Healing
My approach to healing is based on my experiences and what I have been taught by the patients I have worked with and helped to care for. To start, let’s define healing. Usually we think of healing as getting well from a disease or being “cured” (and this usually what we desire as well). Sometimes healing can mean being cured of a disease but sometimes it means finding peace to accept the disease or to live as well as possible with the disease. The definition of healing that resonates most with me is that healing is a return to wholeness. I heard a fabulous talk by Tony Redhouse several years ago teaching about the Native American view of healing. One of the teachings I took away is that healing isn’t necessarily a state that we get to and stay in… there is an ebb and flow to it. We may heal or return to wholeness and then fall out of it and then return again. It is a process of transformation.
When I think about healing and how we heal, I think healing must happen on several levels, and healing isn’t something that happens to us but something that we participate in. Other traditions think about the body as having different layers… a physical layer or body, an emotional body, a mental body, and an energy body (there are different layers depending on the tradition and teaching but I’m using these as they are easy to conceptualize). I think of them as the physical body and the other bodies, and for me, the mental, emotional, energy, and spiritual components are conceptually together. Most of conventional medicine is primarily focused on the physical body and a lot of the wellness industry is too (exercise, diets, supplements, etc.).
In order for true healing to happen, we have to address the physical body and these other bodies. If we have a chronic disease, we need to address the way that we treat our physical body: our movement, our diet, our sleep. We also need to address the other layers too. We can help change how we think about ourselves and our chronic disease, we can help our mental health which may help us make changes in our diet and exercise more easily. We can address and heal old traumas which may change how we show up in the world. All of these pieces are interconnected.
Most of us are most familiar with thinking about physical healing and therapies or modalities we may use to address physical health. It may be less familiar to think about how we intentionally address other layers but there are so many possibilities available and some may resonate with you and some may not. It’s important to choose or utilize a modality that calls to you and that you connect with. Therapy, coaching, shamanism may all work on mental health and possibly spiritual health. Reiki, acupuncture, flower essences may work on your energetic body (as well as many others).
As you can see from the above examples, many healing modalities act on multiple layers or bodies. For example, while acupuncture is working on the physical body and creating physical changes, it’s also working on the energy layer, and it may help your mental health (for example, the liver system is connected to anger so helping to rebalance your liver – gallbladder system may also decrease your irritability). Yoga is clearly working on the physical body but also believed to be working on other layers as well (mental health, possibly spiritual connection).
So when we are on a healing journey, it’s important to think about the layers that may need healing and how you want to go influence and connect with those. Our physical bodies endure so much in our lives that they can all use healing but that’s true for the other layers as well. You don’t have to try to think about all of them but do think about what else needs healing attention besides the physical body. Because they are interconnected, healing that happens on those other levels can have profound effects on the physical body as well.
