Healing Happens

Being a healer is the easiest job in the world, but try telling that to my ego.

Recently, I have been examining the nature of healing, since that seems to be what my life is about. Initially, it was just about healing myself. Recovering from a bruised and broken childhood, I was a very angry teenager hood and then had a very, um, wild foray into my twenties – I have plenty of physical, mental and spiritual “grist for the mill”, as one of my teachers likes to say.

I started to feel the call to help other people in their own healing work early into that wild time in my twenties. I wasn’t even sure what healing was, really, but I knew I wanted to help people do it. At first, I wanted to be a western medical doctor. Then, I thought I would do better as a naturopath. I started school for naturopathic medicine, and quickly realized that I was not interested in the stress, debt and generally toxic culture that I was encountering. Next, I tried yoga teacher training, and that felt like a great fit. I knew that was what I wanted to do. Until I realized that I wanted to be an energy worker and a psychic….

Which leads me to where I am today.

In all of these various iterations, the basic idea, the basic thread, has remained the same; I want to help people heal.

Like I said, initially I didn’t even know what healing was. Honestly, I still don’t fully comprehend it, but new ways to view the process of healing are constantly being revealed to me.

First and foremost, I know that healing is not the same as curing, or fixing (although often an issue will resolve once healing has occurred). Healing comes from the Greek work, Hoiutus, which means “to make whole again”.

When we are depressed, anxious, sick, injured, traumatized, etc., we are out of alignment with what my favorite singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom calls “the joy of life.”

You see, the heartbeat of the Universe has a natural joy in its’ rhythm. The Ultimate State of all things is perfection, completion, wholeness. Inside of this there is great joy that understands and embodies and yet transcends the pain and suffering that we experience in this life. Coming into alignment with this joy, this wholeness, is the very definition of healing (at least as I am currently understanding it).

I also know that healing is something that happens when the conditions are right.

As someone who could identify as a “healer”, I do find that term a little unnerving. As if I could heal anybody!

I don’t’ heal anybody. I don’t know how. I would go so far as to say that nobody heals anybody. Ever. (I would be wary of anyone who tires to tell you differently.)

All I can do, all anyone can do, is to create the conditions that allow the natural process of healing to occur.

Healing is just what happens. It is what life does. It is what the Universe does. It is what Nature does.

It happens all of the time. Think of the surgeon who sews torn tendons and muscles back together. The surgeon creates the conditions that allow the tendons and muscles to cellularly reproduce and knit themselves back together. There is NO WAY said surgeon actually understands how to put broken body parts back together. The surgeon just creates the conditions for the healing to happen, and then…something else. A miracle.

Miracles happen all of the time. Tendons grow back together. When the conditions are right, healing happens.

I sometimes feel like, as a “healer”, I have to make something happen. Like I have to figure out heal myself, or heal someone else. And then I feel small, I feel powerless, I feel like an imposture, because I don’t really know how to do that.

This is just my ego trying to be God. This is the part of me that gets confused about the Nature of Reality and mistakenly thinks that I can control and fix my way through life. This is the part of me that thinks everything is somehow my responsibility.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

My actual job as a “healer”, if you want to call it that, is simply to create the conditions in which the energy, intelligence, life force, that is so much bigger than me, can do its thing. These conditions are not rocket science. They include things like presence, space and time, unconditional friendliness and intention.

I create the conditions and then something bigger than me does something that I can’t fully comprehend. Whether it’s a yoga class, a workshop or a one-one-one session, it’s all the same thing; My job is simply to hold the crucible in which the miracle unfolds.

I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity.