Healing the Wounded Healer

“The cure for pain is what’s in the pain…” –Rumi

Introduction
Healing the Wounded Healer is a year-long, hero/ine’s journey into the heart of darkness and the source of healing within you, in relationship with the world all around. It is designed to personally prepare you for any kind of career or lifeway involving spirituality, healing, wellness, or work in service-oriented fields.

What is a ‘wounded healer’? For many of us, our dysfunctional family dynamics and early life experiences shaped us into empathic beings who can deeply attune to the feelings and needs of others. This can be a powerful gift…and it can be a curse that drives us to help others at our own expense, while we neglect our own mental, physical, and spiritual health. This urge to help others—when purified and transformed—can be a pathway of true healing for ourselves as well as the world. If we undertake this journey, we can step into our life’s work in a way that honors our truest selves, and supports us in a sustainable life of service.

Working with the shamanic tools of the Balanzu Way, and the teachings of Jai Medina and other practitioners, you will be supported in:
• Healing personal wounds and intergenerational trauma
• Learning energywork skills and shamanic practices
• Honing your intuitive gifts
• Identifying your life’s calling
• Uncovering your authentic power
• Getting connected to your ancestors, ancestral ways, and spirit guides
• Overcoming any fears or challenges in the way of your life’s purpose, or your capacity to hold healing space for others.

During your time in the program, you will have the chance to meet and perhaps work with a number of different Balanzu Way practitioners, to gain community, and learn more about how intuitive gifts and callings show up for different people. You will also be taught to work with all these techniques and ways, but only for your own healing. Should you wish to continue on to be an apprentice or practitioner of the Balanzu Way, this program is the prerequisite for that path, or the first year of a three-year journey. See our 3-yr Shamanic Apprenticeship for more information on that.

For those who feel called to healing or energywork, or other intuitive work that is not necessarily shamanic in nature, there is a one-year supervision path available after this program, to have support while unfolding your unique gift in the world. Check out our Intuitive Arts Practitioner program.

Program Description
Healing the Wounded Healer is designed to take a small group of fellow travelers on a shared journey of learning, growth, and transformation, working with the tools and teachings of the Balanzu Way. Because right relationship (which we call “aya’a”) is such a core focus, being in community is an integral part of our work, and you will be invited to deepen relationship with each other, as well as with our wider community, to support and enrich your experience. This is part of modeling and engaging with an indigenous way of being.

Developing right relationship with sacred beings like gods, ancestors, and spirit guides is also a central part of our Way, returning us to aya’a with the spirit world. In Healing the Wounded Healer, you will work with the seven sacred beings of primarily Mesoamerican origin that guide and shape the Balanzu Way. These are real, living spirit beings who will offer you teaching, healing, and challenging experiences to help you grow. Learning to work with these deities is a meta experience that prepares students to develop right relationship with their own ancestral gods and spirits, which they’re supported to do as part of the course.

HWH also returns us to a sacred rhythm by attuning to the energies of the seasons, and seasonal movements marked by the solstices and equinoxes we celebrate. Seasonal attunement is part of listening to the natural world, and learning from those energies, as well as the teachings of the plant and animal peoples, which is part of our Way.

During the program, we support students in having a balance of shared learning with an individual path of personal healing, which is something that few programs in the healing arts attend to. Not surprisingly, wounded healers who haven’t healed their wounds create programs and institutions based in those wounded ways, and that sets up future generations of healers to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns of over-giving, burn out, unsustainable schedules, lack of boundaries, etc. that plague our fields. We’re here to do it another way.

Across the year, participants will be supported through weekly classes as well as personal shamanic healing sessions with a practitioner of the Balanzu Way. In this way, we recognize our own healing journey as foundational to our capacity to offer our unique medicine to others. We may also weave between virtual classes and in-person gatherings as makes sense for each cohort.

The style of teaching will additionally move between Western and indigenous ways of learning and knowing. This includes reading and discussion, talking stick circles sharing our deepest hearts, direct teaching from Jai, occasional written or other assignments, and engaging in trance states, energywork, prayer, and intuitive ways of gathering understanding directly from nature and spirit/s. Students will learn how to shield and protect themselves, how to do energywork and soul retrieval for self-healing, how to access past life memories and their own intuitive guidance from spirit, amongst other things.

As a person of color doing shamanic work, Jai is highly attuned to issues of cultural appropriation in this field. Spirituality and shamanic practice do not exist in a vacuum, and any white folks called to this program must be willing to learn about and more deeply engage in anti-racist internal work. This is imperative to learn how to correctly engage in practices that come from the heritage of people of color without being culturally appropriative. This is also why students are supported to connect with their own deep tribal ancestors, so they can directly access earth-based wisdom and ways that are of their own ancestral heritage.

In addition, there is an optional (but strongly encouraged) invitation for a sacred volunteer service component every month, to care for the land we work on or communities we’re in relationship with, to engage a deeper understanding of aya’a. Service is a powerful way to ground our intention to be in right relationship with the earth, and each other, and to put that into action.

The final, and perhaps most important part of this program is…mystery. The choice to step onto this path is, in many ways, a call to all the unseen world to assist you in your healing and unfolding. The Balanzu Way is a revelatory tradition, based in the bones of our ancestors, but alive to new direction and guidance that comes straight from spirit, and is fresh for us in the moment. Therefore, it’s possible that certain elements of the program may shift or change to best serve a particular individual or cohort, as we all continue to learn and grow together.

PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS
The Retreats
The program includes two residential retreats at the beginning and end of the program. These are in person camp-outs at a beautiful 35-acre sanctuary with a creek, cave, forest, and waterfalls in SW Washington. Participants who are not local will need to plan for airfare. Retreats are on the fall equinox and generally run from Thursday nights to Sunday afternoons closest to those days.

At the retreats, you’ll have time to bond with your new cohort, witness the graduation of the last cohort, and meet other apprentices or practitioners in the Balanzu Way, and our TRiBE community. We’ll hang out, share stories, eat good food, sit around a fire, and explore the space. We’ll also do ritual and spiritwork together as we weave the container that will hold us for the rest of our journey.

There will also be a solo retreat required mid-program, where each participant will be invited to spend 2-3 days alone, in silence, to deepen their presence with the Sacred, in a place of their choosing.

Finally, we will honor our time and close the entire program at the next year’s ending, where you will get to be the graduating class welcoming in next year’s group. More information will be provided about the retreat details as we go on.

Each month, participants will experience:
• Weekly classes, from 2 to 2.5 hours (depending on number of participants) 4-6 on Tuesdays, via Zoom or possibly in person if all residents are local to the Portland/Vancouver area. This will include prayer and offerings, talking circle, guided meditations or spiritwork techniques, and check-ins about learning materials, etc. One class per month will be student-lead without Jai, to have more informal time together and to strengthen relationships.
• Two 1-hr private shamanic healing/teaching sessions a month during weekdays with Jai or another practitioner of the Balanzu Way, to focus on individual healing and growth.
• Equity group: White students will meet in a monthly break-out group to work on racial and social justice and equity, confronting their own social privilege and power.
• 1-hour a month optional volunteer service component, to offer care to any land, elders, or communities students work with, to gain practice in building and maintaining right relationship.
• Engaging in weekly readings or writings to expand our experience with our learning materials, and to deepen our connection outside of class or session time.
• Other special events or opportunities as they arise. Entering the program gains participants access to our TRiBE Gatherings and community events, such as workshops, rituals etc.

This is an 10-12 hour base level monthly commitment, in addition to readings and writing, and any other relational time you may want to spend with your fellow cohort members, which we encourage.

Tuition
Tuition for the program is $2880. Participants may pay upfront, or a payment plan is offered at $240 a month for 12 months. Individual healing sessions are separate, and may run $45-165 each on sliding scale, depending on the practitioner, and students must receive 1-2 sessions a month. There is also the additional cost of the retreats, as well as for books, materials, or special events if you’d like to participate in them.

Prerequisites
There are prerequisites for the program, including reading ‘Why I’m Not a Shaman, and Neither are You’, a minimum of four healing sessions with a Balanzu Way practitioner, an interview with Jai, who will determine if you have a solid enough shielding practice to participate, and a call to the Way.

Students must also have dealt with any active addictions they have, including to marijuana, and be willing to commit to sobriety for the length of the program, defined as not engaging with a substance more than once or twice a week at most, and refraining from all psychoactive substances unless with permission from the instructor. If potential applicants are in recovery from addiction, they must have at least one year of sobriety under their belt before applying. If you have questions or concerns about this, please talk to us.

Registration
Healing the Wounded Healer will begin September 1st each year. June 21st is the deadline for applications for the 2024 year. Once your application is in, all of the prerequisites are accomplished, and you’re invited to participate, you can formally register by sending a deposit of $240 by July 1st, and the cost of the first retreat, $300, by August 1st, in addition to a personal written statement and a signed declaration of intent. If money feels like a significant barrier, read our sliding scale philosophy or ask for other flexible options. Call or text Jai at 503-683-3085 with questions, and email your finished registration materials to jaihawk@hotmail.com. Apply Here.

Dear one, we are excited about this program, and hope to take this journey with you!