The Healing Path

Healing is mandatory if one wants to live a good, productive life in the vein of fulfilling one's potential; to be potent, after all, is to be filled with something effective, isn't it? The concept of healing, in our society, has been dominated by western science and those in positions of power. Personal experience and accumulated knowledge (through the process of discerning information) has led to me to a very basic, intuitive path. But one that requires discipline, rigorous honesty, and reflection in the face of more humanistic, holistic values.

I've come to accept that it's very natural and indeed an innate capacity to want to heal ourselves, to become whole, into our natural state. A natural capacity and automatic survival system also exists within us to deny our experience if it is deemed as being too overwhleming. Make no mistake about it, denial is very effective to the capacity that it serves as self preservation, however, it's not our natural state, to live in fear. Healing and denial are co-authors in this thing called life, each serving a purpose, but ultimately our natural state is to be whole, healthy, and happy.

It seems then, with this understanding, that our society structurally and foundationally lacks elements of a whole, healthy, and happy people. A sick organism at best, is what we currently have. The status quo has it that healing is for sick people, I would agree with this conception, but, I would include the organism in it's entirety. We really can't separate one from the other, can we? We are all people at the end of the day. Tiny, essential fragments in this entire existance of one. While healing has been mandatory, it certainly hasn't been guided by spirit in dominant, meanstream culture. In fact, traditional ways of knowing and healing have been relegated to the margins of society having been demonized by the church and imperial powers and thusly legally sanctioned.

Pathology is a big business in our society, being labelled as inferior in terms of emotional fitness to this society. To this society? I mean, can it really be the barometer of good health and emotional fitness? Our society is so... sick. People are being symptomatic of the systematic. Granted, there are some who can adjust better than others. People with humanistic principles and who value integrity have a particularly difficult time adjusting, and without proper supports and a holistic understanding and ideology in which to secure oneself, it is quite easy to slip through the cracks of a flawed, fractured system. Deeper into the confines of a society that doesn't care about you. It only cares about your market value. How sick is that? And how anxiety provoking?

Breaching adulthood with a less than enriching childhood (which is all to common a story) left with little to fend for myself and encouraged by the status quo to go out there, into the big, wide world, grab life by the horns and pay my taxes. Once I understood just how flawed our society was, I knew I couldn't endure the pretention, and from there, I knew I would have a difficult time adjusting. I just didn't want to play the game that I saw the majority of my peers and the dominant majority in society playing. I simply questioned things and challenged the existing status quo. Healing has been mandatory to accurately reflect this lived experience.

This healing journey hasn't come without its share of hard knocks and feelings of intense loneliness and brokenness, but, as I put the pieces of my life together and create meaning from my experience, a new story emerges, a story co-authored with the universe, moving in harmony and complete synchronicity, if I let it. In the words of Jane Rubietta, "Anger is natural. Grief is appropriate. Healing is mandatory. Restoration is possible." Here's to restoration and all the possibility that brings.

The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,.
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.