This blog post was inspired by thinking about another blog post I plan to write about which therapy to choose. And my opening line was something I said many years ago on the topic of which therapy is best. “If you are open to healing any therapy will work, but if you are not none of them will”. Healing is an inside job, the therapist simply helps and supports it, but does not cause it.
But what do we mean by healing and is it the same thing as being cured? My own journey has forced me to widen my perspective of healing beyond cure. Those that know me will know that I lost my only child at the end of the pregnancy, my relationship with her father did not survive, and what ensued were years of social and then biological infertility which was unexplained. In that time the only “healing” I could countenance was a live birth to my own healthy child. I read many testimonies of miracle healings, and it is true that medical prognoses are not always accurate. Books I read were:
“Dying to be me” by Anita Moorjani in which by changing her outlook she recovers from the terminal stages of stage 4 cancer to complete remission.
‘Why I survive AIDS” by Niro Assistant where again a complete change in mind-set led to her going from being diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s when it was close to a death sentence to becoming and remaining HIV negative and healthy.
“Change your mind, heal your body” by Anna Parkinson which is also a story of remission from cancer.
‘Inconceivable” by Julia Indichova who after being told she would never conceive again had a healthy baby following her own healing journey.
“Heal your life” by Louise Hay whose life work is based on the fact the outer effects are the result of inner though patterns.
All of these remarkable stories gave me hope. If some-one could cure themselves of cancer or AIDS by changing themselves, surely I could do something as simple as get pregnant and have a baby. But none of my efforts led to a baby, the pregnancy I had years ago remained a one-off. It was only when I realised at 48 that I was post menopause, and that not only would it be a heck of a miracle, it was also no longer desirable for me, did I begin to heal. While there are women of that age and a little older having babies I realised it was not for me. Five years earlier I would have grabbed it with both hands, but for me, at 48, it was game over. What happened next was something, even 5 years earlier, I could not have countenanced. Free from the constant pressure, my mind opened to the rest of my life and I began to make peace with being a woman who had not raised children, and to wholeheartedly believe that while it makes me different, it does not make me less. I started to see that I could still live with meaning and purpose even though I did not have children. In other words, the healing came, and continues.
Another story, far more remarkable, of a healing that did not include a cure is that of Joni Eareckson Tada. Joni became quadriplegic at the age of 17 following a diving accident. I read her biography “Joni” many years ago when I was a teenager and the arduous journey she went on. The anger with God, as she is a practising Christian, followed by praying for a miracle cure that never came. But in time, once Joni let go of the possibility of a cure, she began to make peace with God and her disability, and then to thrive. She became a renowned artist holding the paint brush in her mouth, and has done a great deal of work supporting and campaigning for others with disabilities.
So while for some healing does come in the form of a cure, the disappearance of the condition in spite of the odds, for others it is more of a transformation of our relationship with our condition or circumstances. Having a very narrow definition of what healing means, and, as I did for many years, believing that only a cure would do, perhaps holds healing back. And maybe allowing a wider definition of what it means to heal opens the door to a range of possibilities.
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