How Do People Heal?

I recognize the inextricable link of body and mind, the mind in every cell. I believe that healing happens on many levels involving our physical, mental, and etheric bodies.

I trust the body-mind to go towards health when given an opportunity and conditions to be able to choose.

I know the body-mind heals quicker with the introduction of a possibility for an easier, better way to feel, move, or be.

 As you read think about what your experiences have been. What are your thoughts and feelings about how you have healed during your life?

•       I have experienced the healing in relationship by feeling seen and accepted for all of who I am.

I was lucky to have a good therapist who held the possibility of my wholeness until I could feel it for myself. She was able to provide a space for me to explore my feelings and reactions until I I could trust that I could be loved for who I am. It took me awhile to trust, but I eventually felt it in my being, can access that feeling within me. It’s not that I don’t lose that feeling in particular situations. I do. But I can remember the feeling inside me and can get back there.

I see a therapist now who reminds me to stay present and explore my sensations and feelings, who provides a space to explore the under-sides and insides, the shadow and the light, who helps me to know myself in new ways and find my truth.

There is also the good fortune to have people in my life who I feel deeply known by. Some people are the carriers of many decades of the history of my being and I am grateful for their remembering with me.

• I have experienced people’s hands helping my body-mind make connections and guiding the cells and tissues of my body to find easier pathways. Bodywork has helped me find relationships within my body-mind that have enabled me to live with more ease, with a greater range of movement and being.

I was quite abusive to my body as a dancer and an athlete. I had many injuries that I was encouraged to ignore. When I did get help it was about being fixed so I could go on abusing my body. I have received hand-on work that gave me a sense of being known and encouraged me to know myself, that helped my body re-organize into easier patterns than the ones that had become habits. This understanding through sensing and knowing my own body as a participant in my own healing changed my life. It is not that I am always embodied or that I don’t have impediments to doing this work. It is that I can find my way back to myself or ask for help to find my way to healing both physical and emotional injuries.

•     I have seen and learned from people by modeling their behavior. This has helped me to have better relationships both within myself and with others.

I have a practice of keeping a list of qualities in other people that I admire. How one friend communicates with her children. How an acquaintance asks questions. I write about public figures, dead and alive, I would like to be like and why.  Seeing and being inspired by other ways of being, whether it is to have more fun or how to speak with kindness and clarity to injustice, broadens what’s possible.

•      I experience how ideas and images influence me to change my relationship with myself and my environment both towards health and towards despair.

Perhaps a quote has appeared in your life that significantly influences you. Support precedes movement was one of those for me. Perhaps it’s be an unexamined belief, for example “It’s shameful to ask for help.”, that can be transformed into, “You can find the support you need.” that allows you to do what you want/need to do. Or maybe you see an image that opens a new way to experience life. Once I saw a young girl running with abandon through a field. It was like she was flying with joy. It was just a moment out of a car window, but it has stayed with me for decades. I knew in that moment that I wanted with my whole being to get back to that feeling of being able to run like that. Or maybe you need to change how you take in news. I no longer read the news first thing in the morning because it often leads me towards negativity and I am better able to receive national and international news later in the day.

• I feel the healing power of nature and being in communication and presence with other sentient beings organic and inorganic.

Being in the woods surrounded by the green and growing world in summer and the hibernating world in winter always makes me feel better. I also settle in myself sitting on rocks or by water, especially sitting on rocks by the water. My body and soul always feel better in or near the ocean. I also grew up loving and being loved by a cat and dog. There is something elemental and healing when in the presence of the nonverbal natural world.

•      I feel the movement of spirit in my life, that underlying support of everything. This gives me the ability to stop thinking it has to be me that needs to do everything or be in control. I know there is a greater spirit holding all of us and that is always present for me.

I remember taking time out in difficult moments of mothering. Perhaps you know those times parenting when you are stretched past your capacity. I would close my eyes and ask the Great Mother or the power of Spirit to help me when I was overwhelmed. I would feel held in the lap of something greater than just myself understanding I could not do this without inner and outer support. Opening and surrendering to more than myself helps me not just in extreme times, but every day, every moment.

•       I have taken medication and remedies and had surgery that has aided me to find my way towards health.

We are lucky to live in an age where many things our ancestors died of or were severely impeded by can be healed with medical intervention. I am grateful that surgery is available, that plants have properties that can help our body-minds, that our collective knowledge of the body keeps growing and changing. It is one way to bring the body-mind back to balance.

• There is the healing power of community.

I experience a web of support from others that is like a life raft in difficult times, that is an amplifier of spirit, that helps me know I am not the only one experiencing life this way.