Healing

As I was observing the mosquito, I wrote:

I begin my life dependent.

In the raiment of frailty and resilience, I grow into my unfinished states.

It was a revelation when I understood that the way to live was being myself; being with the broken pieces and seeing how the light and the air touches sometimes-invisible wounds.

I am writing to address the stigma attached to the word healer. I have found it an uneasy identity. I think it’s like describing yourself as an artist in the 1950s or choosing to be primarily a mother in the 1980s. I started my healing practice in the 1990s, the time when new age was serious stuff with new age magazines filled with ‘you can trust me with your life and your money’ pictures of psychics and mediums. They tended to have hazy purple and pink auras, searing eyes and painful smiles. I held tightly to the feminist movement, to herbs and to science that I loved and ventured out into what really was mediumship. I co-owned an organic shop at the time and the ghosts would sometimes come in with the customers which was distracting.

I began to recognise healing as finding gold in the cracks rather than fixing or eliminating some problem or illness. Healing isn’t something done to us. Healing occurs because we engage in a relationship with our discomfort. We might unlock a kernel of an idea, unravel a memory, reveal an understanding, share our thoughts, our feelings. Healing can happen when we are with the disquiet, the truth we dared not listen to. It happens through how we are with the difficult things, or the moment we let go the stories that bind us. Some stories are so ingrained from our ancestors we hardly recognise their impact on us. Our burdens are indiscernible simply because we have always carried them. Healing can be subtle like a butterfly alighting on a chicory flower or invisible as when the cicada emerges from the earth in the hours we are sleeping. Sometimes we don’t know the moment that triggered the shifts in us. Other times we forget to integrate because we are caught up by social judgements or we are too mean to gift ourselves the time to walk on a lonely beach, or find a space to lie back under a tree in a park and read a novel.

Healing is ongoing because we are evolving through our lives.

I look up the word heal and find that it originates from the old English word hælp; meaning wholeness. That makes sense to me as I like to equate healing with being part of an interconnected living system. Wholeness encompasses a spiritual and physical interdependence. I tend to equate wholeness to the pūriri tree with its capacity to grow with hollows and broken pieces, and where the air finds its way through and into its materiality, reminding me that spirit is breath.

There are times I need someone to drum for me so that I may journey with support and structure. I might need the support to reveal ancestral patterns and traumas from the past that freeze me in my attendance and creative work. I need someone to help unwind my stress and tension, someone to help me release patterns that I haven’t realised. I need people to balance and question what I might be doing, and to guide me when I trip up and forget to attend to the physical. I sometimes need the insight and science of our medical system. I am part of our earth and the evolution of our planet, I am part of a great collective of people and so cannot always separate myself from what is happening around me; economies, racing time, tyranny and global pressures on our environment. These affect my wellbeing and mean that I must remember to be with my emotions, to bring a consciousness to the way my thoughts tumble and leak, to face the painful pieces in my heart as it cracks open with love or hurt.

I have called myself a flower essence practitioner and a shamanic practitioner and teacher, which describes the modalities I work in. However, I have come to a time in my life where I no longer want to skirt around this word healing, or this role that I have as a healer. From the earliest age I have always been curious and caring towards people, combined with a strong empathetic nature and a capacity to see aspects of people that seem hidden to most. My sensitivity combined with a strong imagination has often made me shy, yet I love community, and I can become animated and passionate sharing and exploring ideas, and things I love like printmaking, books, conservation, nature, gardening and cooking.

I have made mistakes in my healing practice due to a desire to give people what they want. I see so clearly the shadow here of the servant who forgets the real gift of service and how I serve. It’s through this deep long look at shadow that I have grown my ethical foundation in relationship to healing. I am afraid, too, of judgement, revenge and jealousy and when I have allowed that fear to affect my work as a healer, I have had to confront these powerful emotions towards me. There are times in my work I need to take long breaks and recalibrate, reflect before re-entering this remarkable work. And it is remarkable work, which is why I am writing about it and allowing myself to honour it.

When I do my work, I do a lot of listening. I listen to the person seeing me and to an inner receiving of the key aspects to touch into. I look at how best we work together? Do I facilitate a shamanic journey? Is this ancestral? Is there something to shift or clear or meet? What are the presences at the periphery, are they ghosts? Do they have a story? I am always at the edge of the unknown and together with the client we take a few steps into that space. We become explorers. We put in place the structures that support our work.

I have a great respect for the remedies that I have made and the blends that are a collaboration of Meggan Young and myself. They support in ways that I could never imagine. These remedies encapsulate place and the essence of plant or animal or mineral. They invite a direct relationship with nature.

The space I work in is important to me and I am grateful to the healing room that Stu Birt built on our land.

I have had many teachers on the way, here are some of them: Wayne Nicklin, Nivana, Francela Davies, Oraina Jones, Rodiyah Zwart and Shen Elderton. When I write their names, I feel a gratitude for their generosity and their personal challenges of being different and choosing to do work that called them. All the way I am learning – I feel paused with a large thank you.

Prices:

For an hour and a half session is $160

For half an hour phone session with a personal remedy blend is $100 inclusive of postage in New Zealand.

For more info on courses: https://lasaviahealing.nz/training/lasavia-foundation-waiheke/

For more info on remedies: https://lasaviahealing.nz/essences/

Contact:

For appointments

Email: leila@lasaviahealing.co.nz

Mob: 0274196805

October 24, 2022

Exploration - Gardens

October 24, 2022/ Leila Lees

My studio sits in the garden, I will sometimes get up from whatever I am engaged in; writing, drawing, carving a woodcut and wander out, attending randomly to a plant or simply looking. I spend a lot of time gazing in the garden, there is so much to take in. In the spring, particularly I go from the detail, the tender corolla of the wild carrot, to the overall sensation of buds and leaf, the scent, the colour, the exuberant growth. Everyday new discoveries; the echinacea unfolding its red hued leaves from the ground, plaintain stretching its stems long, a cylindrical spike of flowers, a breeze gently rocking them side to side. The new leaves of comfrey stretch up like fingers from the earth and have white hairs that are soft like fine fur. Textured and strong it smells of earth and wet rock. Yesterday, whilst preparing a bed, I dug up a comfrey root as carefully as I could, keeping the long roots intact. I balanced it on a cup and settled down to draw it. There is something about taking the time to draw that I feel like I can take up space. I enjoy the attendance to the curl of a tendril, to its character and to the overall rhythm. Time opens up and slips past. I get the feel of its medicine, its cohesive power, joining back together what has come apart.

Leila Lees

BUY: Into the World by Leila Lees

Into the World arose from teaching a series of workshops that are working with the Lasavia Healing Essences as a foundation of learning. As insights and understandings came through I would write and receive and sometimes record myself working around subjects like power, belief patterns, the mind and how we learn.

cover image of piripai.JPG

Piripai is natural history as prose poetry. It is a story of place, time and a subtle coming of age on the sand dunes between the river and the sea. The book is structured around twenty-six birds that inhabited Piripai, and ordered according to the time of year, beginning in spring and ending in winter. It is suffused with observation and memory, conveyed in a stripped back style that both evokes and abstracts.

For further enquiries, please contact Leila using the form below:

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