Healing isn’t repair

There's a perspective I want to share about healing, informed by my own process and experience in healing spaces. I’ve shifted the focus from fixing to recontextualising — and the three mechanisms below are what that looks like in practice.

A lot of people reject the healing frame as wishy-washy spiritual indulgence. I get that. From the outside it can look like that, and I'm not denying there may be some narcissistic people out there milking it. But on a deeper level, from the higher spiritual realms which I've glimpsed enough of in my time — while we're here on earth caught up in the belief of being separate individuals and buying into that whole story, we're truly sick and suffering. We're all in the same boat and we don't realise we're circling. That's why Ramana Maharshi's famous quote is "Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world." The more of us that are able to get out of the boat, the more we can navigate others to do the same. That's the scale "healing ourselves before we heal others" can take. I feel it's the level many people on the path are now starting to come to and using all the mechanisms of healing can help us get there. These are the three that I’ve observed.

First: the linear.

At a physical level this looks like a wound. A broken bone. These are things that may leave a scar, but they mend gradually over time. A doctor, a healer, can 'fix' them, more or less. Or more accurately, the body can fix itself with the right facilitation. Restored, but not quite the same. A record remains in the tissues and cells of the body.

When we speak of healing more abstractly, though, we tend to overlook that bit. "That wound's healed" despite thicker tissue being obviously still there. In our modern world we gloss over that bit. Or judge it even as superficial to relate to the scar differently to the rest of the body. But I know from my own scars that they're not just nothing. They're reminders of particular events in my life that I would otherwise have forgotten. Not constant reminders of course. But enough to form a kind of atmosphere of 'being me' that my body creates, and that contributes to my daily felt sense of being, to a greater or lesser degree. That part's still active.

With mind, body, and spirit all being expressions of the same thing, at a spiritual level and emotional level it's a similar process when we don't repress. We feel our grief and it gradually dissipates. Never fully gone. Always still a bit gnarly. Even systems like Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda operate on this premise. They're working with a different set of diagrams and able to access deeper levels of our 'structure', and their premise is to bring the body into greater harmony, which is a more refined version of 'fix', but the same overall approach. The linear path has its limitations in this respect.

Second: the non-linear.

This is where we begin to recognise that time and space are a construction we can bypass. It happens a lot in medicine shamanic spaces and in modalities such as past life regression or inner child healing. You can go back and heal your past and it changes your present. You can heal your ancestors by healing yourself. It takes some wrapping your head around, but these are all valid ways of approaching change which I'm sure we'll be using much more commonly in the near future.

It's also a comfort if you've been doing lots of healing and not getting anywhere. You can be doing something for years and think you're getting nowhere — then suddenly it all lands. I've been in many a healing process, perhaps on medicine, perhaps just tuning in, when suddenly I’ve remember all the times I've worked on a similar theme: a workshop 10 years ago, a conversation where I changed the dynamics, a book I read years ago. It all counts. And it all lands in perfect timing if you stay the course.

Third: the phase transition.

This is the point where real transformation happens. The other two methods relied on a degree of order. Even the non-linear approach is using a structure, albeit a sophisticated one, spanning potentially different lifetimes and dimensions. When you introduce chaos within a safe environment you can really set a new baseline. It’s the safety that creates the ability to surrender to an intelligence beyond our understanding.

Prigogine, who won the Nobel for it, described what happens in open systems that are pushed past a stable range: they don't gradually shift. They hold, they hold, they hold — and then they hit a bifurcation point and fall into chaos. And in that chaos, they self-organise into a new structure. A higher one. The old baseline isn't repaired. It's replaced. All the accrued scar tissue wiped, transmuted, and used as compost for the next iteration of who you're becoming.

The point isn't to come out the same person, slightly patched up. It's to come out a different system altogether: much bigger and made of different stuff. One that's beyond the question of the wound reoccuring because the very rules of your reality have changed. The thing that broke you is now the thing that makes you not just stronger but immune. Antifragile. You can actually forget about it and truly move forwards into a new life.

Between all three, the scope for healing is far greater than what we understand the scope of our physical health and experience of who we are to be. Despite all our technology and privilege we live in a time where so many people are living in a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual crisis. I feel like that's the invitation from spirit to shift the paradigm, not a curse.

You don't have to come along for the ride if you don't want to. Many are actively resisting. Many in the spiritual community are dragging their heels — preferring to stay in their comfort zones. But the potential is there.

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