Healing the Healer

This is from an article I wrote for a local publication a couple of years ago... just another lesson from Weirdness Gone Wild...

“Sometimes the obstacle is the path.” This aphorism is written on an otherwise pristine bathroom wall of a convenience store outside of Waco, Texas. It no longer surprises me where tidbits of wisdom might be revealed.

One day a few weeks ago, you could say I had a bad day. I awoke feeling out of sorts and as the day continued, I experienced every downwardly spiraling emotion in my repertoire of feelings. And I could not bring myself out of it. I meditated twice, did a self-facilitated breath work session, read my inspirational readings and nothing in my bag of tools worked.

In this state, it is easy to worry about what the root of the emotional state is and how long it might last. Finally, as I gazed at my reflection in the mirror, I surrendered to the fact that for whatever reason, I was supposed to experience that day as it was and to learn whatever I needed to learn from it. The next day I was still feeling out of sorts and, on the way to visit my mother in Tyler, was listening to my inspirational cd's still trying to bring myself out of it. I stopped at my usual convenience store pit stop, and as I'm sitting there taking care of business, I turn my head and right there in my face was the writing on the wall.

As a healer, the phrase ‘healer, heal thyself’ becomes, or at least should become, a mantra for how we must be, of how we put ourselves out there to the world – as a person connected to their own sense of well-being. There is an even greater necessity to ‘walk the talk’; after all, we should be the primary example that our clients look to for an end result.

And, as healers, there is also the challenge of letting go of our expectations regarding the results we want to see in clients. Sometimes, if they do not fit into our preconceived notion of what a ‘healed client’ looks like, we have done something wrong. We start questioning our intention, our purpose, our abilities, which in turn can activate our own ‘stuff.

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Since I have returned to practicing breath work, I have come into contact with healers of all modalities, specialties and credentials. Quite often, when I tell them I am a breath work facilitator, they get excited and want to do a session, saying they really need to clear out some of their own ‘stuff’, their own suppressed emotions and negative energy. Their response to my work has made me clearly realize just how much energy we put toward our clients’ healing and neglect our own. Any time any person operates outside of the framework of love, forgiveness, compassion, releasing judgments, peace and a basic state of well-being, something needs healing. How can we effectively heal others unless we continually work on ourselves?

And taking it a step further, when I was discussing this with a friend the other day, he reminded me that we are all healers, with the ability and capacity to create and manifest our own healing from within. So while my primary focus in this article is to remind healers to take care of themselves, it really applies to everyone.

When the law of magnetic attraction comes into play, there is also a good chance the clients that come to us are experiencing the same challenges or issues that we ourselves need to clear out. They become our mirrors. In order for us to lay out a path of healing for our clients to follow, we must go through and clear out our own obstacles, using the obstacles as the pathway for our own healing. This solution, to spend as much energy on continual self-healing as we do on our clients, paves the way for us to be the best channel for healing that we can be.