After cataract surgery on both my eyes, healing is on my mind these days. The word conjures the feelings of my mother’s hands massaging my feet, sitting by a copy fireplace sipping a hot brew of fresh herbs from the garden, eating my friend Staci’s hearty bean soup. It means letting my body, my psyche, my life force energy do their repairing work, with my conscious mind acting only as an obedient helpmate.
As I allow the fuzziness, the precarious feelings of the days when my sight was most impaired crystalize into this new, crisp, clear vision, I recognize, again, that I am not a healer of others. Even though I have been called to the healing arts in many ways, many times, and even though healing most definitely occurs in the course of my work, I am not a healer of others.
I am a catalyst for healing and growth. You do your own healing, my work is to provide the spark that ignites the process, the gentle flow of oxygen that keeps it alive.
One of my clients truly hated some of the tools I work with. She’s musically inclined, and she hates toning and rhythmic exercises that sound dissonant to her. She also hated anything that reminded her that she is inhabiting a body, anything that required movement or looking at her form.
Through our work together, she discovered that dissonance and form, their deep discomfort, are also portals for her healing. And, treading with care, witnessed and held by me, she began to heal traumas decades old, and inherited unease going back many generations.
She comes to mind because she reminds me that some of the most meaningful healing comes from learning to love What Is: what Life is offering us now, and in each present moment.
For me, loving the blurry edges and the precariousness of reduced vision did not feel welcome or easy, but they showed me a fortitude and stability I did not know I had, that I would not have guessed came from within me. In that way, the cataracts were a powerful gift, as much as they were once a huge obstacle.
And the contrast! The wonder of clear vision, of crisp edges and effortless sight! I believe I will be breathless from them for as long as I live, as I never was when my sight was a given.
Now You
The gift I offer you now, in this sacred space that we create through our shared intention and these lines, is for you to stop and look at what is present to you in this moment, in its beauty and its ugliness. Look at What Is and allow yourself to suspend judgment for one brief instant, as if you were looking in on a a stranger’s life. Ask yourself what gifts it holds, what portals are waiting for you to step through, what discomfort is asking to be unpacked. What is there to be loved so that all the healing and richness, and the unforeseen wonder can become fully available to you?
If you are willing, I would love to learn what you discovered, what you remembered and recovered through this exercise. Share with me directly, or in the comments, below. And if you are feeling stumped, or intuit that there’s something you are not seeing, reach out as well, and we can talk about how I can help!
I am wishing you peace and joy, and unforeseen wonder.
