What do we mean by healing?
Healing means to make whole. Physically, it may mean restoring, repairing, and reconnecting what has been damaged or impaired. It can involve cleansing, balancing, or replenishing. Mentally and emotionally, healing may suggest understanding, adapting, creating balance, and integrating deeper levels of wisdom, awareness, and energy into the conscious mind. It can include changing habits of thought, feeling, and behavior. Spiritually, it implies connecting with the power and grace of the Universal, whatever that means to you.
Living in the Mystery
Healing is a natural process, mysterious in many ways. We sometimes treat medical practitioners as if they are heroic mechanics. In other words, we act like they can fix the body as easily and mechanically as one might repair a car, no matter the age or condition of the body or the state of the person who owns it. The car metaphor actually lies close to the truth, for in many ways the body is a brilliant machine and provides the vehicle in which we move through life in the physical world. And it’s true that many times, doctors perform amazing feats of restoration, to the point of creating new limbs or replacing damaged organs. Still, even in these instances, medical practitioners do not ultimately “heal” the patient; they set the stage for healing, and the body/mind does the rest. No one can force a wound to heal. We can only nurture the conditions for healing. The surgeon cleans the wound, sutures the flesh together, and hopes nature does the rest as perfectly as it is designed to do. Those who use natural methods for healing follow a similar process. They try to remove obstacles to healing and to give the body/mind system what it needs to heal itself as it was designed to do.
We also tend to treat disease as an enemy and death as a tragedy, regardless of the circumstances. Healers look at things a little differently, taking into account the unseen dimensions of experience and the meaning of things. For those of us who believe the soul lives forever, death loses a little of its sting. Not all, of course. It can still be painful for those of us who remain to mourn, including doctors and nurses, who sometimes view a patient’s death as a personal failure and are not given scope to grieve within the demands of their workload and the restrictions around their patient relationships. In recent years, addressing doctors’ hidden stress and grief has become more of a public focus, as it rightly should. Like death, grief is part of life. Learning to feel it and then allow it to flow and, perhaps, change with time is an important part of our evolving journey to wholeness.
As a holistic practitioner, I have witnessed some amazing instances of healing, in which people have defied statistics to recover and thrive or to create lasting positive changes in their attitudes and behavior. Yet I have also experienced the death of some clients, not necessarily while we were working together, but after we’d spent enough time together to develop a strong bond. Even at the end of life in the body, healing can take place. It can take the form of comfort, acceptance, relief from pain, discovery of meaning, resolution, appreciation, forgiveness, gratitude, an experience of love or deep peace. For an eye-opening resource in this regard, I suggest reading Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley. In this book, the authors draw on their decades of experience as hospice nurses to illuminate the ongoing opportunities for healing that accompany us even to our final moments on earth.
Expectations
I serve as a facilitator for processes with which we can cooperate but not entirely control. When I work with clients, I don’t know what form their healing will take. I don’t know how they will make use of the energy and tools they receive, what they will discover in their inner worlds, or how the Universe will respond to their intentions. What I do know is that my services can help clients develop an energetic, mental, and emotional climate within themselves to encourage healing to take place. My services can support you in almost anything you want to achieve.
