Q: What is healing?
A: Ten years of practicing medicine, and I find this hard to articulate. Which is why I am interested in asking myself this question. I am interested in asking myself a complex question and then needing to answer in a short amount of space. Impossible. Take two opposing concepts and place them together—a Daoist practice, so that’s nice. I don’t know what is healing. This is the thing. It is not one thing. And neither is illness, sickness, pathology. A serious can of worms. Worms! They can make your soil nice, or they can take residence in your gut and wreak havoc. Or more distinctly, they can live in your gut and make you happy, or they can live in your gut and render you host of a possession. What’s the difference? This is one key. In understanding. Can we understand healing without understanding illness? You can be ill without being ill. And not ill while being ill. What’s the difference? You can heal while remaining ill. You can get over it while remaining afflicted. It’s all possible and what’s the difference. I began my career caring very much about illness and being able to do something about it, becoming able to do something about it. If I am being honest, it goes back to the terror I experienced witnessing my mother die within 6 months of a cancer diagnosis, when I was young. She died almost symptomless, it advanced so quickly. It seemed no one knew what they were doing. It seemed I could have done it better. I learned medicine because I wanted to know where the edge was. I wanted to touch life and life, making something happen. And I think I have done that: I have learned to make something happen. The year I began to practice as a healer, I became sick enough that I was only able to lie in bed and be with myself. All other activities, including activities that were supposed to be healing, made it all worse. I laid there for a long time. It lasted longer than I believed I could tolerate. I waited until god lifted the boot off my neck, and I healed, and I died, and I prepared for death. Some illness is life threatening and you end up living. And some illness leads to, ends with death. Life is not guaranteed with healing. The only thing guaranteed is that we die. And I think healing has something to do with that. Am I authorized to say more, make a statement?
This was first published in Scene Report, a publication out from Dominica Publishing in L.A.