Healing - A Frightening Proposition

Over the years, I've been told that I have a healing presence. A healing voice. A healing heart.

It's true, but it isn't always what people expect it to be.

Healing is often confused for a return to what once was. It is thought that if something needs to be healed, that means it needs to be restored to it's original state. 

While that may often be what we want, it is very often not what we need.....besides being impossible.

What we need is wholeness. I have found over the years that wholeness occurs more like rebuilding than like restoring. Some things simply cannot be restored, no matter how much you might wish it were so. 

Once erosion happens along the river bank, that river's path is forever changed. The land that was, is no more, and no matter how many truckloads of dirt and rocks you attempt to dump into the empty space, you won't be able to return it to it's original condition. The components that made it, rocks, dirt, roots are gone, washed away. That particular combination is neither known nor recoverable.

We often want to fight that reality, insisting that surely things can be as they were before. 

And this is why many people run away from the healing that they need. My own experience as a healer of sorts is that this is why sometimes I've experienced people running away from me.

I take a deep breath as I make that statement. It has been painful to live within that reality. I have felt that I was somehow wrong. Still, the process of walking that road has taught me a few things about what healing is.

For example, take the idea that we can 'Make America Great Again'. The idea is that if we simply roll back to the way the country was 50 or 70 years ago (choose the decade you think was great), all will be well, citizens and the economy will flourish, and we will all be happy. 

But you can no more take America back in time than you can return a baby to her mother's womb. She can no longer fit! She has stretched and grown and if you return her to where she had been, she and her mother will die. The womb will now be poison instead of life-giving.

Still, people long for their idealized version of 'what was' in our country. And in the same way, we long for what was in broken relationships, broken bodies, broken minds, broken hearts. 

What is true instead, is that healing requires an emptying. 

You see, healing has a cost. We hope it will be free, but in fact, it means letting go of what feels like everything. This cost often feels far greater than we can afford. And so, when the healer comes to us and asks to scrape the insides raw, so that they are ready to be filled with what is new to us, we are terrified and we run away.

Healing requires that we welcome that which we do not know and allow it to grow and become what we didn't know we needed.

A Frightening Proposition

I am Healing

I am a gift......with a cost

Healing demands that you let go of what you've known

Release what is familiar, embrace the hope of what is unknown

Pour out the poison inside

That space needs cleansing, clearing, washing, emptying...

You feel...

Empty

...............for a time

The time for being filled up is coming.............Freedom

Healing is being filled up afresh

Healing is welcoming what you do not know

It is not about going back to what was before

It cannot be a return, only a renewal

Healing happens best and most readily in partnership

Healing is a gift

It is pain and beauty and newness rolled into one extraordinary unknown

I am healing

I have a cost

And the payout is priceless