Intro to Healing Work
As we embark on this healing course, I wanted to share some thoughts and personal opinions I have about the role of being a healer. We talk a lot about the challenges of living in a world where we have to define ourselves without the support of a culture or a community. Learning healing tools is a new part of ourselves to navigate within the world and can be especially challenging if you plan to expand your work beyond your family and friends. I believe compassion and making a conscious effort to act ethically is what gives us the roadmap to do this as advantageously as possible.
Becoming a healer is a process of stepping into power and authority. We need to be aware of this power and conscious of its use. To abuse this power and authority is specifically antithetical to healing work. As a part of this process there must be an effort to practice ethical behavior and to develop a compassionate mindset in our healing work in order to adequately serve others.
This is emotionally challenging work and many people who are seeking healing/healers have histories of harmful patterns with authority figures as well as difficulty setting and respecting boundaries. People who are drawn to become healers often have a heightened ability to empathize, sympathize and understand the perspectives of others making it difficult to set and respect boundaries. These patterns might be true of nearly all modern people because our culture offers little in what healthy and respectful boundaries look like, but boundary issues are noticeably prevalent in spiritual and healing circles. This means that learning to create and hold boundaries is an important part of this work. These are standards you hold yourself to as well as others. You cannot control what another person does, only how you react to it. Boundaries are intentional actions and reactions on our part, not expectations and punishments of others. To set up a good foundation for boundaries, adopt a conscious interpretation of your role in this work, your limitations, what you can and cannot promise, what you can and cannot accommodate. Practice expressing and holding to this role with kindness and honesty. None of us are ever going to be perfect, what we’re hoping for is progression and consistently holding onto the ethics we strive to embody.
What weaves healing, service and boundaries together seamlessly is compassion. Compassion is a complex feeling of love for others that can deepen and develop the more we seek to be compassionate. Respect is, I believe, the most important piece of developing compassion because from respect we can appreciate another individual’s experience without the need to control, pity or judge it bringing us into deep intimacy with others as they are as opposed to how we would like them to be or have the capacity to imagine them to be. A real gift is given without attachment to how it is received, interpreted or used. Respect in healing work allows us to give freely, without expectation.
Coming from a place of respect also means that if we as a practitioners need to set boundaries with others, we must trust their ability to process and react to that boundary. It should also implore us to set boundaries in a kind and respectful way. Respect allows us to sink into love for others without attachments, crossing boundaries or allowing boundaries to be crossed. Love isn’t justification for actions or expectations, it simply is. Respect is the way we can actively treat others with love, kindness and clarity.
Another important aspect of compassion is understanding. The understanding that acknowledges our inability to ever truly know what it’s like to be anyone else and that our reactions to their experiences or similar experiences we’ve had are not the same as their experiences. It’s the understanding that we don’t have to fully understand another experience to respect it. Again, coming from this place of presence without trying to build an interpretation of what we’re being present with brings us into intimacy. All of our judgements and stories and reactions and ideas about others build barriers between us, even if meant to be helpful and positive. I do think there are times and places for analysis and working with our own reactions and exploring our similarities and differences, but in the context of healing work, these are protective or self-indulgent distractions that draw us away from our work.
The final piece in my interpretation of compassion is humility. Humility is a wide open door that prevents us from barricading in our illusions and delusions about ourselves and the world. Humility acknowledges shortcomings without shame. Humility invites us to do our work, and strive towards greater work without the heavy standard of perfection weighing down on us. Humility leaves ample space to learn and grow.
The first person we get to practice all of this on is ourself. In viewing ourselves we often default to the same patterns of analysis, judgment, lack of compassion, distancing from intimacy and attachment to ideas that we are conditioned to apply to our understanding of others. This gives us the opportunity to familiarize and shed these patterns in ourselves before they become obstacles in our healing work for others. For this and so many other reasons it’s important to work on ourselves first. The more we heal ourselves, the more healing work we can bring to bear for others.The more we face our own terror, the more compassionate we can be with others moving through theirs. The more we move through windows of hard healing reactions, the more confidently we can assure others that they are temporary. The more we work on our own judgements and reactions, the easier it is not to bring judgment and reactivity into healing work. The more we learn to accept ourselves, our shame and shortcomings, the easier it is to accept others.
My last and very important note about stepping into this role is to remember that being a healer does not negate or compensate for harmful behavior in the world. We can help ourselves, our loved ones, and many others if we choose to do so through our healing practice. The way that we treat our loved ones, coworkers, acquaintances, ourselves and everyone we interact with in the physical world is even more important. Striving to be kind and honest, especially towards those closest to us is imperative to our healing work and spiritual work. Once again, when stepping into a position of authority, especially spiritual or healing authority, the responsibility we bear to others increases and it’s important to strive to direct our actions towards kindness, patience, helpfulness and humility. Because this is a hard culture and time to live in I’ll remind everyone again that boundaries can be set and held with kindness, patience, helpfulness and humility. Boundaries won’t necessarily be received that way and we will make mistakes, but striving to be the best versions of ourselves is what will make us great in a healing role and every other role we step into.
*This article is part of a six month long healer course offered in our membership section
