What is healing?
“Healing is a holistic, transformative process of repair and recovery in mind, body, and spirit resulting in positive change, finding meaning, and movement toward self-realization of wholeness, regardless of the presence or absence of disease.” ~ Kimberly Firth et al.
Healing is such a commonplace term these days that its potency has become diluted. Here I shall examine its meaning with the purpose of reinvigorating its usage as a real process.
What does it mean to heal?
How does healing oneself lead to healing broken relationships, our society and world around us?
This is one of a series of articles leading to the upcoming H.E.A.L. training that I’ll be conducting in November.
Derived from the old-English term haelen, healing refers to a state of “wholeness” and a dynamic process that seeks to actualise a desired state of transformation, integration or cohesion.
According to the work of Kimberly Firth et al, healing is (1) personal, (2) innate or naturally occurring, (3) multidimensional, and (4) involves the repair and recovery of mind, body, and spirit.
Genuine healing involves the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—creating a new dimension that’s more than the sum of its parts, and changing the individual into a new entity. Both the healer and the patient are transformed by a process that is dynamic and experiential, with the patient transcending distress, suffering, and the disease state.
Healing is naturally occurring in that it utilizes the body’s innate capacity to restore and renew itself - what I describe as our innate ability to disrupt disease and procure health and wellness instead. It is an awakening to the fact that we are not inherently broken, we just strongly believe that we are.
Healing also occurs at multiple levels—from the cellular up to the national and global—and in multiple dimensions, such as the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social, to name a few.
Healing involves the repair and recovery of mind, body, and spirit—with repair meaning to fix or mend, and recovery meaning to return to a previous state. In this way, the framework of repair and recovery distinguishes healing from a cure.
When people experience a cure, their symptoms may be physically eradicated, but repair or recovery may not arise in all areas. Healing, on the other hand, involves the repair and recovery of the whole person and in all aspects of their life.
Another aspect of healing is that it results in positive change and the realization of wholeness through the discovery of meaning. As Victor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, “suffering ceases to be suffering in some way, in the moment it finds a meaning.”
With a cure, the patient may experience a remission of symptoms but without the discovery of a new transformative meaning. Only a profound and meaningful insight can impact the totality of the patient’s mind-body-spirit. And the result might take the form of a radical acceptance of one’s own illness, or a passionate desire to assist others in the face of theirs.
The highest meaning is the realization of wholeness - the integration of the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, the energetic, and the spiritual within the individual. Because of this, it is the individual, rather than the healthcare provider, that is best placed to determine when and if genuine healing has occurred.
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