The Healing Moment, Pt. II

The greatest medical minds of all time have tried to figure out how to induce the healing moment. It's normal to want to help others who are suffering, it's a good thing. Hence, we cajole, plead, lecture - even threaten - our near and dear ones when we see them stuck in a pattern of dis-ease. We make the appointments for them, even though it's plain that their hearts are not in the process. If they see the people we think they should, it usually doesn't click, because it isn't time yet, they have not yet experienced the healing moment.

No one can be talked into the miracle of the healing moment.

Sometimes the person who is suffering can be talked into going to the doctor who can, depending on what's happening, treat the physical side of the equation. Allopathic medicine does not address the spiritual and emotional components of illness. Symptoms may be alleviated, but the source of the suffering will continue to smolder, unless the person suffering experiences the healing moment.

Modern medical science can not replace the mystery of the healing moment.

Some people turn to a higher power. They pray for a change, a shift, they pray so hard, so sincerely! It's very hard to judge if or how prayer works, or even what it means to say prayer works. What does that mean, anyway? I pray every day. Sometimes I ask for specific things including healing for those I love who are suffering, but my experience of prayer isn't incantation. For me it is the way in which I develop my relationship with God. I might ask God to please help so and so who is struggling, but I'm not specific about how that help might look. Do my prayers "work"? You tell me.

The healing moment does not arrive specifically as a response to prayers.

Timing is everything when it comes to the healing moment. How much suffering is "enough?" I think we work through things, many things, in this human form. I believe illness, injury, pain and suffering can be redemptive in visible and invisible ways. Some suffering feels (to me) like the fulfillment of a karmic contract. Sometimes it seems that the suffering person has taken on a bit of the family soul that needs healing and/or releasing. Family issues get passed down from one generation to the next. Eventually, like a hot potato, a family issue lodges itself at last in the tissues or organs of a particular individual who must then physically defeat the energy form. Other times people feel "stuck," unmoving and unchanging. Sometimes suffering seems to be more about intertia than anything else.

Illness and suffering has its own lifespan, just like everything else. Towards the end of that arc, something happens in people, something is uncorked, or plugged in, a corner is turned. Something happens! The healing moment is a fulcrum, a benchmark in the life story of disease. Its timing can not be altered, it happens when it's supposed to, not a second before.

The point is, no matter what the suffering is about, there's no way to rush through it, no way to induce or invoke the healing moment. Every illness has its own mythology that must unfold in its own way and own time. You can not induce the healing moment! You can not push the river. Lord knows, I've tried.

I try to remember the above every time the urge to harangue one of my clients rises up in me. I know suffering is a part of every life, which is one of the many reasons people come to see me in the first place, but I don't have to like it. I don't like it.

Shalom.