When Illness Reveals Hidden Purpose

A Divine Plan, When Illness Reveals Hidden Purpose…

In Plant Spirit Shamanism, a book by Ross Heaven and Howard G. Charing, readers learn of the strange ‘sin eaters’ of old. Sin eating was once a healing tradition of the Celtic people. According to Ross Heaven, “A sin eater would be employed by the family of a deceased person, or sometimes by the church, to eat a last meal of bread and salt from the belly of the corpse as it lay. By doing so, it was believed, the sins of the dead would be absorbed by the sin eater himself, and the deceased would have clear passage into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

In this healer-priest-medicine-man role, sin eaters provided a sinless passage into the afterlife for the departed. As one might imagine, society basically shunned these individuals as they considered them impure due to their calling. Considered healers, sin eaters lived away from their villages, in obscurity. In their isolation, sin eaters lived much closer to the mysteries of the divine.

They also had skills in medicine, spiritual doctoring, and spirit world communication-translation. In the latter, they brought messages of forgiveness, hope, and specific instructions from loved ones who had already passed into the beyond.

…To the Healing Arts of Today

Today, we call these medicine people who serve humanity through the translation, service, and knowledge of the spirit world intuitive coaches, shamans, mediums, priests, and trans-personal mental health counselors. They view healing through a psycho-social-spiritual perspective. In the earliest shamanic traditions, traumatic life events always had a spiritual cause.

However, we do not have to wait until the afterlife to gain insight into the purpose of this lifetime. We can use the process of life review to help us discover the hidden meaning of illness now.

Identifying Hidden Illness as Destiny Calling

For those of us who serve in these important roles as healers, how can we identify a client’s hidden life purpose or destiny inside an illness? We may overlook this phenomenon sometimes, but different forms of illness may sometimes be a call from spirit to live out a unique destiny.

The wounded healer may be a tired or exhausted phrase, but still worthy of mentioning as we explore the original progression of modern medicine. For example, let’s look to mythology for an ancient representation of this. Modern medicine uses the symbol of the Asclepius staff to represent healing and medicine. The original Hippocratic Oath began with the invocation,

“I swear by Apollo the Physician and by Asclepius and by Hygieia and Panacea and by all the gods …”[1]

If we go back even farther and see who influenced Asclepius, we find Chiron, the centaur. Chiron was struck in the thigh by one of Heracles’ arrows poisoned with the blood of the Hydra. He was also the master of the healing arts. Even though he had trained many students in the art of healing, he could not heal himself.

Thus, the iconography of the wounded-healer-as-teacher was born. In the respected Greek tradition of tragedy, this powerful irony leads many healers to identify with Chiron, Asclepius, and other masters of medicine who found healing as a vocation.

How to Use Illness to Find the Divine Plan in a Life Review

First, take life experience into account. We use everything we have learned in our lives up until now.

Step One: Help clients flesh out their powerful, defining moments by drawing a timeline of life events. Go through the life review on paper and draw out or use images to help the client construct their own story. Certain patterns will emerge. Look for archetypes, symbols, and universal themes in the story.

Step Two: Hold sacred space to allow clients to creatively process their experience by expressing their meaning. For example, if a client uses words to communicate freely have them type up, hand write, or tell you their full story including what purpose they discovered.

Step Three: How did illness show up? When and where on the timeline of events? Does it connect to other people or life challenges? If it was early in life with the client having limited memories about what happened, it is helpful to allow them to process the memories connected to childhood illness.

Step Four: As coaches, we may have experienced personal loss through illness. If this is the case we allow the divine in ourselves to come out and greet the client where they are, encouraging them to accept their divine purpose. This is the synergistic healing property of the spiritual counseling relationship.

Reference: Farnell, L.R., Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, Chapter 10, “The Cult of Asklepios” (pp. 234-279)