Healing Practice: the Slippery Slope (Part I)

This is a two part essay on aspects of healing practice.

Every person born (I would include at least some animals as well) has healer capacity. This is so because we are dynamic, multi-layered, energetic beings who are designed to self-heal.  This self healing variable gives us the potential to help others heal.  Our humanness resonates, vibrates with all energetic beings. Providing healing energy to oneself or to others requires a layered sense and an understanding of energy (how it moves and behaves) through experience. This requires an adept use of all the senses including our sixth sense of proprioception, intuition.

Most healers are trained and skilled in one modality or other (if not many).  This is a platform from which a healing most often begins. One learns a structure and a set of skills from which to begin and carry out energy shifting.  These can include a deep knowledge of the body's anatomy and physiology as well as the more ephemeral knowing of how energy moves or doesn't move (recognizing when energy gets blocked or static). Healing work can be very simple or very complex. Good healing work is never static or perfunctory (using only learned skill sets), but includes a relatedness to self which is simultaneous to other.  This relatedness, and being in relationship is an experience of creativity.

To be in a right healing relationship is to be Met; to be matched. It could be said it mirrors the ideal of the original relationship of the wise, benevolent, unconditional parent (God(dess)?) to child;  One is Seen, accepted, respected and encouraged to Be what one is in a moment. When one's organism and person is approached in this way, trust becomes an operating factor, allowing the energies to naturally balance and align.  Nothing is automatic, everything is related from and to.  This balancing and alignment of the energies is almost always different with every person and in every session.  Hence, preconceived notions or ideas as to how a session should go aren't relevant.

This is an ideal. The fact is all healers are wounded in their own way.  All people/healers have not had a complete, wise, benevolent, unconditional parent as a model, but fragmentations of same in some degree and their own partial humanity from which they act. So, we all are imperfect, partial healers for the most part.  It sometimes happens, use of intuition is sometimes skewed.  People in a healer capacity sometimes have their own agenda, act from their own self need (usually unconsciously), can't help but transfer their own "stuff", are creative for their own sake not for the sake of the relationship at hand. Others rigidly adhere to a modality's form without consideration that something else is called for or do not trust themselves outside of the structure of the form.  The human propensity to deny an inclination of what Is is pretty much ever present.  A healing is a slippery slope.

For a healer, allowing oneself to be in an open inquiry, free of expectations and ego-authority seems the safest approach (easier said than done!). Where does the impulse to put my hands on or say what I say in a moment come from?  If I am in question, can I resist the impulse to act, allow a pause for a possible confirmation of an action?  Is the action I make out of respect for the moment or some part of me that wants to "fix"?  How much of me wants to change what is, rather than Be with it? How much of my action is from my knowledge base, the place in oneself that has spent considerable time (and money no doubt) accruing "expertise"? Do I trust the other will find their way (in their own good time), or do I feel responsible to get them there myself?  How do I verify my authenticity in a moment? How do I know that I'm on the right track?

Lucky for the healing moment, it rarely happens in a vacuum.  There are lots of ways to know that what is transpiring is right. We are working with (not "on") a healing partner, with another.  We can ask if it feels right to them (it's always a good idea to be "checking in" periodically, with oneself and other, in a session anyway). The flow of energy and one's attention will often clarify if the direction is on course. With experience, we begin to sense when we are in and out of a more sensitized zone. Being in this "zone", the harmonizing of the joint energies is very apparent.  Out of this zone, doubt is much more prevalent and the joint connection more tenuous.

Many animals have healer talents.  These animals are benevolent and unconditional by nature.  Their healing skills are purely intuitive, less layered and less complex than their human counterparts, but nonetheless effective, if not simple. Healer qualities are not so much a part of them, as seemingly their purpose.

"Squirrel"  the wounded healer cat

 Acknowledgements:  I'd like to thank both Aileen Crow (New City, NY and NYC) and Mie Sato (Larchmont, NY), both respectively stellar healers, for permission to post their images (above) taken while working on a healing.  Aileen's art and writing on healing work can be found on:  AuthenticMovementCommunity blog and in the Journal of Authentic Movement and Somatic Inquiry (JAMSI),  authenticmovementjournal.com, as well as in the late A Moving Journal magazine.  Mie's remarkably intuitive hands, gorgeous artistic sensibilities and considerable presence can be found planted firmly in Larchmont, NY.