I can only heal others as much as I’ve healed myself.

I’m in the business of healing; myself and others. Healing others is a conscious and unconscious thing that happens. People say they are healers, wearing it like a badge of honor, but in reality, everyone is a healer. Your energy, attitude, comments and actions can be healing to many different people at times. Frequently, someone will comment on the warmth of my hands when I am working on them. It isn’t friction and it isn’t a coincidence. I know that healing being transferred through me to them, without my conscious involvement.

A smile, a hug, being honest with strangers, being willing to take the time to see someone clearly, a simple text, and mostly being yourself are all healing actions.

Thanks for the call. Got me to contact my advisor and have a meeting. Good to get out of paralysis.

I am continually surprised by how often I receive messages after conversations with friends or clients where I hadn’t done anything but been my natural self and inspired them in some way. Sometimes I feel like trying to heal anyone on purpose is an unnecessary doubling down on something that would have happened on it’s own anyway.

You don’t always know the impact you are having or when you’re healing and many times, never will. The world is filled with incoherence, fear and lack. Just being the opposite of those helps others change.

My current expression of my healing business is as a physical therapist, a box I outgrew (and in other ways haven’t) several years ago. Recently I visited Bangladesh where I led a team of 6 therapists in providing care to young people with political protest-related injuries. At various moments, therapists questioned whether we were truly making a difference. My response: of course we were.

Healing…is so broad. Were we healing their physical injuries?

My response: of course we were. For some people there, just meeting someone from America was joyful. Joy alone is healing. During our visit, the energy in the ward was buzzing. Smiles spread through the rows. Mothers offered us tea and cookies in gratitude. We gave focused attention, compassion, physical touch, and presence that these young men hadn’t had during the course of their healing thus far. It takes a small gesture to change someone’s energy. Besides, I’ve found that just standing near people is enough to help them heal. Pay attention to the subtle changes in the feeling of a room or group conversation next time you walk in. Energy is powerful.

You can’t heal everyone though, and it isn’t your responsibility to. Even knowing this, I’ve often felt like a failure when I can’t heal someone.

I should be able to figure this out. I’m the one who’s supposed to know.

I have to remind myself sometimes of the limits of the agreement between patient and therapist: the patient must want to heal and to receive healing, and I can only expect to be effective to the level that I have healed my own wounds (to my constant disappointment, I’m not healed enough to heal people with merely a touch like Jesus did).

I’ve encountered many people who come to therapy ‘wanting to heal’ but when I get them close to being healed, they have a strange incident that brings them back to square one: fall off of a roof, try to lift a full-size vehicle ‘because they have to’, butted by a sheep in the middle of nowhere. Subconsciously, they aren’t ready to heal. What will they do when they are no longer limited by their pain? Who will they be? They call in a road-block or set-back. Maybe I’ve attracted these people because I used to struggle with a similar identity issue. I was obsessed with the fact that I didn’t feel right.

For those that are ready to heal, the progress goes much differently. They transform. It is not only their body, but their mental state, their personality, their general energy level and more that heals. For those ready to heal, the process of healing them is like a puzzle or a game: it is fun. I am always amazed by them and what they can do with just a little awareness.

A patient I’ve been seeing for a while, who recently ‘committed’ to healing, off-handedly mentioned that her right inner thigh is always tight on one side. She noticed that her pants leg on that side is always twisted. When she stands too long, the right inner thigh starts aching.

I listened, feeling curiosity build within me. That happens to me too…

I readily admitted that I am familiar with what she described, but that I had not figured out the root of this issue within myself even, besides my unwillingness to be truly vulnerable. We would embark on this mini-quest for inner-thigh equality together.

The month after this admission was extremely transformative for me. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, I just changed a lot. I went to Bangladesh and returned. There I learned how to manage myself in a leadership position. I returned and gained a new perspective on what community means and learned to stop controlling other people’s processing time for their feelings. I learned to speak even more honestly and to do so without that potato-chip-bag-shriveling-in-fire feeling that had accompanied it before.

I was busy and as I always do, had forgotten about my patient’s thigh issue; a consequence of being present.

At some point after all the changes, I went skiing to find that my inner thighs were relaxed as they had never been before. I stretched down to touch my toes. My knees were equally positioned. Huh…I must have let go of something big!

During our next visit, I entered a flow state that comes rarely for me. By the end of the visit, her hips were balanced. The twisted pelvis was no longer. The pant legs were even. It had happened with ease. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried in the past, but somehow this time, her body responded differently.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later realized that I must have healed the issue that was causing the inner-thigh tension in myself, possibly a fear of taking risks and failing, which allowed me to pass this unconscious understanding on to my patient. Whatever emotional or energetic issue, belief or trauma was causing this chronic inconvenience had gone.

I feel encouraged knowing that it is possible to heal others with better skill, the more healed I am myself. I started my own journey with a lot of issues and a lot of awareness. While I still have much healing to do, I find joy in knowing that one day in this life or future ones, I too will heal people who are ready with just a touch, just like Jesus.