One of the great things about living in Southern California is the hippie beach culture. Part of this culture is a subset of healers, modern-day shamans that combine multiple forms of pseudoscience, placebo healing, and spiritual frou-frou with the enticement of genuine personal enlightenment. My wife reads me the advertisements for these people she finds in a local magazine, and I can attest to the magical properties of the healing power of laughter.
These ads all seem to have the same format. First is the prominent photo of the healer/mystic/shaman, usually wearing some kind of pan-religious flowing shirt or robes, sporting an eccentric hairdo like a tightly-curled white Afro, and posing in front of a giant agave plant. This is the first sign that the healing services by this person are much more about the personality than the actual service rendered. Fair enough. The healer’s name will need to start out normal, to prevent scaring off tentative customers, while mixing in a frisson of the exotic. Something like Marie Shakti Moonfeather Krasinski. Next will be a long curriculum vitae that includes four or five acronyms behind the healer’s name, none of which you’ve ever seen before like DNS (Doctor of Neutraceutical Sciences), or others that sound like they came from a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet—level 18 Grand Wizard of Shamanic Channeling. The services offered by the healer will include chakra realignment, crystal energy enhancement, past life cleansing, Earth Mother corrective adjustment, spiritual guidance, and deep tissue galactic vibration corrections. Finally the address will turn out to be an alternative bookstore in one of the small beach towns that dot the Pacific coast, the type of place that sells hemp sandals, incense, and glass figurines of fairies riding on the backs of dragons.
Just by recalling one of these typical advertisements I already feel calmer and my chakra feels aligned. Behold, the power of the Rainbow Healer!
* Image courtesy of this site, which is chock full of the hilarious and incomprehensible stuff typical to rainbow healers. Read and be soothed/confused.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Is that part of a hairdo?? Get me some of that Neutraceutical Science–need it now!
Those ads have often helped me bliss out until I fall asleep ;D
Check these out:
http://www.visionmagazine.com/marketplace/index.html
“CHAKRA BALANCING Offering divine service of negative entity removal, extraction of devices, chakra balancing.”