The Changing Role of the Healing Professional
With vast changes roiling society and the expanding role of AI, the role and expectations of the healing professional in society will undergo a slow-moving-yet-profound change in the coming years. These changes aren’t to be feared, but they are inviting adaptation, innovation, ingenuity, a bit of pluck & rebelliousness. Coaches, therapists, and healing professionals can get ahead of the curve by orienting ourselves to the coming changes ahead of time. Ultimately and years from today, the way we train and educate healing professionals will look quite different than the way it does today, but know that the institutions will go last, be the slowest to adapt, and have a vested interest in keeping us conditioned in the ways that allow them to maintain their authority and position in society.
That said, we cannot allow corporate and political self-interested resistance to progress or change limit our freedom in offering new, creative - and often more effective - ways to serve.
Remember that power only lies in something or someone to the extent the majority of us agree to obey — we can give up, give in, grow complacent or complain about the walls, or we can simply put on our work boots and climb over them, go the long way around, or tunnel underground… and, trust me, we will do all of those things.
Instead of looking to institutions, academia and authorities for direction, leadership, and permission, I invite you to look to what real people are actually seeking and needing from us right now… and begin creating from there. Nevermind if it feels too simple, or plain. Nevermind if people think you’re a bit out there. Don’t seek attention for what you’re building - keep your attention on the work - nourish the work - and let that work steadily grow and speak for itself.
As it has always been for all time, the best ideas and most innovative solutions will not come from the conditioned mind, they will come from the fringe… the mutation… the divergent… the disruptions of the norm.
As a society, we are being faced with a challenge right now: Do we force people to go backward toward an imagined, artificial narrative via threat, force, gatekeeping, censorship, intimidation, silencing alternative voices and fear tropes? Or do we actually center the real, lived needs of people’s reality, make that central to the conversation, and build new frameworks & practices to support that?
As one of the many earth medicine guides and educators who had their presence on Instagram censored and silenced by Meta recently, I’m well aware there are great forces of power, money and control who do not want people to know that true, lasting, effective healing is possible outside of pills, the pharmaceutical industry-backed scientific & academic institutions, regulatory bodies, and heath insurance capture. Just as two thousand years ago the church, the kings and priests did not want you to know that your connection to the divine, your relationship to God(dess), and your spirituality could live outside of their control as well.
The future of healing for us looks very different than the present. I’ve been listening intently to folks over the last thirty years, and these are the shifts I’ve been seeing - quietly, inevitably - coming to life and reawakening in all of us, all across the world. While the transformation won’t be immediately apparent or felt (and - dear god/dess - the path through will be an excruciating denouement) we can begin looking ahead now and re-orienting our practices, models and systems today to ease and embrace the transition.
1 - Wisdom, Knowledge, Embodied Experience will be everything. Human education will ultimately move from the externally-oriented memorizing of facts and accruing information to lived, felt and experienced embodiment practices, wisdom & knowledge. Rarely have I ever witnessed someone heal from “knowing more.” With AI, information is going to become very cheap and freely accessible - from the comfort of home, people will be able to speak their symptoms into their phone and, within seconds, get a more accurate diagnosis than most humans could possibly give. Professions that are based on gate-kept information or fact-providing will give way to a different kind of knowledge: Wisdom. We will remember the power of our lineage… wisdom traditions… medicine keeping… learning through story-telling and sharing. We will remember how to heal through dreams, plants, nature, sunlight, fungi, sound, the elements, dance, energy, emotional intellect, intuition, prayer and the body.
2 - Telling people what to do will be replaced by SEEING people for their individuality and guiding from that place. If you listen - really listen - to many health professionals, they are often talking to themselves and their own life situation rather than the client in front of them; all of us - to varying extents - are coloured by our own perception of the world. But in a future where individuality reigns, our role as health professionals is to SEE our client’s uniqueness and offer clear guidance that is unique to them versus doling out standardized advice, methods and uniform instructions.
3 - Authenticity & Alignment in a healer, guide, coach and therapist will be paramount. In the present paradigm, people can get away with saying one thing while doing another entirely. How many people have you run across who are wearing a spiritual name & costume, writing books on spirituality, podcasting about health & well-being… only to find that in real life they cheat, lie, leverage, mock, gossip, copy & use others, and just aren’t really swell people? It’s commonplace now, but in the future: it won’t be.
A few weeks ago I was messaging with my colleague, energy healer & intuitive channel Missy Toy Ozeas, and she casually mentioned her gifts are predicated on her always telling the truth. Interestingly, I was given the same exact, precise instructions from my guide as well… that an honoring of truth - always - was one of the prerequisites for the immense gifts she promised. That was the deal - truth-telling was a non-negotiable part of the bargain. Today I - literally - live on an island named Vero, or “Truth.” As I look around at my colleagues and fellow guides I most admire, their commitment to a life of truth - in ALL areas of life, and especially when no one is watching - is what sets them apart and, I think, is one of the necessary factors why they are exceptional at what they do.
4 - In the future - in generations to come - the letters behind your name will matter less and less to the people you serve. All-in, I’ve worked with 30K+ people over my three decade career, probably more. If I stop to think about how many of those people asked me what college I went to or what my degree was in, it’s a teeny tiny handful. And that tiny handful who cared to ask usually had a lot of letters behind their own name. 😂
Going forward, what our clients most care about is: Does this person genuinely care about me? Will they put my best interests first? Do they possess deep experience + excellence in what they do? Can they set themselves aside enough to really see and listen to me? Have they gotten excellent results with other people? Have I grown & healed since working with them? Has life gotten significantly better since I crossed paths with them?
I’ve worked with highly lauded psychotherapists with Ivy League PhDs, innumerable academic honors and awards who have also been among the most unstable, ill-prepared to hold space for another, unaware people I’ve ever come across. I’ve also worked with 20-something massage therapists with preternaturally wise, gifted, intuitive, old souls more capable of holding space for healing than the most academically accomplished psychiatrist.
In the future, a healer’s strength will be determined by their own level of personal development, capacity, wisdom, knowledge & maturity - not academic letters, elite titles or special robes. Testimonials and an authentic, living body of work, strong results & relationships will be far more important than a string of MISY-PhD-LCSWIIII-PsYD-III or institutional affiliations. As healers, we must learn to LIVE the work, not just wear the letters.
5 - A Return to the Body - In the modern era, health and well-being - especially mental health - has been centered around the mind… manipulating our brains with pills, cognitive training and mentally-focused talk therapy. The body has been an afterthought, but it has not always been that way; in many indigenous and ancient cultures the body was a vessel for healing and connection to the divine, and many healing traditions centered the body’s health, purification, vibrancy and suppleness as a measure of our health and well-being. I’ve witnessed in my own somatic practices over many years, we can ‘get to places’ that need healing through the body that we cannot access through talking alone — regular bodywork is a potent combination with earth medicine practice in moving heavy energy, fear and trauma out of the body.
In the future, we’ll remember and again learn to address the health & healing of our clients with mind and mindset, yes, but also the physical body, spirit and soul within.
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One of the reasons I love the term and title “Guide” is that it is undefined/being defined presently, real-time, by us. It gives us room as healing professionals to stretch, to redefine, to expand our role. So many of the experiences that people move through on their healing path and earth medicine journey simply don’t have English words to quite capture or articulate it, and this is true for the art of accompanying and witnessing people on this journey as well.
With a new vision and approach comes the need for a new language to put words, context and containers on how we hold space for the health of our world and give voice to a fresh paradigm in human healing.
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