Why we still need healing

By Lian Brook-Tyler

Healing isn’t fashionable, it’s not impressive, it’s certainly not cool. It’s no wonder we dress it up in other terms or more often, attempt to escape the need for it altogether, via…

Transformative coaching
Alchemy
Psychedelics
Shadow work
Spirituality
Magic
Sovereignty
Ontology (“being” work)
Meditation
Polarity work

Ah that’s better!

Until it isn’t.

And just to be clear, many of the approaches in that list truly can be consciously focused on healing or can work beautifully alongside it - for example, combined sovereignty and shadow work (especially inner child work), has brought some of the deepest healing for me personally and for our students.

My intention isn’t to demonise whole bodies of work or the people within them, it is it to say… For all our attempts to push healing into a dusty, forgotten corner and focus on the alluring shiny things instead, it will keep calling us back to look at it with honest eyes at last.

Not because we’re being punished or that self-development has to be a struggle but because a ) for the most part, it’s our abandoned, wounded inner children calling for our attention - thank goodness they don’t give up, and b ) because deep inside the wounds calling for healing can be found our beauty, our genius, our medicine, our unique gnosis - precious gifts that our souls came to give to a hungry world.

It took me a few years of doing transformative work with people to realise that when our work worked, it was because they were ready to heal, and I was ready to help them to do so. And when it didn’t, it was because one or even both of us were innocently, and maybe sometimes wisely, bypassing or dismissing the healing needed.

And still, it’s taken me many more years to write this. In part because I had my own huge resistance to the idea of ‘being a healer’, even when I knew it was an essential aspect to the deepest soul work I was called to doing with people, and in part, I knew in writing this it may appear I’m making others wrong, which isn’t something I’m drawn to do, but at this point, I trust if you’re meant to feel my love in this, you will.

I wasn’t intending to get into my own resistance to the idea of healing here but given stories are one of the greatest communication devices that humans have, and I know too, that as Carl Rogers said, what is most personal is most universal, I will.

You may already know that a decade ago, I was suddenly and miraculously freed from 15 long years of chronic pain and panic attacks, in hindsight, this ‘instant cure’ happened over the course of a year in two events: the first, my father’s death blasting me open to Spirit, the second, a year later discovering that thoughts create my reality (there’s more to that latter statement, which I’ll come to).

Due to the seeming spontaneous and complete nature of the transformation, and the subsequent deep dive I took into the world of the 3Ps and non-dual spirituality, I adopted a belief that we are all innately healthy, whole and can’t be wounded, and can only create the illusion, via thought, that we are otherwise.

Whilst there’s certainly some truth to that, it’s much more nuanced and metaphysical than I was joyously, rose-tintedly over-simplifying back then, and importantly, what was missing was the understanding that in order to actually experience wholeness, healing is needed.

Healing is making whole, (the word healing comes from the Old English hælan and hāl, meaning ‘whole’), sometimes this whole-making happens without conscious effort, as it did for me in the sudden disappearance of my pain and panic, and other times it requires intentional, focused healing work, for most of us, it’s both.

Although I’d had a very real spontaneous healing of one of my most obvious and painful wounds, and as a result was undeniably happier and healthier than so many in our culture, it took me time to see that it even was a healing, and even longer to see that there were still more wounds and therefore more healing for me to do in order to retrieve and reclaim the wild, beautiful, whole soul that lies beyond the conditioning and wounding.

And even longer to see that healing was actually the most powerful and transformative work we were doing with our students all along.

Even then, when the spirits dragged me kicking and screaming to shamanism, I was so busy working through all my resistance to it, unbelievably I somehow managed not to recognise that at the heart of that resistance was one of the main points of shamanism… healing.

Devoting fully to the shamanic path proved to be not only the deepest healing imaginable for me but thrust me into becoming the healer I had spent a lifetime doing everything I could not to be.

(Those in my close circle often chuckle when remembering that despite finally submitting to the hard initiatory training, I often said I could never see myself becoming a shamanic healer at the end of it. I really was the last to know what everyone knew about me all along.)

These days, the work I do can be described as teaching, guiding or healing, but even most of the teaching and guiding is really about healing because until we’re some way to becoming whole and aware of any wounding that remains, almost anything we attempt to do will be hijacked or harnessed by our wounding… and the more we dismiss or deny this, the more it is so.

And of course, my healing work, and probably any healing work that anyone does that works, is based on ancient knowledge and experience, held and so generously shared by indigenous wisdom keepers throughout time and across the world, often at great cost to themselves.

Important side-note: if you benefit, indirectly or otherwise, from these wisdom keepers, I invite you to recognise how lacking in reciprocity that relationship has been, and how we can each be part of changing that by both speaking about it and providing meaningful support and resources to indigenous communities.

Which brings us to this… wounding and healing are probably as old as humans are. Will we ever outgrow it? Maybe but it seems unlikely if we deny the need for healing when so many of us are walking wounded, maybe more of us than ever.

My intention, wish and even prayer for writing this is that if you hear anything of yourself, your dreams, your pain, your shame, and your journey in this, you will choose to receive the healing, in whatever form, your soul is calling you towards.

Healing isn’t fashionable, it’s not impressive, it’s certainly not cool but it’s what makes us whole. And as we grow closer to that union with our own souls, we realise that it is enough, and maybe even everything.

All my love and blessings to you, dear one.

Art: Jake Thacker
♥️

P.S. For more on Medicine ‘24, and the Wounded Healer, take a look at these links:

🌟 Read about the full blog Happened 💫 here: www.wakingthewild.com/blog/happened

🌟Find out more about Medicine: www.wakingthewild.com/medicine

🌟The Wounded Healer dedicated page of resources here: www.wakingthewild.com/woundedhealer

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