What Makes A Healer?

[Written around 2004.]

A healer must be humble. Humility is optimal openness to learning. Humility requires suspending one’s preconceived confidence in what is right and what is wrong and listening on a more fundamental level. The healer must be a great listener. He must be open to entering the depths of another’s story, another’s wisdom, and another’s truth. Everyone carries a lifetime of truth in their pain, their symptoms, and their buried hopes, and he must relate to it if he is to help them remove their psychic daggers from their chest.

A healer must be mature. He himself must be largely healed – or at least have a good, strong, core part of himself well along the healing path. He cannot blinded by the sway of another’s false guidance. He must have a powerful framework of self-knowledge on which he bases his growing realization of truth. If he himself has not climbed the mountains that lead to maturity he cannot hope to lead others toward the promised land. If he remains too broken he can only lead them into the blind canyons toward which his self-deceptions are ultimately unknowingly leading him – and into those which his parents already abandoned him.

A healer must be honest. He must be open about his strengths and weakness, and be devoting himself fully to healing the latter. He must have an utter respect for the healing process in his own life. He must be on the vanguard of self-questioning and be willing to take any and all steps – no matter how sacrificial – to both uncover his denial and heal his wounds.

A healer must be patient. He must know the length and difficulty of the path toward truth, and recall every trial on his own journey.

A healer must be an individual. He must have individuated from his parents. He must stand on his own two bare feet, however cold the ground, and know himself as his own being through and through.

And a healer must have guts. It takes guts to face life’s inner demons and keep on plowing through.

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