Healing
1. To restore to health or soundness
2. To set right; repair
3. To restore (a person) to spiritual wholeness.
Healing comes in all shapes and sizes, seen and unseen and contrary to what we are often told by doctors, therapists, gurus, ministers and healers of all sorts – no one has a monopoly on making whole what feels broken or restoring health of body, mind or spirit to dis ease. There’s room for a smorgasbord of approaches to healing – sound healing, Chakra clearing, talk therapy, hands on healing, massage, jin sinjitsu, energy work, yoga, herbs, aroma therapy, B
ach flower remedies, western medicine, eastern medicine, spiritual counsel, laughter therapy and hugs all around. There is so much available to us in the outside world and our inner terrain to helps us feel better and remind us that our natural state is 100 percent wholeness or health.
Which is why it was so gratifying when one of my client’s showed up at her session, plopped down and said, “I feel whole”. What more could a healer ask.
While I specialize in talk therapy and life coaching – an approach to healing that uses words to point to and elicit feelings, asks questions which shift focus and open gateways to new perspectives and uses words as as archeological tools to unearth buried pain and buried treasure (often the same thing), I am a big proponent of mixing it up and of whatever works.
One client shared that part of her healing had involved getting an answering machine to screen her calls, listening to music that told her story and inspired her and another credited regular exercise, changing his diet and working with an expert in chakra balancing for his new found well-being. I’ve encouraged clients to turn warring parts of themselves into puppets so that they can bridge the gap and cultivate compassion and understanding and move toward unity, collaboration and one love wholeness. I suggest that they look around see themselves in their or others’ children imagining themselves at the age where something happened, something got stuck and some part of them froze.
Every person, place and thing we encounter has the capacity to be a touchstone, a healing amulet, a magic potion. I ask questions and see what my crystal pendulum has to say, people read palms and tarot cards, and decipher their messages, my grandmother read tea leaves, my doctor listens to my heart with his stethoscope and Jesus had the ability to restore life to dead and sight to the blind.
Marianne Williamson reminds us that every encounter is a holy encounter so that even as we may want to turn away in disdain or like a casting director call NEXT – healing medicine is always being offered if we are receptive to the lesson, the antidote and the challenge to see beyond the surface into the depths.
A little blue book called Heal your life by Louise Hay fell into my life many years ago when I was holed up in my apartment in New York with a bad back. I suffered from severe pain shooting down my left leg and was unable to walk any further than from one side of my studio apartment to the other. When I looked up Back, it said that the back represents feeling supported by support of life and that the lower back represents fear of money lack of financial support. The affirmation that is the antidote to this mental patters is: I know that life always supports me and I trust the process of life. All I need is always taken care of. I am safe.
I wrote these affirmations on post-its and plastered them around my tiny apartment and, to this day, whenever my back bothers me I remind myself that I am always supported, that I am safe and that I trust the process of life.
We are all healers. We have the ability to heal our own lives if we remember that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, that every thought we think is creating our future and that the point of power is always in the present moment. If we are willing to release resentment, criticism and guilt and forgive ourselves and others we free ourselves from damaging patterns, dissolve emotional and physical illness and last but not least when we really love ourselves, everything in our lives works.
We also have the power to heal others whether or not we call ourselves healers or practice the healing arts professionally. Our unconditionally loving presence is healing to others, a hug is healing. Seeing the best and encouraging one another is healing and there is great power of healing in a loving touch.
I attended a talk last night where the speaker shared that her spiritual and personal growth had more to do with remembering than with learning anything new and it struck me that healing has more to do with remembering than with fixing – that, as was repeated over and over in my coaching courses, everyone is whole and complete, no one needs to be fixed, we all have our own answers – It’s just a matter or helping people (and ourselves) remember this truth and like, Orpheus leading Euridyce from the depths –once we turn on the light of consciousness and compassion what has been hidden in the darkness of our underworld will set us free and restore us to wholeness.
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