Reflections on Healing


One of our innate capacities of which I am most in awe is our ability to heal. From birth on, life experiences wound us physically and emotionally, and we heal without any special attention or effort. At other times healing doesn’t happen so spontaneously, but requires attention, effort, and outside support. In these cases, we leverage additional resources to foster and promote our natural abilities to heal. W.H. Auden, whose father was a physician, wrote: “Healing,” Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”



It seems to me that we take our capacity for physical healing more in stride than our capacity for emotional healing. I’m not sure that we trust that we can heal emotionally, and it feels scary and daunting. However, we have the same ability to heal emotionally as we do to heal physically – at times spontaneously without special attention or effort and at times with additional support. Helen Keller observed that “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”



As I think of what promotes emotional healing and the overcoming of suffering, many things come to mind including humor, friendship, kindness, music, singing, writing, physical exertion, creating art, and love. The Buddha said “Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion,” and I believe each of those things listed above creates ways to witness and touch our emotional wounds with compassion. 



All of this is good news. We each have the native internal intelligence to heal: physically, emotionally, and relationally, even though it may feel overwhelming. Tori Amos speaks to the overwhelm when she notes, “Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.” So often finding our courage is the biggest challenge to getting on the path to healing.



There is a light in this world,

a healing spirit
more powerful than any darkness we may encounter.

We sometime lose sight of this force
when there is suffering, and too much pain.

Then suddenly,
the spirit will emerge


-Mother Teresa