Part 3 - Life in Awareness

Healing

We can all feel when a part of us has been hurt. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes fear. Sometimes a wound has been with us for so long that it has started to feel like part of who we are. And so we begin to look for healing.

We are not speaking here about medicine in the ordinary sense. We are not speaking about a doctor setting a bone, treating an infection, or prescribing the right medication. That has its place and its value. We are speaking about healing in the inner sense, where what is hurt cannot be seen on an X-ray or measured in a blood test.

Across human history, there have always been people who held this role. In some cultures, this was the shaman. In others, it was the traditional healer, the ritual leader, or the wise elder. Their work might involve herbs and smoke. It might include prayer or song. Sometimes silence itself became part of the healing space, together with symbols and ceremony. Different cultures gave the process different forms, but the deeper pattern was often the same: a human being in pain entered a space set apart from ordinary life and became available to something deeper. That part matters. But it is easy to misunderstand what is actually happening there.

The danger begins when healing is presented as something another person does to us, while we remain dependent on them for access to it. Then the unspoken message becomes that we must come to this person again. We must return when pain rises. We must pay for access, and we must keep needing them. The form may look ancient or modern, sacred or therapeutic, but the structure is the same. Power stays with the healer, and the one seeking healing remains the one who must keep coming back. This is where things become unclear.

Because no one can manufacture awareness for us. No one can own it, store it, and hand it out in portions. At most, another person can help create conditions in which we are more able to recognise what has always been here.

That is a very different thing.

If you did receive this kind of help, did it return you to yourself, or make you more dependent?

We can feel the difference between someone who makes the room revolve around their power and someone whose presence helps us become more honest in our own body.

A few well-timed words may open a little space. Presence may allow the body to feel safe enough to listen. Ritual can gather attention, and guided attention can show us where we are still holding on. Sometimes simple human care is enough.

Through such conditions, a healer may help us become still enough, present enough, and open enough to recognize awareness of life again. And in that opening, something begins to re-order itself. Nothing has to be imported from outside, because something real has been allowed to come forward.

This also means that the method is not the deepest thing. The herbs, the smoke, the ritual are not the deepest thing. These may all have value, they may prepare the ground, create focus and attention, calm the mind, and help the body let go. But what heals is not finally the outer form. What heals is the opening in which awareness and inner coherence can be sensed again.

If someone truly helps us, they do not bind us more tightly to themselves. They point us back to what is already present. They help us discover that the deepest ground of healing was never absent, even if it was overlooked, buried, or covered by pain.

Deep hurt remains real. Some wounds need time before anything can open. They need safety, so the body no longer has to protect itself every moment. Support may be needed too, together with patience and a steady presence that does not force the process. Yet healing is not dependence; it is the gradual rediscovery of what has not been broken underneath the wound. That is the real turning point.

The moment we stop believing that another person possesses what we lack, something begins to change. Help may still be useful, guidance may still be beautiful, and ritual may still have meaning. But the centre of gravity shifts. We no longer stand before another as someone waiting to be fixed. We begin to sense that what heals is already nearer than any method. It is right here, right now.

What remains unacknowledged in you beneath the wish to be healed?

And perhaps this is why all genuine healing, in the deepest sense, returns us to the same recognition: what we were seeking was not elsewhere. It had been obscured, but it had not gone missing.

When we forget this, healing becomes a market.

When we remember it, healing becomes a return.