The Pitfalls of Healing

The Pitfalls of Healing


A few years ago I was ordained as a minister of holistic healing. Since then, I’ve stopped using the word healer to refer to myself because I found that lots of people don’t really want to be fixed, and although I may be certain that I know what someone needs to do, that does not necessarily translate into being helpful. And wanting to be helpful in itself is questionable, since it often stems from an ego need. The truth is that I don’t know what will work for someone else. Sometimes people who read my books and articles get quite a different idea than that which I intended. I’ve learned to trust that they are getting what they need, and it’s not my job to put them right.

This brings me to the question, what is healing? As the Earth shifts into her new way of being, we are presented with a different paradigm. At its most basic, in the old paradigm, healing is simply alleviating discomfort. At the other end of the spectrum, in the new paradigm, I would say that it is about whole-ness, which means being in alignment with all-that-we-are. From that perspective, health is not about overcoming discomfort, because even while we are railing against it, we may (in truth) want to experience discomfort so that we can experience end results which our limited human perspective is incapable of grasping. From the perspective of all-that-we-are, discomfort (even extreme pain) is not a bad thing. In fact, from that perspective, there is nothing the matter with anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m into alleviating discomfort — I don’t think it does my body any good to be in acute or chronic states of pain. But whether or not you treat the symptoms, it is necessary to address the cause. Pain is usually a messenger.

There are a number of potential problems for healers in dealing with this changing paradigm. The old question of when to leave well alone and when to step in is just as present as it always has been. I’ve avoided having to make this judgment by writing books—if someone doesn’t get anything from reading my books, they will simply dismiss it as a bad book. They’re not likely to demand their money back. For healers who have all kinds of people coming to them for a myriad of different reasons, it’s not so easy. The healer must remain in that place of knowing that the client knows best, even when she perceives the client as determined to ignore the message. The fact is that all clients must be allowed to do what they want to do.

There have always been different levels of healing but in the new paradigm they are very different. A healer may be presented with situations as varied as helping people who want to stay fast asleep, to helping people who are very wide awake and trying to find a way to remain in human form while being fully aware of the vastness of being. There is nothing wrong with being asleep, it’s just different from being awake. It’s not the healer’s job to decide someone needs to wake up—but it might be her job to judge whether someone is asking for help in waking up or help in staying asleep. And then judge whether she can offer anything appropriate.

Being awake is not as straightforwardly obvious as it might appear. We’ve all heard the phrase, all is well, and most of us have thought, at one time or another, Wake up and look around—clearly everything in this world is not well. The irony is that the people who are sleeping are the ones who are rushing around trying to fix everything, while the ones who are awake know that their only job is to appreciate this amazing planet. The true meaning of health is being awake: coming into alignment with all-that-we-are so that we perceive the truth of the phrase, all is well. True health is a state that does not need healing. We understand that this wonderful diverse planet Earth is a place of duality: peace and war, right and wrong, good and bad are opposites that need each other. Outside of that, when we are awake, we are learning how to choose a state of unity where we can experience peace that is absolutely something else; where the words right and wrong have no meaning. How different would our lives be if we operated from that perspective? Healers who are working on that kind of level can be accused of a lack of ethics by people still operating in the old paradigm, who don’t understand these concepts.

It is always important not to get attached to a particular image of who we are in the world, especially in these rapidly changing times, but because a healer’s job is specifically to divine what is wrong with someone and tell that person what to do about it, they very often get attached to being good at that, and then they are not able to step out of the role of the advice-giver. The healer is expected to know best. I’ve found this a problem with a number of the psychics I know—they assume that I am asking for help when I simply want to discuss how to be in the world. Being attached to the image of being a good healer is particularly tricky, because you are messing with people’s heads.

It is not just her image of herself that a healer needs to be aware of, but also her image of who her client is. Again, we are living in a world where all kinds of new and wonderful things are coming into form. Some of the beings around us do not fit in any standard mold, and yet a healer often learns to operate within a limited awareness of a standard mold. It makes her job easier in general, but she may be making inaccurate judgments of some of her clients. We humans are manifesting our individuality as we never have before. Like a photographer who doesn’t see the beauty because she is so focused on getting exactly the right shot, a healer may not be able to step back and allow new ideas to enter.

As more and more of us come into a daily awareness of the vastness of being, we tend to be dealing with two ongoing problems. The first is how to keep the physical form in good health although it is vibrating at a much lower frequency than that which we are getting in touch with. This gives rise to a lot of unusual physical symptoms that may require treatments very different from those that worked in the past. Moreover, the treatments may be quite different from one client to another. Healers have to be thinking outside of that old box. The second is how to be with other humans (the majority of the population) who are not going through the same kind of intense changes. Most healers, if they understand these questions at all, are busy working out their own answers. We’re all stumbling around in the dark—or rather, the light! We are on the cutting edge, forging our very own paths, and looking for help wherever we can get it. I revere all healers who working towards that knowing of whole-ness, both because it is such a responsibility and because it is so important. In the same breath, I revere all of us who are coming to accept that there is nothing which needs to be healed. We live in paradoxical times!

Bio: Mikaya Heart’s greatest desire is to inspire humans to follow their hearts and live their dreams. Her most recent book, My Sweet Wild Dance, which is in the running for the Lambda Literary Awards, is about a woman who claims her own power in a world where powerful women are not popular. For more information, see www.mikayaheart.org