I am not a healer, at least I don’t identify that way. Others will disagree. Turns out people call you whatever they want whether you agree with them or not ; )
I don’t use that term because it makes it sound like I am doing something to the people who work with me, which gives me way too much power. Rather, I have learned over time how to be a conduit for healing energy to move through me, and how to help others get out of their own way so that it may move through them too. This is a skill that can be taught and practiced — so cool.
Did you know the words heal and whole share etymological roots? Believe it or not, healing energy is flowing everywhere all the time. (And if you don’t believe it, I invite you to get curious about how your body and breath hold on to that thought.) It is something we can connect to, and it connects us all in wholeness. It is not something that must, or even could, be generated by our sweet, messy, little human will power, even if we tried (though bless us for trying). It is something to be accessed, and we access it best by continuously clearing all of the many intricate strategies we have developed over time that interfere with it.
This can be tricky, because most often the ways we have come to interfere with healing energy have somehow helped us survive, so our body-mind will not loosen its grip on these strategies so easily. We come to identify the ways we block healing energy as our Self. Release the strategies, change your sense of self and the ways you survive. Not everyone is ready for that, or more frequently they may be ready only to a certain degree. And who are any of us to say how fully someone else should let their ego die? The agency to make the choice to let go is important. It’s a conscious, “Yes, I surrender to healing and whole-ing. Yes I surrender to life and love,” so that it doesn’t feel like it’s just happening to you. You are participating, even if you still and will encounter aspects of your self that are in conflict with this intention. Combing through the conflicts is the bulk of the journey.
Recently I’ve had this recurring image of a giant wave of healing coming up behind all of humanity, cresting over and washing through, an undeniable force. So much for our agency in this scenario, but life also has a tendency to move us whether we feel ready for it or not. In the power of this wave, we are carried forward together, though some people will still try to hang on because clinging to the familiar might feel like comfort. Even as we let go into the healing wave, we’ve got to learn how to recognize and dance with all of the ways the old patterns (individual, ancestral, collective, systemic) will reappear to try and lock us back in, keeping us tethered to the banks or the shore rather than in the flow of new life.
Even stuck energy has some motion, though it’s minuscule, and can be hard to detect. It’s just a smaller, tighter down spiral, rather than one that breathes and expands upward and outwardly. There’s power in this knowing, because once you begin to recognize all of your stuck places as healing energy that’s just not yet in flow, you change your relationship to your patterns as experiences that are trying to help you. Be present with the stuck-ness and pass through it to access freedom. As you gain facility with identifying and working through stuck places, you build greater tolerance for surfing flow states. Every pocket of activation is a portal to healing.
How are you blocking your access to healing energy today? And how are you getting out of the way for the current of healing to move through you? I dare you to let yourself be moved.
Listen to this free somatic meditation to practice accessing your waves of healing 💚