Vodou 401: Immunization and Growth
For the sake of metaphor, let us imagine the soul as a ball of light. The elements of the soul are all there—the ball is made of many parts—in various states. Some elements are smooth. Some are craggy. Some are ripped or rough around the edges. The ball is dirty, it has various things on the outside which keep it from shining the way a ball of light might.
If what you’re picturing starts to resemble something that should be in a 3D rendering program, you’re imagining it correctly.
The healing and growth that is so often discussed in this series is the process of cleaning that ball off and smoothing out the elements that are not smooth. We remove the things which are not a part of the ball, and we work on the elements of the ball which are not yet integrated and working well in the ball. This is a multi-lifetime process, but it has benefits.
What we’re doing is making it harder for anything that doesn’t belong with the ball to stick to it.
Negative entities, trauma, every sort of problem—things happen, in the course of living. The question is what effect those things have. For people who have not done healing and elevation work, all the various ‘jagged’ things about their soul provide places for those things to linger. Where, for instance, we have trauma about our mothers, that is a place where negative entities can attach themselves to us, but also a place where the things which are of yet unhealed can reoccur. Literally, the soul picks up ‘dirt’ in the same place it has dirt, or the soul picks up dirt in a place where it is torn.
Healing and elevation work immunize the soul. They make it difficult for negative entities to find a place to attach, they make it difficult for traumatic events to cause additional trauma (or, for that matter, to linger for years being painful.) This work takes for granted that the unpleasant bits of life will find a way to happen, that it is impossible to go through life and not experience negative events, painful things, or otherwise not to be having a pleasant time. It asks the question: if we can’t always prevent ‘bad’ things from happening, how can we get through them without it being too awful?
We do our best to avoid problems, which gets easier when we are more healed and have done elevation work, but when we do encounter problems, the lack of those uneven, torn, or craggy areas means that we are less likely to have lingering emotional side effects like misery and less likely to repeat the actions which may have contributed to the problem. It is an attempt to make suffering as brief as possible by refusing to ignore it, refusing to compensate for it, and instead doing whatever is necessary to ensure that while today might suck, tomorrow does not have to.
That ball, when it is smoothed out, does not get dirty in the same way ever again. It rolls more and more easily through whatever is happening. The healing and elevation work is retained, life after life. It is, in fact, one of the only things to be retained between lives—though the consciousness is not aware of such things.
An acceptance of the inevitability of suffering is, to my mind, one of the kindest things about vodou, philosophically. It is one of the most hopeful qualities of vodou.
