Healing: Moving towards Wholeness
What is Healing?
The word heal stems from the root word ‘haelan’ which means to ‘make whole’. Our individual and collective journey towards greater healing is synonymous with our path towards wholeness.
I believe that we’re all moving towards greater wholeness - on an individual and collective level. Our path towards healing is about fully embracing all aspects, all parts and all dimensions of our being. When we do this, we become unified and coherence within ourselves, between one another and the universe as a collective.
Healing is about acknowledging the full spectrum of our emotions and all the experiences that happen within our life. It’s about meeting joy, bliss and unconditional love wholeheartedly, whilst also opening up fully to our grief, pain and suffering. It’s about letting the contrasting aspects of our reality to exist side by side, holding space for them in their totality, not valuing one more than the other or getting lost in either polarity of our being.
Duality and Polarity
We experience our reality from a space of duality and there are these polarities and cycles found everywhere in nature. Everything is in a constant state of change and is always moving in a cyclical rhythm.
Recently, during a shamanic journey I saw a ‘fast-motion’ image of a forest generating itself. It was constantly dying, re-growing, dying and re-growing and it highlighted how the vibrancy of the forest could only exist because of its inevitable decay and death.
If we resist polarity and the constant cycles of life - then we deny what it is to be alive. If we try to rest somewhere in middle - experiencing everything but nothing fully - then we can't step into our true potential to heal.
There may be times we want to avoid our individual and shared grief and suffering. Some of us may only be interested in dwelling in the bliss of meditation and in following a spiritual path, but this denial of the darker aspects of our life can also consume us. It's definitely difficult to look into our personal and collective pain and to hold space for it. It takes courage to open our hearts to grief and to address the wounds from our past and our present.
Constant Change
We sometimes want to run away from suffering out of the fear that we might become consumed by it. Some of us do get lost in the pain and are unable to see that the experience is a cycle of life and it won’t remain that way forever. Everything is changing and there is always movement. So, it is important not to deny it and to stay with the experience but know that it will pass. If we embrace both the lightness and darkness, then we start to operate from a place of coherence and wholeness.
If we deny either dimensions of our individual and collective consciousness, then we only create more separation between the two polarities. Some of us may experience a stronger sense of ‘bliss’ through spiritual practice alone, but this bliss is not always whole or complete. We can spend weeks in meditation experiencing ‘peace’ and then be faced with an external trigger. If we don’t want to face this trigger because it might ‘disturb’ our peace, then this is not complete peace or real happiness. When we look directly into the eyes of our suffering and grief it might generate turbulence, uncertainty and fear. However, it is only when we stay present with it - in our own lives, in the lives of others and in the entire universe that there is movement towards the wholeness that we seek.