Why I Have a Shamanic Understanding of "Schizophrenia"

There are a handful of people who have affected my healing journey so deeply, I would be reduced to dreadfully little without their influence. These are people who put the “sacred” in what I call sacredphrenia.

In late 2012, I met one of them in the body care section of a small health food store I worked in. Her name was Tammy. Our little interaction planted a seed that would sprout months later when she would work on me like no one has ever worked on me either before or since.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was conversing with a bona fide shaman.

This woman could plumb the depths of your soul like no one I’ve ever known. She could travel inside you and tell you things you knew deeply about yourself but could never put words to. Tammy imparted some of the most instrumental and oftentimes counterintuitive wisdom I have ever come across, much of which directly explains my recovery over the following eight years.

For months, she journeyed into the “abyss” that had developed inside me and rearranged the structures of my paranoid psychology, showing me all of the myriad ways in which I was sabotaging myself. She pattern-interrupted the perpetual cycle of tormenting thoughts and existential panic that had become permanent features of my reality. Perhaps most incredible of all, she did so without charging me a single dime.

Sometimes I wonder what would have become of me had I never run into Tammy in that health food store. Part of me fears I might still be swirling in the sinkhole of psychosis. She is the primary reason I have a shamanic understanding of “schizophrenia,” which is the framework best capable of delivering these people from the psychological hells they inhabit. No other framework can possibly do justice to the supernatural events millions have witnessed, nor can any other framework enrich our society by encouraging these people to master their spiritual capacities.

It can be said that Sacredphrenia really began when Tammy entered my life. It is for this reason that I still feel incredibly indebted to this woman. Words will forever be inadequate. That is why I decided to express my thanks through music.

I created The Welcoming of Trees with an electric guitar and a microphone at the end of 2012, right as the Mayan calendar was ending and we were entering a new astrological age. I presented this song to her as an offering of gratitude for the soul shift she produced in me, one of the greatest breakthroughs of my life. I recently remastered the original recording. Now I present it to you in the hope that it will provide inspiration as you pass through your own dark tunnel.

May you find your light.