‘I like to think of the word ‘healing’ in the relationship to curing, as coming to terms with things as they are. What healing is is a process through which we come to terms with the actuality of our situation in the present moment. Now, the beauty of healing is that healing is possible even in the absence or the very improbable likelihood of a cure — that the work of healing can be done right up to our last breath.’
Kabat-Zinn (2004)
“Healing may not be so much about getting better as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a ‘realer’ you….People can heal and live, and people can heal and die. Healing is different from curing. Healing is a process we’re all involved in all the time. Healing is the leading forth of wholeness in people. I think that healing happens only in the context of our imminent awareness of something larger than ourselves, however we conceive that.”
Rachel Naomi Remen (1993).
These quotations on healing are from today’s post on http://www.beyondmeds.com:-
http://beyondmeds.com/2014/09/26/what-does-it-mean-to-heal/
Please click on the link for the whole of this interesting post, which has a number of links to the quoted writers and others, including Deena Metzger on the concept of ‘sacred illness’:-
https://palacegatecounsellingservice.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/a-sacred-illne/
This is worth a read too, from Jon Keyes:-
We were seized by the words Monica Cassani quotes from her husband, on our cultural tendency to think about ‘health’ as if the physical can meaningfully be encountered or addressed separately from the rest of us – commenting:-
‘The real barometer of health is spiritual rather than physical. The times when we say we feel most alive are when we feel most deeply connected to life itself — not our own life, but life in its totality.’
Yes. Our sense is that this is a spiralling, reciprocal flow. We cannot experience deep connection with ourselves without this also giving rise to experiences of deep connection beyond ourselves – be that with others, with the natural world, in spiritual terms – and vice versa. Carl Rogers noticed this too – in terms of the actualising process and the individual’s movement into organismic experiencing. He noticed the benefits of this extend beyond the individual, and the process naturally and inevitably enhances how we relate to others and in the wider world. It’s socially and ecologically constructive. What serves one, serves all.
Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter
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