Healing Metaphysics Home > Archive> 21st Century Healing

Article by Michael Finn
Copyright Michael Finn

From my perspective, authentic, deep and abiding healing in this millennium, will be more concerned with the actual healer, than her/his medicinals and therapeutic tools of trade. The latter are most certainly essential ingredients of the bedrock of health, to giving people 'energetic poise' and 'homeostasis', i.e. balance and a sense of wellbeing.

Importantly, once an acceptable order of body and mind are achieved another level of therapeutic need opens up. That is, how to maintain such health and how to deal with the factor(s) which degraded one's health in the first place, and will presumably continue to do so in future.

Pharmaceuticals, medicinals, herbals, health-promoting practices, exercise, supplements and dietary discretions then, are the bricks and mortar of healing.

Yet these do not address tectonic rumblings, 'neath the bedrock, from cyclical emotional and mental doldrums, life transition angst, relationship impasses, deep and enduring depressions and more rarely discussed matters, such as death anxiety and so on.

All of these, due to their abiding nature, if disregarded, ensure that certain pathological (physical) processes (as adaptive responses), will endure.

Healing is not a magical ingested substance, nor a wondrous act bestowed by one unto another. Healing is a 'circumstance'.

21st Century healers will be Zen-like mentors, having the skills to follow the Tao, the unfolding moment. Their access to the Zen beginner's mind, investigates: dreams, symptoms, accidents, relationship rumbles, addictions and strange twists of fate, for their 'signature expressions', their very genesis and their usefulness.

As Elders, these healers will be embodying the wisdoms of their ancestral teachers. Like Taoists, they are sensitive to the ways of nature, like Confucianists, agents of social change.

As such, healing will ride the razor's edge of these societal shifts, remaining in touch with newly emerging 'time spirits'. This also means it openly and realistically embraces change, but doesn't promise popularity. Like the prescriptive wisdoms of the 'I Ching', the book of Changes, the advice provided will be challenging and require much more than simply medicine-taking compliance.

The healer-elder will direct her clientele back into themselves, there to unravel the 'seeds' of self-expression, creativity, imagination, the essential spirit.

They will assist their clients in sifting through their -usually- cloudy personal history.

Dealing and negotiating with internal critics, facilitating renewal and rediscovering forgiveness where appropriate.

Handing the client a map to their former, intrinsic innocence, the healer reboots contact with the person's in-born self acceptance.

Change requires courage, so these healers will role model the ability to 'sit in the fire' of self reflection, examination and appraisal.

Being aware of 'blind spots in the rear view mirror' and seeking clarity, support and challenge, these healers will pursue and engage for themselves, the supervision of their peers.

Thus an 'inter-practitioner network community' develops and a profession self reflects, becomes conscious of itself, refined, less self-inflated and less likely to be seduced and corrupted by personal power.

The elder-healer will be porous, hence an absorbent wailing wall, a refuge within which the client embeds the undigestable angst of their personal history and present dilemmas.

The most effective preventative medicine is one which espouses Mind-Body inseparability and uses this approach to nourish and strengthen the individual.

Matters of life death are a part of the healer's investigative interests.

That thirsty vampire called death which sucks the very breath from our vessels at life's end, needs to be within our daily vision.

Death (awareness) anxiety will not be a taboo matter to the healer. If one doesn't recognise a client's existential viewpoint, their spiritual or religious underpinnings, then how can we fathom the genesis of life-long afflictions, such as fears, phobias and behavioural tendencies?

The healer will be ever mindful of the underlying complexities of the healer-patient relationship. For instance, the quandary which arises when a patient presents with a longterm affliction.

This symptom has by now become an intruder, a major disturbance and the client has begun to identify it as 'other-than me'.

This is a version of dissociation, and is more obviously apparent in disease processes such as cancer: the tumour is seen to be something 'killing me'.

Yet, it's a two-edge sword actually.

Yes, the tumour is having a lethal effect, but it is still a part of me. It has arranged a blood supply to nourish it and is supported by my very body's operating systems.

There is a confusion I feel at the level of identifying just what the tumour represents. This is then complicated by the state-of-the-art allopathic therapies such as chemotherapy. It is destroying the tumour to save the host. The host has to collude with an element of self-destruction, to survive.

More frequently, a client presents to her /his healer asking to be cured. But in the small print, is the unspoken proviso, that this not require them to change, nor be changed. Given that they have developed a disturbance, (which requires change), its fair to assume that the circumstances which created it are still occurring. These are usually deeply ingrained habits.

The healer will be a consummate diplomat able to navigate this tenuous ground, stretching between wants and need.

She will ask always: What exactly is being healed here?

The Healer will be a much needed elder:

The leader follows Robert's Rules of Order; the elder obeys the spirit.

Healing Metaphysics Home > Archive> 21st Century Healing