Healer on Healing

A healer teaches you how to heal. All healing happens between you and Nature. A healer lights the path, but you must walk it.

How to slow down, listen to the deeper healing current within you, make meaning of the journey, sense the journey as a path to greater and greater wholeness (even when ‘symptoms’ increase). Healing includes feeling better, but it is not only about feeling better. 

Consider a river that has been clogged up with debris. Some toxic, some natural: a piece of trash gets stuck between two branches laid across the flow of water, but then that small dam begins to catch pine needles and rotting grass, small stones and sticks. This one little piece of trash, over time, may cause a whole section of the river to become clogged, closing off the flow and narrowing the riverbank. That clog may also being to create an eddy where the water now grows a different kind of bacteria. That begins to grow on itself and the little eddy becomes now a clog of funk and a cesspool of unhealthy stuff begins to happen. None of this happens immediately it is all slow to grow and essentially insideous. 

Now consider what may be happening down river from that growing cesspool. That unhealthy area upstream is contributing to what can happen downstream as well. Maybe there is a very delicate flora in the river downstream and now that this toxic bacteria is introduced, that delicate growth downstream doesn’t have the nutrients it needs to survive.

This is a picture of how dis-ease and dis-harmony happens in our body minds as well. Something happens, even something small, and it dissolves the body mind’s natural ability to resolve its toxicity naturally which, over time, creates a toxic environment. Imagine trying to pour as much water through a smaller space: pressure, stress, overwhelm.

Now, how does that return to health? Maybe we don’t even notice that the river is sick until that delicate flora a mile down stream is effected. Maybe there isn’t even much of an indication that anything is wrong until that water pressure changes so much that everything is responding with a stress response. How do we return to health?

We have to recognize the simplicity of my little metaphor here, of course in the bodymind this process is far more complex, but the principle holds true. In order to heal, we have to trace the path of dis-ease, back to its source, and attend to the source of the problem. We don’t necessarily have a direct easy path straight to the dis-eased part. That is now hidden under layers and layers of debris. That little piece of trash lays beneath a lot that appears ‘natural’. 

The process of healing includes tracking these patterns in the body mind and attending to the places along the way that give a deeper sense of what it is upstream, so to speak, that is creating this pain/stress/dis-ease. In the human, this is mulit-layered. It includes not only that spell of Dorito eating you had as a teen, but the epigenetic layers, the biographical layers, the emotions associated with these things, the mind patterns involved in those things.

The river is flowing. Nature is alive and well. It doesn’t stop, and neither does the capacity to heal, even if that healing is into death. What we must do to resolve these unresolved things in the patterns of our body mind is to allow ourselves to come back into relationship with what has moved out of our awareness, snuck under the radar.