Healing is a journey, not a destination. What does it mean to heal your mind, body, and soul? How exactly do you undergo that process? Once your body heals, it starts curing your emotional, mental, and spiritual conditions as well. Healing is not just limited to pain from physical wounds and injuries—it also applies to your mind, body, and soul.
Healing requires us to be willing to change. Healing invites us to be accepting of change, accepting of our self as sufficient before our ego that always feels insufficient and judges our current situation as not enough. Healing gives us the courage to make conscious choices and look at things from a different perspective.
Healing From a Buddhist perspective invites us to consider and understand that we have a physical body, and that this body will feel pain, will have disease, will age, will eventually die and decay. Our bodies are change. And yet our bodies will also experience states of pleasure, vitality, vigor. Both sides, mind and body, soul and spirit are but one coin with two faces, both sides are part of healing and health.
We confuse health with a cure. We confuse healing with the removal of disease, health as the absence of pain and discomfort. Indeed, that may all happen as a part of the acupuncture process even lasting for a lifetime, but the human form is in constant flux influenced by external and internal forces working to maintain equilibrium. Health, like equilibrium, is not a static state.
Pain and disease are signals from the psyche of emotional, psychological, physical imbalance. Yes, sometimes pain is a simple injury requiring a muscle rebalance or mend, but in all the different types of pain, regardless of their causes, there is the opportunity for awareness and growth.
Pain and disease are messengers who want to tell you a story about yourself or invite you to change the one you are currently telling yourself. True self-discovery begins where your comfort zone ends.
Pain is as much a matter of the processing of pain, treating the signals in the central nervous system and brain, our interpretation of pain as it is a physical injury, treating the bodily hurt. Chronic pain is often a matter of the feedback loop happening in the brain and central nervous system. Healing is often a matter of interpretation of pain and suffering. Healing is as much about turning wounds into wisdom as it is healing or curing physical issues.
Healing can be helped or hindered by the stories we tell ourselves about the pain, the disease, ourselves. Can we listen to the message? Can we look at things from a different perspective? Can we change the story we tell ourselves as part of our healing process? Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Both are an opportunity to grow.
