What comes to mind when you hear the word “healing”?  Is it an image of a cut, scrape or other more severe wound being cleaned, treated, bandaged in order to mend or heal?  Does the word conjure up a picture of emotional trauma, grief, sadness or perhaps a broken heart?  Do you envision something or someone who needs fixing?

Webster’s defines “healing” as “tending to cure, soothing, mollifying”.  One definition in The American Heritage dictionary is “to restore (a person) to spiritual wholeness”.  The Merriam-Webster Medical dictionary’s first definition is “the act or process of curing, or of restoring to health”.

Although I didn’t find any reference to “change” as I was looking at dictionary definitions, in my opinion healing is all about creating change – changing from one state to another – wounded to mended, sad to happy, traumatized to stable, broken to whole.

In some instances healing seems fairly black and white – a broken bone needs to be set back in place in order to mend and become whole again; a cut needs to be cleaned and bandaged so that the skin can heal and come together again.

However, there are many kinds of healing that involve an extensive grey area, where it is not clear cut.  For instance, are you drawn to “heal” someone’s self-esteem so that they can be happier, or would you like to heal your best friend’s relationship with their partner so that they can stay together and you can continue to be friends with both of them?  Do you feel the need to heal or fix someone so that you can better enjoy their company? 

What might appear to need healing to you, may in actual fact be another person’s valuable life lesson that, if taken away from them would hinder their growth and learning from that experience.  But what if someone is in pain and is suffering, you’re thinking?  How can you allow someone to be in a bad place without doing something to help them?  For a healer this can be quite a dilemma.

This is where you have to take yourself and your feelings or opinions out of the equation and simply look at where that person is.  What I have found in all my years as a teacher and healing practitioner is that the more I step back from the problem and allow that person to be right where they are, the more they are able to accept what is going on in their life and the more clearly I can see how to assist them.  Once they can accept rather than resist or fight what is going on, then they can start to create change or a way to heal themselves.

This can be applied to pain or problems on any level – physical, emotional, spiritual or mental.  Our first response is often is to dive into that pain or problem and fight it or resist it.  As hard as it may be, if you can pull your attention out of that area of pain you will be in a better position to find a way to relieve it and heal yourself.

The next time you feel compelled to fix or heal someone, I would invite you to stop and take a breath, sit on your hands and take a look at what that person is really asking for, if anything.  It may be as simple as granting them space to be who and where they are without having to respond to any judgment.  This is what I both teach and practice in my Intuitive Touch Healing program.

Take a look for yourself – what does healing truly mean to you?