HEALING, the inclusion of honesty
There is a great difference between Curing and Healing: Curing is making the symptoms go away. Healing is attaining understanding of the causes. The first is the realm of the medical doctor, the second the realm of the psychologist, priest, spiritual guide, urban shaman – and of the patient him and herself.
The medical doctor will look for patterns of symptoms that fit with known medicine and attempt to cure on a basis of statistics. The healer will attempt to guide the patient or client to an understanding of their full interaction with the Universe, ie. their whole life from birth to their present moment, in an attempt to have them come to terms with who they are and why they do, what they do.
In past times the doctor and the healer were often the same person, the community’s shaman, carrying the historical thread, which over time becomes statistics, to perceive humans as relatively alike bio-machines responding somewhat similar to the same treatment, while at the same time being the (non/judgemental) receptacle of all kinds of individual needs and experiences on a one-to-one basis with an aim to integrate these into a functioning world view.
Over time, with the growth of focused research and the resulting medical industry, the roles separated for real. Organized religion and teaching had long forged their own roads to power and influence, and the healing part became subjugated to the perceived cure of the medical doctors, through big money and lobbying, with demands being put to healers to prove results. The half-science of psychology was born out of a genuine need to medically re-attain the lost part of the wholeness of being, possibly because medical science had advanced to such a level of societal ”safety” that there was room for the individual again.
But psychology in itself is not healing. Psychology is part of healing, part of the coming to respect of self in a respected Universe. The other parts – understanding one’s position in human society (the domain of teaching), in existence (religion and philosophy), with respect for the world itself (nature practices formalized in camping and scout activities) and for one’s own body (sports and competitions) – rarely come together as a whole in dealing with people seeking assistance to cure suffering. The march of science has imposed a level of perfection on every activity, making it near impossible to combine that which has been separated and become proficient at all its parts to satisfy science.
For real, genuine healing to take place, the only way for the healer and for the client to go forward is to slow down. The aim being to accept his and her level of impurity – of imperfection – to only work with the whole of existence. A healer may be idealized as pure in a modern Western point of view, but it is most certainly not a purity in the Victorian sense of sexual chastity, nor is it a purity in the New Age sense of abstinence from dealings with death and dying, in false empathy with other breathing entities. A healer defines the unity with the Universe in terms he or she can understand and since acceptance means NOW, imperfection cannot but be part of acceptance.
So when you see a healer smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol or eating meat or swearing or just acting in a fashion outside of average human behavior, think that this person like everybody else is acting in response to personal needs and that this does no exclude the interaction with the Universe that makes him or her able to assist others in finding a level of wholeness, where they come to terms with their own failures, fears, suffering, needs and thoughts and stop putting blocks in front of themselves, on the way to becoming a happier and self-integrated individual.
The perceived purity of a healer should not be the controlled absence of anything – as seen by fanatics of the health regime – but the inclusion of honesty. Without honesty the healer cannot lift him or herself up to the level of interaction with the Universe, where he or she perceives the wholeness that is acceptance of the present restrictions of being versus the knowledge of the world – what we today call ”living in the now”. Honesty is the way to diversity – one’s own inner permission to be oneself and thus everybody’s permission. And that is what purity is. And that is what healing is capable of – when not treated as the little sister of curative medicine.
