"The Making of a Healer"
"The Healing of a Healer"
"The Spirit-Centered Practice"

The Making of A Healer

In my experience, there are those who learn healing techniques and work in various modalities to bring about health in others, and there are those who have innate gifts that get channeled through a modality, or a number of modalities. I work with people whose highly sensitive natures and innate gifts lead them into the practice of healing.

I work with people who have been called to be healers, not people who decide to be healers. I believe healers are born, not made. I believe that the road to integrity as a healer (the right and egoless use of one’s gifts) comes through the trials required to insure that one is a servant of one’s gifts, rather than an ego identified with one’s gifts.

In my experience, the most gifted healers were at first victims of their own multidimensional awareness and highly sensitive natures. They did not ask for, or seek, the abilities that plagued them. It took them a great deal of time and pain to find the way to live with their gifts and come to understand their needs as highly sensitive people. I don’t think there is any other way to thread oneself through the form of work for which one is destined.

Some healers recall being highly sensitive from early childhood. For others, the awakening of their gifts can appear to spring fully blown as the result of dramatic life events such as a near death experience or a life threatening illness. Others find their gifts emerge or deepen with time. For someone who has carried unusual ways of attending from early in life, there can be childhood issues of alienation they need to clear. For someone whose gifts seem to arrive unbidden, the new awarenesses can be disorienting and overwhelming.

I believe the journey of the healer involves: understanding the nature of your gifts by gaining an awareness and vocabulary around your experiences of yourself and others learning to live in harmony with these gifts through clear boundaries and clear intentions and learning how to serve the world in the highest form through continued evolution

 

The Healing of A Healer

Do You feel:

• confusion about whose information you are receiving?
• attachment to outcomes?
• defensiveness?
• fearful or overwhelmed by what you experience?
  
  

Inner Resolution:

If you are a healer, it is likely that a child you experienced states of heightened awareness that may have been somatic, energetic, psychic or empathic. As a highly sensitive child, your differences from others, and their responses to you, may have made you feel that something was wrong with you. Since our culture does not recognize other dimensional awareness, those of us who came into the world with our senses heightened, tended to have our awareness pathologized.

While you may have been called to develop your inborn gifts, you may have also walled off emotional scars, resentments and deep insecurities which were the result of living in a world that feared and denied realms that were very real to you as a sensitive person. You may have split off parts of yourself to survive in the world.

My understanding of the term wounded healer is one who has not found the way to heal the core wounding experienced from living in an ignorant world. Many healers never do this work. They settle into their skills and identify with their gifts, ignoring the parts of themselves that are never at ease in being alive.

Because of the degree of alienation and inner confusion, a sensitive can find it intolerable to face the dark places within. However, until they do this inner work, I believe they can find working as a healer dangerous to themselves and their patients.

Boundaries:

Without knowing it, you may have survived by using your innate ways of sensing and attuning to manage untenable interpersonal situations. Instead of learning that you had gifts and that they were tools to be taken out and put away, you ended up living in a chronic state of attuning through your heightened state of awareness.

It is essential that you develop boundaries that enable you to have choice in the ways and the occasions when you use your gifts. This involves healing early traumas and establishing an inner sense of safety so that you have choice in how you pay attention to the world around you.

While therapy is a key piece to recovering one’s third dimensional story (and this is not the work I do), a therapist who is unaware of multiple dimensions of awareness – from somatic, to energetic, to spiritual, may be unable to thread through core experiences and knowings that you need to bring forward to integrate all levels of your understanding.

If a healer does not dive down to the place of core wounds, there is a likelihood that in the work he or she will:

• become attached to the role of healer
• identify with the form as the source, rather than consider it as one manifestation of universal energy
• override client agendas and rhythms
• ignore core issues in clients
• project unresolved themes onto clients
• be unable to have a neutral energy field while working
• be defensive and unable to be open to a client’s feedback
  
  

I think it is a mistake to expect that all healers are wounded healers. The journey to become a healer often involves a kind of initiation by devastation. However, this arduous road of breakdown and realignment is not what I think is being referred to by the phrase wounded healer.

The healer’s process of reorientation does not necessitate that core emotional issues and energetic entanglements are cleared. These core unresolved dynamics explain the darkness that one can sense when working with a practitioner. The healer has focused on the skills, rather than attending to personal evolution and resolution of core conflicts.

As a healer, you may face the challenge of being moved to help others while also needing to attend to your own wounds and growth. Since it is so hard to find a colleague skilled enough to help you facilitate your own evolution, you may postpone attending to your own internal prompting toward further transformation.

For many born with innate gifts, it is tempting to leap into the transcendent without fully embodying in the physical dimension. But in order to be fully present as an incarnated being, you must clear the original injuries and misunderstandings that limit your clarity. As long as there are unaddressed core level conflicts hidden by protective mechanisms of thought, you will be unable to be a neutral presence as a practitioner.

My innate gifts and years of required clearing in all dimensions have resulted in a unique ability to sense and name invisible threads of truth and of entanglement in clients with whom I work. Because of my own experience as a patient with over 60 different healers, I am committed to facilitating an unusual level of integrity in healers with whom I consult.

In Our Work Together we: Clear hidden attachments and places of fear and core misunderstanding Invite deep self acceptance for all aspects of your nature Promote self awareness around boundary maintenance/loss and use of your gifts Provide a vocabulary for your experiences of internal states and the external world

The Spirit-Centered Practice

The theory of what you do and the techniques and tools you possess facilitate adaptive change. Unless you are dedicated to being a vehicle for the wisdom of spirit—a client’s unseen, intangible being— I believe your skills as a healer are limited.

Aspects of a Spirit-centered Practice include:

• respecting the truth of your clients and distinguishing it from your own
• finding ways to enter the paradigm of your clients instead of expecting them to enter yours
• considering your tools and your work to be one way rather than the way
• doing your personal work to continue to evolve
• being honest about your limits
• being willing to accept feedback from clients
• honoring clients’ limits as their inner wisdom
• accepting that sometimes you or your tools are not suited to a client
• taking responsibility for referring clients to other practitioners when appropriate
  

As you hone your skills as a practitioner, I believe you are called to :

• expand your capacity to be an advocate for the spirit of your clients
• work within a framework of mutual respect
• expand your capacity to trust your clients’ wisdom, including that which is beyond your knowing or your skills
• continue your personal work to become a clearer vessel
• explore your biases and beliefs related to healing