was a group of a dozen adults with an average age of forty-five to fifty-five. Mark and I were embarrassed to be late, knowing that it was a sacred circle we were entering. We joined the group as quietly as possible.

  A discussion was underway in which the participants reported what had been going on in their lives over the last several months. The leader was engaging in what I immediately recognized as “brass knuckles” coaching—a form of coaching in which clients make themselves completely vulnerable and the coach focuses immediately on their greatest fears. It can feel a little like soul surgery sans anesthesia. My life-coaching mentor, Martha Beck, also calls this highly uncomfortable method of transformation the “wrecking ball” approach. I personally prefer velvet gloves.

  Soon it was Mark's turn. “Well, I feel as if I haven't gotten much clearer. I'm still working on myself and haven't made much progress. I know I still have a lot of work to do,” he said, grinning sheepishly.

  The leader, who was wearing ominous-looking mirrored aviator sunglasses, immediately launched into Mark. “That's always your story, isn't it, Mark? Nothing is happening. Right?” He smiled. Yikes! This felt cultish.

  But Mark didn't get defensive or freak out. He just looked calmly back at the leader, chuckled quietly, and said: “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Cool!” Sunglasses said, almost gleefully, as if to say: “Alrighty then. You're owning your shit. This is good news. Now let's move on to the next person.”

  Frankly, I wasn't loving this process, but it wasn't about me. And I must admit that I was feeling a little protective of Mark, because he seemed to have surrendered so completely to Sunglasses. If Mark loved personal transformation as much as it seemed he did, why hadn't he talked to me about it? Sometimes it seemed as if I hardly knew this man I'd been living with for twenty-plus years.

  Then suddenly it was my turn.

  “Well, hi. I'm Sarah,” I began, “and I'm thankful to have been invited into this circle by my husband Mark, and I'm eager to learn and participate.”

  “Cool!” Sunglasses said.

  Phew! I'd survived round one.

  After these introductions, the group worked together on each individual. Each person's healing session took from one to two hours. Sunglasses prompted the students to ask questions of whoever was in the hot seat, and guided them to send healing energies in particular ways.

  Each client selected the place in which they wanted to receive healing. One man with metastatic cancer chose an area full of dying cacti and scrubby brush. A mother-to-be chose an area that, we discovered midhealing, included a nest of owlets high up on a saguaro cactus limb. As her healing began, the owlets started to cry, which seemed to be a direct teaching about the demanding responsibilities of becoming a mother. Each place chosen seemed to hold perfect metaphors for the person who chose it.

  Finally, after a few days of this, it was time for the group to work on Mark. It was roughly midday and the sun was high. We followed him to the spot he'
d chosen—an exposed plateau. He was then instructed to lie down on a tarp spread out for protection against sharp, pointy cactus spines. Then—surprise—I was asked to lie down next to him. I reluctantly complied. The group stood above us and stared at us intently. As I squinted into the sun at the faces above us, they smiled and a few nodded their heads in apparent encouragement.

  After a long silence, Sunglasses looked out at the group: “Hey, do you guys see what I'm seeing? They're mirror images of each other. Their bodies are identical.” More people nodded.

  Now wait a minute, I thought. Mark is six foot four and I'm five foot six. He is long and lithe and I'm slightly more sturdy, like Popeye. After a bit more staring, Sunglasses said: “No offense, Sarah, and I'm not sure just how to put this, but you're not—let's just say …” And then he alluded to the fact that I'm rather flat-chested. Where was this going? Was he going for a deeper metaphor about us being mirrors for each other. I silently reminded myself that I was there for Mark and that I could simply disregard anything Sunglasses said.

  Silence fell again. The whole group continued to stare at us in the ninety-degree heat. It occurred to me that lying on the desert floor in the midday sun was probably putting us both into an altered state.

  “Tell us about what you want to heal, Mark,” Sunglasses said.

  “I'd like to work on my breathing. I just feel sometimes as if I can't breathe, as if I'm suffocating.” Mark has sleep apnea. He uses a device at night that helps, but he hates having to be plugged into it in order to sleep. He'd like to be free of the problem.