Kip Roseman
A Shamanic Exploration of the Healing Power of Stones
THE SUN BROKE THE CLOUDS AROUND 10:30 A.M. on August 24, 1987, as a late model white VW convertible bug lumbered across the landscape near Salinas, California. Kip Roseman’s journey back to Los Angeles the day after his eighteen birthday celebration weekend with the Grateful Dead, Santana and David Lindley at Angel’s Camp culminated in a near-fatal crash that accelerated the trajectory of a young life into a into a shamanic healing vortex.
Although his two sisters emerged uninjured from the twisted wreck, Roseman wasn’t so lucky…at least it didn’t seem so at the time. Even before the crash, he was physically, emotionally and psychically vulnerable, susceptible to unseen invaders, the result of a recalcitrant insomnia perpetuated by a relentless energetic assault that was almost impossible to treat medically – because it wasn’t a medical condition. It was a spiritual condition.
“My journey started at the inception of my first memories. They were lucid dreams, shapeshifting during family meals, spirits coming through the walls trying to speak to me, transdimensional experiences. I was in the crib…babbling…trying to in some way communicate to these beings,” he remembers.
Searching for a way to survive, he asked a friend for assistance who gave him a stone: a black tourmaline known for its ability to ground out dark or negative energies. Within a day, the disturbing activity Roseman experienced was reduced by ninety-five percent. Without the external distractions circumventing his process, he began to heal himself and his traumatized nervous system. Shortly after, his journey led him to a Navaho Shaman.
“He worked with me, essentially saying he could ‘put a lock on this door, but you need to find a teacher to study with. You have gifts that come with many challenges. You need to sort it out. That’s your work. If you don’t get a hold of it you’ll be plagued by these forces for your entire life. This is your spiritual crisis…your initiation if you will,’” he remembers.
That moment of clarity inspired Roseman to seriously assume the pursuit of finding teachers and practices to engage in his own personal healing journey. His relationship to the stones was the first pebble in an avalanche that would become an integral part of his healing methodology. His study of Chinese Medicine while he was developing his experiential understanding, and ultimately his expertise in the shamanic application of stone healing culminated in a uniquely effective marriage of modalities.
As he describes it, “I’m an acupuncturist. I work with stones in my practice…to help facilitate a healing response in the treatments.” His words understate the effects of his medicine.
Since he spent the first fifteen years of his life in Asia, his fascination with the culture and affinity for healing made his decision to pursue acupuncture and Chinese Medicine a natural passage. Shamanism was the component that brought it all together.
“Shamanism is about engaging in a relationship with beings; it can be the energetic aspect of a stone and the resonances it brings in, it can be the spirits of animals, and it can be about activating relationships with plants and the sentience within the plants,” he says.
He speaks of the power of using stones along with needles: “When you’re in a healing response in an acupuncture setting, when your nervous system is relaxed, then energy is flowing harmoniously through the body and the hemispheres of the brain are being harmonized, now you’re in a perfect receptive state to actually engage in the resonances of the mineral kingdom. Because our bodies are made up of mineral substances, if you use specific mineral compositions that are available in nature, it can help you to actually bring about a harmonious engagement of whatever imbalance you have into alignment with whatever the mineral kingdom has in store for you.”
He incorporates shamanism “to engage in the resonances of the specific stones, to use for journeying or healing purposes, to bring in specific energies to help reorganize or calibrate a healing response in a person; and to ground out or transmute energy.”
The process of engaging with the stones is similar to the process he uses to engage in plant medicine. “Chinese herbal medicine focuses on understanding the ways in which the systems in the body have fallen into a pattern of compensatory mechanisms, thereby going into levels of balance and imbalance. In an herbal formula, you think about the synergy of herbs that are an antidote to whatever that imbalance is; you’ll have a chief herb perhaps, adjunctive herbs, envoys, helper herbs or medicine-horse herbs.”
The shamanic stone-needle combination comes in particularly handy when it comes to the combination of energetic and physical issues. “A traumatic psycho-emotional experience, such as the death of a loved one or a challenging time emotionally, may create energetic changes in the body that over time can, depending on the severity, create chemical changes in the body. So you might actually have a pathway into disease being built from just having stress or having an emotional trauma. I’ve seen in my practice a woman who developed cirrhosis of the liver who never used alcohol or drugs. Instead it was because of so much stress over time that her liver was actually starting to fail. When you start seeing an energetic path being built into a stress response that’s actually buckling an organ on a biochemical level, you understand this person has an organ disease. But is that disease from a biochemical invasion or toxicity, a viral invasion or is it just from an energetic constringent or pathway?”
He chooses which stones to use through a process similar to choosing which of the 400 herbs in his pharmacy he has a deep resonance with. The stones give him information. “I have specific stones that are workhorses if you will, that can get a lot done. An example is Tibetan quartz. The Tibetan black quartz is one of those stones that are very beneficial for people at this time because it’s grounding and can clear negative energies. At the same time it opens your system to be receptive to higher vibrational patterns either from your inner meditation practice or from other stones. People today who are stressed and overworked and trying to bring in higher vibrational frequencies into their system, especially if they’re engaging in meditative processes, will benefit from a stone that will help ground that process deeper into the system.”
Another group of stones that are helpful for the stages we as humans are going through right now are the tourmalines. As Roseman says, “Green tourmaline opens up the physical and energetic heart space and allows our emotional tensions and our emotional being to be processed through the heart. Most of the metaphysical community for many years was focused on or searching in the higher realms. My understanding is that the evolutionary pathways right now in the world are accelerating so fast that we no longer need to journey out to the heavens, the heavens are coming to us a hundred miles an hour. It’s really important for us to be grounded and receptive in that process. It can be overwhelming to transmute and transform those energies and keep your heart space open to the best of your ability and be authentic while coming from a place of lovingkindness despite all the difficulties and challenges that were going through right now. Green tourmaline is an excellent stone to facilitate that.”
It can be overwhelming to transmute and transform energies and keep your heart space open to the best of your ability and be authentic while coming from a place of lovingkindness despite all the difficulties and challenges that were going through right now.
“Shamanically, it’s more important about how you engage in the resonance of an item. Even if it’s a feather or a plant that you ingest as medicine the way some indigenous cultures do, or a stone you’re working with…it’s a matter of coming to terms with your own energy system experientially and then reaching out and learning the language of stones, plants or of those beings. I started engaging with the stones, feeling each stone one at a time. Some things I was very sensitive to, and some I didn’t resonate with at all. It was a matter of learning from the stones.”
Kip Roseman has been studying and practicing Chinese Medicine for 15 years. He works from his Clinic in Bend, Oregon where he reaches out to people who are doing deeper work, whether it’s through meditation or people who are engaged in a shamanic practice. The Roseman Clinic: rosemanclinic.com.
Sam Slovick is a journalist/documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He is a regular contributor to LA Yoga, LA Weekly and other publications. Blog: samslovick.com; Site:thecurelist.com<
By Sam Slovick
Award-winning journalist, documentary director and long-term LA Yoga contributor Sam Slovick is the director, writer and producer of the Radicalized documentary, currently working on the Kirtan Road Dogs documentary.