The Flawed Healer

I used to believe, naively, that healers and other people in the helping professions were healed themselves...that psychologists must not have issues, that energy healers never got sick...that somehow these people had the key to their own well-being. It was always disillusioning to me to discover the person I'd been seeking guidance from was flawed, sometimes greatly so. How could I trust what they were telling me if it didn't work for them?

Now I think, how could they be helpful if they didn't experience those things? How can you help other humans if you yourself don't have human emotions, human ailments, human thoughts? It seems obvious now. It is in our own suffering, in our flaws that we are able to help others because we are able to empathize. And it is our own suffering or discontent that pushes us to find answers, encourages us to find peace, however we can, and in so doing, help others do the same. At least if we don't get stuck in it.

Sometimes it works the other way around. Sometimes when we are striving to help others, we help ourselves as well. This is nowhere more evident than in a parent/child relationship. If we can relate and listen to our children, perhaps we can heal that child who was never heard. Or if we can honor our kids' "selfish" side, maybe we can learn to honor our own Self that has been neglected. And if we can truly show unconditional love to our kids, we might just be loving some lost part of our own inner child.

It's sort of a chicken or the egg kind of thing. It's cyclical...it's hard to give someone what you haven't gotten yourself ...but it's sometimes even harder to give to yourself.

I have many energy healing modalities at my disposal and when I am in pain or out of sorts, I can achieve a certain level of relief by using them. However, many times I find the result is more drastic when someone else works on me and my work on them is more effective on them than their own is. I can only speculate that this is because we can't see the forest through the trees, so to speak. Perspective changes everything and we usually don't have great perspective on our own issues. Or maybe it is the sheer act of purely receiving that is so healing...either way, we have the potential to help each other heal, if we could just see the connection, the reflections of ourselves in everything. I think we need to play both healer and healee in order to find balance and peace.

Being human, accepting all that that means, and being a healer or teacher are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary...speaking as someone who wants to help people heal, it helps us be more compassionate. And speaking as a patient or client or student, having a leader or healer who is human and embraces that, shows me that I, too, with all my human issues, have the same potential to help others.