Healing Ourselves

Nothing we can do will avoid the fact that at some point our physical bodies will stop working and each one of us will die.

How you react to that will probably depend, in part, on whether you see death as an end or as a beginning. Personally I believe it’s both but I’ll only find out for sure when it comes. I react to the thought mainly with peace with some moments of fear (maybe I’m wrong, and it is only an end).

Scars On the Journey Of Life

The good news is, for now, I’m alive and well in a physical body, subject to emotional ups and downs, learning new stuff all the time and gradually connecting with a spiritual dimension to my life.

Part of this journey I call ‘life’ are the knocks and bruises we all suffer. Accidents and diseases damage my physical form, emotional traumas leave their invisible scars and my intellect gets misled by wrong thinking or factual mistakes. The other part of me – my spiritual dimension – is , as yet, unfamiliar to me and so far less tangible. Many traditions teach that even our souls can get damaged, for example, through ’sin’, though I prefer to believe that my soul is pure and untarnished whatever happens in this life.

The quality of my life, the inner peace I strive for, is heavily influenced by my overall health.

If I’m un-healthy in some way, then my energy is used dealing with that rather than getting on with life. We’ve all experienced the need to rest after an illness – our energy goes on recuperating.

The Healing Power Within

If I fell over and broke my leg I’d probably go to the doctor to fix me up, right? She/he would align the bones, put on a cast to keep my leg rigid and after several weeks the break will be mended.

Who healed me?

Neither I nor, in this case, the doctor do anything to heal my leg. Realigning the bones, administering chemicals (natural or otherwise!), resting, paying attention to how I’m moving are not ‘healing’ but all things that support the natural healing process and allow it to work smoother and faster. The healing takes place at a deeper level from within my organism and is really quite extraordinary – the other stuff is just helping this invisible process.

For me this is vitally important.

Keeping Healers In Their Rightful Place

• Doctors don’t heal our bodies.
• Therapists don’t heal our hearts.
• Religious leaders don’t heal our souls.

No-one can heal me, no matter how much I’m told the opposite.

Healing is what happens within each of us and not something we receive from the outside. We can receive many things from the outside that can help the healing process, and those trained and experienced in healing different wounds have a lot to offer. But doing the healing is not one of them.

I want to keep so-called ‘healers’ in their right place – as people who can offer potential support to the healing that happens within.

I want to take responsibility for my own health and not abdicate to the ‘health’ industry in its myriad forms or to anyone else, for that matter. Nobody cares as much about my health as me and that’s exactly as it should be. I know plenty of people who go running to the health centre at the first sign of illness, for example, or whole communities living their spiritual lives by rules laid down by their local priest or guru.

Doctors, therapists and priests are not gods but most of them deserve respect for their experience and expertise in particular aspects of health and healing. I want to know when and where to seek the support and guidance of others – including those from the health industry with relevant expertise – but not pass responsibility to them.

I confess I don’t yet take as much care of my health as I would like and I’m not very well informed about the support available. I need to be in order to make sensible judgements. My own apporach is to avoid the health industry wherever I can and I don’t take especially great care of my health in all its forms.

Not yet anyway!

Taking Responsibility

What this means for me is:

1.   Recognise that most wounds (physical, emotional, spiritual) will heal

2.   Honour and respect the remarkable capacity for my being to heal

3.   Support the healing by creating the right conditions to allow the inner process to work its magic

4.   Give patience and time to the healing

5.   Call on those with relevant experience and never pass responsibility to them

And I want to always remember that nobody will ever care more about my health than me.

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