The Hollow Bone is a metaphor for the conduit through which healing flows from the spirit world into the world of ordinary reality. In shamanism it is said that the healer acts as a Hollow Bone or Hollow Tube, is filled by power and then gives the power away so that others can be healed.  Born with “the gift” of intuitive perception, I have cultivated this gift through my own daily healing practice and while studying with a variety shamanic and intuitive healers from around the world. 

The process of gathering or collecting previously dispersed life-force energy is often called soul retrieval. The goal of soul retrieval is to increase the amount of life-force energy that we have available to us in the present moment by asking any part of our spirit that left our body in the past to return to us now so that we have more energy to work with. One can easily see that if our attention is constantly wandering back to a point in the past when a particular event occured we have less energy to to focus on the present moment. The more energy we have to work with, the more effectively we can interact with the world around us.

It is also clear that power to effect change is only one aspect of shamanic healing. Another important aspect of shamanic healing (and a crux of shamanism in general) is the clarity of our intent. As we purify and distill our vital essence, we cleanse away the judgments which distort our perception of events and cloud our vision. We begin to find answers to the most basic question of "how do I want to apply my newly activated life force energy to create change in the world?" This leads us directly to an inquiry of what we value and what is "right relationship".

In shamanism it is said that one must continually dust the link to intent. This means that we must clarify for ourselves exactly what is our right relationship with the world around us and summon our will to ensure that our actions are aligned with our beliefs. Some people may call this ethics or moral values but it is much deeper than an ethical code because the world is a dynamically evolving multi-dimensional template which requires a flexible response system. Static value systems quickly become useless when ambient conditions move outside of their pre-set boundary conditions. In shamanism this is called collapsing our view of the world. It is a pre-requisite to expanding our awareness and opening up our capacity for intuive healing.