felt the brief touch of her fingers on his arm. His skin tingled pleasantly. He was sorry it was such brief contact. Ellie’s eyes held such compassion for him and he sensed her sincerity. “You’d use your drum and do what?”
Rising, Ellie gestured for him to follow her. “Come on, I’ll show you my healing room.”
Highly curious, Mac followed her through her home. Down a hall, she opened the first door on the right. Mac stopped short, amazed. On the floor was a dark brown buffalo robe. A small table held a number of Native American items, including sage, a long brown-and-white feather and a pottery bowl that held ashes. More than anything, Mac was aware of the feeling in the room. At first, he pooh-poohed it, but as he moved toward the center of the room, an incredible sense of tranquility blanketed him.
Ellie quietly shut the door and moved to his side. She saw disbelief warring with what his senses were picking up about the room’s energy. She leaned down and retrieved a drum covered with elk hide. A butterfly was painted on it. “This is the drum I use when I want to put myself into the right-brain state.” She took the drumstick and began to softly hit the instrument.
Mac felt the deep, low-throated sound coming from the circular drum that Ellie held. At first, he consciously stopped himself from feeling anything, but as the steady, monotonous beat filled the room, he sensed something. And he saw a change in Ellie’s eyes; they became less sharp, seemed to lose their focus.
With a small laugh, Ellie stopped beating the drum and set it back down against the wall. “If I keep playing it, I’ll go into an altered state, and I don’t want to.”
Shoving his hands in his pocket, he turned and looked around the rest of the room. There was a picture on the wall, and he went over to it. “Who are these people?”
Ellie touched the dark frame of the picture. “The woman in the middle is my mother, the other woman is my sister Diana, and that’s my father.”
The woman in the middle had fierce black eyes; she wore her gray hair in braids, but otherwise bore an uncanny resemblance to Ellie. Mac studied her face for a long time. Ellie’s sister looked more like her father, with lighter skin, dark brown hair and brown eyes. The women were wearing some kind of ceremonial clothes; the father was in a suit, looking proud. All of them were smiling.
“This photo was taken on the day I got married,” Ellie said reminiscently. “I had convinced my husband to let us get married on the reservation, with my mother performing the ceremony.” She sighed. “Actually, it was a compromise. Brian let my mother marry us, but then he demanded that a ‘real’ minister marry us off the reservation.”
Mac felt Ellie’s sadness. “He didn’t believe in your mother’s authority on the reservation?” Mac gazed down at her and saw the pain in her eyes.
“No. Actually,” Ellie admitted, “that’s why we eventually divorced. Brian couldn’t accept my culture, what I do, the fact that I’m a shamaness and my life is devoted to the healing arts.”
“So the women of your family are doctors on the reservation?”
Her mouth twitched. “We are called medicine people or healers. I let the medical doctors call themselves doctors. And there’s a big difference between a healer and a doctor.”
“Such as?” Mac took his hands out of his pockets.
“A healer, where I come from, is interested in the whole person, Mac. Modern doctors treat only a single piece or part, and address only the disease—not the issues that go into that state of imbalance. Healers take into account all the things about a person’s life that may make them ill. There’s a lot of common sense and practicality that comes into play, too.”
Ellie pointed to the buffalo rug. “Let’s take off our shoes and sit on down, shall we?”
Mac respected her request and placed his tennis shoes against the wall. He sat down cross-legged opposite Ellie. The robe was thick and silky feeling.
Ellie rested her arms on her crossed legs. “I get people from all walks of life who have heard about me word-of-mouth. I journey for my clients in one of two ways, Mac. If they come and see me in person, we both lie down here on the robe together, side by side. I place my left hand over my client’s right. I have a cassette of my drum being beaten, so I turn that on.” She pointed to a small cassette player in the corner of the room. “I close my eyes and allow the drumbeat to make it easy for me to switch to the right brain, and then I move into the fourth dimension.”
“Can you feel it happen?”
“Sure. I’m consciously triggering the switch. It’s important to know that a shaman is trained to turn it on and off at will, Mac. If we don’t, then we’re in big trouble. Let me give you an example. One of my clients—to protect the confidentiality of the healing, I’ll call her Susan—was very sick. She had a major trauma in her past. So we lay down here together with the drum beating in the background. I asked my chief guide, who is a great blue heron, if I had permission to journey for Susan, and I was told yes. I flew on the back of my heron and we went down into what is known as the dark world, which is contained within Mother Earth. I was brought to a house and taken into a room. I saw Susan as a little five-year-old and I saw this man grab her.” Ellie grimaced. “I won’t share all the terrible details, but what I did see was Susan being sexually molested.”
Mac felt Ellie’s emotional reaction to the scene. “You actually saw it?”
“Yes. You see, everything we’ve experienced in life is recorded, like film in the fourth dimension. My guide took me back to the time when Susan was emotionally traumatized, where she lost a huge piece of herself after being abused that way.”
“What did you do?”
“I stopped the man from molesting her, separated them and asked Susan’s little girl if she wanted to come home with me, back to the present Susan. She said yes, so I picked her up and we both rode back on my spirit guide.”
Mac shook his head. “This sounds really weird, you know that?”
“Yes, I do. But before you judge me or the journey, wait until I tell you the outcome.”
“Okay…”
“I brought back Susan’s five-year-old, which really was a traumatic symbol of what had happened to her.” Ellie patted the robe as she got to her knees. “Here, lie down here for a moment and I’ll show you what I did, what I do to all my clients who want soul recovery.”
Mac laid down on his back, his arms at his side. Ellie knelt by his left arm; she cupped her hands over his chest and lightly touched the region over his heart.
“A shaman will ‘blow’ the piece back into the person’s heart and then sit the client up and blow the piece back into the top of his head.” She leaned over Mac and pretended to blow into the circle of her cupped hands, which lay across his heart. Then she placed her hand beneath his neck and helped him sit up. Getting to her feet, she moved to his shoulder and cupped her hands once again, this time on the top of his head. Again she pretended to blow a piece into him. That done, she went to the table, where she picked up a rattle.
“Then I shake this rattle and move it around you four times.” Ellie shook the rattle gently around Mac, noting his doubting expression. “You see, everything is living. This rattle is made out of a gourd, so it’s alive. There are small pebbles gathered
