For many years the pagan community has had an attitude of total healing. Someone is sick and Pagans line up to bring total healing or restoration to a fully functioning body.
It reminds me of a time when I was still not clear about the autoimmune disorder that I suffered from. I was at a festival, feeling tired and generally very sick. A healer there, very well intentioned, told me to come to her camp. She laid me on the ground and she did a chakra aura cleansing with rocks and minerals on my chakra points. I didn’t feel anything significant at the time. But a few hours later, I was throwing up and much worse than I had been. By the end of the weekend, I was in a hospital getting my appendix and my gall bladder removed. I feel this healing session did what was intended: tried to heal my body back to total health.
There seems to be an assumption about what “healing” looks like—a restoration to a fully functioning body. My body, in a weakened condition, ejected my appendix and gall bladder when faced with the goal to restore my body to a totally healthy state, a state prohibited by DNA strands that had been altered by my Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Years later at the Parliament for the Worlds Religions I ran into another healer. This one was going on and on about a healing class they had just taken. He said, “If we could get people to just think themselves well and that their mind has that power…..”
“What,” I responded, “If their DNA is broken. Can they think their DNA back to “wellness?””
He stood looking at me while I watched his mind slowly digest what I had really asked. Can you physically, mentally, and psychically think yourself well if the illness is generated at a DNA level?
This healer didn’t have a ready response and chose to disengage by walking away.
To further complicate matters, when total healing is an attitude pushed by healers, it is rooted in a very ableist mindset. The idea that wellness only equals total healing leaves an entire spectrum of healing untapped. And leads those with illness to feel that anything less than total healing is a mental, spiritual, or psychic failing.
I do believe in the power of the mind to heal, but I don’t think we can overcome all illnesses just by thinking about it. It is like global pollution. We can harness psychic energy to heal the Earth, but if we don’t stop polluting, the Earth will only improve so much with our good thoughts, well wishes, and magic. And to take the metaphor further, not only do we know how NOT to pollute the Earth (less fossil fuels, less garbage, less coal), we also know how to generate wellness in the earth (electric cars, recycling, alternative energy). No one believes that the Earth will ever be free of the effects of human pollution. Even if humans are eliminated, our impact on the Earth will remain.
There needs to be a shift from the belief that healing is the traditional concept of no illness, everything functioning wholly, to an optimum healing for an individual. What I meant by this is best demonstrated by a Big Named Pagan who taught my coven the Chalice In Drinking of Wellness ritual. A group centers itself around the person who is sick. The coven chalice is passed person to person to be charged with a purpose, and then the person who is sick drinks everything in the chalice, drinking in the energy that was raised. We were explicitly taught not to center our energy on “healing” but on specific wellness goals. If someone has cancer and is going through chemotherapy, then you focus on easing the effects of chemotherapy, not on the cancer being gone. In this manner, a member of our coven had little to no chemotherapy effects like vomiting and significant fatigue. The cancer resolved, and she has been cancer-free since. However, our coven didn’t focus on beating cancer, we focused on the more immediate need of the individual’s health journey.
In the case of cancer, there is a beginning, middle, and end of the effect of illness, but what if someone has Ehlers-Danlos, MS, a POTS disorder, or other genetically created autoimmune disorder? When working on “healing” for these types of illnesses, is it reasonable to focus on healing as a return to traditional views of health with no sign of disease at all?
The focus of our healing should be to return the body to what would be an optimum healthy state for each individual. This might not be a traditional view of health as being free of any sign of disease. It might mean a decrease in inflammation in the body, a stabilization of blood pressure, or a decrease in the body pain. These actionable items are more concrete and more likely to have a positive impact on the person who is ill without the added stress of feeling that healing must be complete and total.
A good example of this is chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. This chronic condition does not respond well to the idea of a return to the physical state of the body before the traumatic episode happened. Largely because trauma cannot be forgotten, it only can have a reduction on its impact of the body. C-PTSD has been shown to have an effect on the DNA in a body. It also has an impact on telomeres. Telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes, made of DNA and protein. Telomeres prevent the chromosomes from fraying or fusing together and protect the genetic information within the DNA strand. The more damage and excessively shortened telomeres become, the greater the cellular aging and the more disease. (page 87, The Deepest Well, Nadine Burke Harris, M.D.)
Telomeres have been proven to respond to exercise, diet, and meditation. The longer the telomeres, the more improved a chronic condition is. (page 88, The Deepest Well, Nadine Burke Harris, M.D.). Consequently, this is an avenue for energetic healing. Focusing on lengthening and strengthening telomeres can improve chronic conditions. This is an example of optimum healing.
There is no striving to restore the body to a pre-trauma condition; there is an active working on the actual mechanisms in the body that will promote better health for the individual.
Optimum healing is the best outcome within the confines of DNA damage that has already been done. It is the idea that healing doesn’t mean a cessation of all illness. It can mean an easing of symptoms. This idea is also free from ableist thinking, which is in and of itself a whole blog post.
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