Healing, by my definition, is helping someone into a frame of mind where healing can happen. You don’t need a formal education to be a healer, just the willingness to walk with someone until they discover the path.

Healing is not overt teaching; it’s not an intellectual excursion. Showing and telling people what you know to be true may keep them from discovering their own truth. Yes, you can teach people the “how to” of the healing arts, but it’s not the conscious explanation that causes the healing. Healing is personal and individual.

 

You can wash and dress someone’s metaphorical cut but you can’t heal it. That happens within them.

 

The good news is that when you lead someone to water, you get to drink too. When you create a way to help someone find his or her inner resources, you become more resourceful. My mentor in hypnosis, Dr. Dave Dobson referred to the moment when you helped someone make a connection as “watching the nickel drop.” It was a reference to making a connection with a coin-operated phone. What he didn’t teach me was that a healing also happened in the helper.

 

It’s more than a feel good moment; a connection is also made within you. The mystery of life becomes a bit less mysterious for you, perhaps because you helped them discover a connection in them that you also needed to make. I can’t tell you how it works; I only know that it does.

 

Helping someone into a healing frame of mind can be as simple as just being with them without agenda. That means that your back and forth is unrehearsed and all judgements and cookie cutter formulas are set aside. Something organic and new comes from these type of encounters and it registers in both of you. It can happen in a private encounter between you and another or between you and untold others in an audience.

 

Helping someone find a healing path isn’t telling them what you would do; it’s helping them find what they can do. It’s not advice or counsel, just an openness to what can be discovered when you both don’t know the answer. That’s when healing happens.

 

When you’re tempted to tell another what you know, just let it go and see what comes up next. It may be the piece that turns a one-way agenda into a two-way street.

 

All the best,

John