Healing

In some ways, healing has taken many forms during my life. I\’ve turned to doctors, hypnotists, psychotherapists, priests, energy healers, massage therapists, psychics, naturopaths and herbalists to help me with problems that have run the gamut from broken bones to inexplicable grief to depression. I want to be well. And I want others to be well, too, because I think wellness and happiness go hand-in-hand.

Yet as my practice of A Course in Miracles has deepened, I have increasingly accepted the fact that sickness – like every other physical manifestation in the physically manifest world – is merely an illusion, one that stands between what I am in Truth and God. Healing, says the Course, \”is accomplished the instant the sufferer no longer sees any value in pain (M-5.I.1:1).

That is a profound idea! It is empowering and liberating. But it is also intimidating. For most of us, including me most of the time, our experience of sickness is that it is a natural consequence of being human in a human body. And in fact it is! But we are not the we that we think we are. Our bodies are optional. When they decay and disappear, we go on. What we are is not contained by a body any more than what lilac blossoms are is contained by little purple buds. Our practice – our healing, if you will – aims at making this concept applicable, making it our experience rather than a nice idea to chat about at our local ACIM study group.

To be healed is to be responsible. It is to recognize that we are decision-makers and that we can choose to revel in our Oneness with God or we can choose to stay separated from God a little while longer. In a way, the healed mind is simply a mind that has accepted the inevitable. It accepts that it is itself an aspect of God\’s mind and that it always was. Why resist that? What is gained?

Yet we do resist. I know I do. The articles gathered here reflect my ongoing efforts to understand what it means to heal, how to heal and even, perhaps, to celebrate the experience of being healed. I share them with you in hopes that they might shed a little light on your own healing. We are in this together, healed and unhealed alike.