Mother Five by Licia Berry, 2006
I was reminded this weekend that I am a healer. I’ve always known this, but haven’t always wanted to own it. I think there are a lot of us out there.
I don’t have to say a word. Just my presence, a smile, will sometimes awaken the desire in others to offer up their wounds for me to kiss. If I offer more, such as a hug, a home cooked meal, a conversation, or god forbid an invitation to stay in my house for some days, the healing can be more wild and wooly. But opportunity for healing nonetheless.
Healing is not always pretty. In fact, I frequently find that healing requires that it will hurt more before it gets better. This is true whether resetting a broken bone (OW), ripping a scab off an infected wound (OW), or re-opening a heart hurt that has been glossed over by a desire not to feel pain.
We went camping to the coast for the thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. There we met a lovely family while strolling on the beach. There was an instant connection, a feeling of wanting to get to know these folks. Conversation led to enjoyment of each other, and we got together for dinner that night.
In a very short time over delicious food, our conversation turned to deeper heart matters, such as love, marriage, relationship, commitment, priorities, and family. Our sharing turned very personal, very quickly. Old hurts started pouring out as well as the tears. For some reason, the fact of the four of us sitting together opened up a safety zone within which the swirling energies of love could stir up and cleanse what was unsaid in each of us, and healing could occur.
I don’t find this unusual; in fact, it seems to be the way it goes most of the time. I know from personal experience that, when the ideal factors are present, alchemy can occur. Sometimes the chemistry in a group is not so ideal for transformation, but for another purpose. Perhaps an example might be a social gathering that is intended for networking or making friends. But I always hunger for the chemistry that allows true and deep opening and therefore healing to happen. Not adept at the “how about this weather” types of conversations, I seem to need to know the precious soul of a person in five minutes or less.
I hesitated several times in writing this because I don’t want to sound egotistical. To say that I am a healer could very well incur the wrath of those who don’t understand the subtle energetic nature of healing, or those who say that healing is a dying art or not needed in the world. To be a healer necessitates that some will not trust you.
But others can say that they are a lawyer or a gardener or doctor or a writer or a chef….so why not say that I am a healer? I don’t pretend to understand it fully….far from it. But, at a very basic molecular level, this is what I am.
I notice after 44 years that my good friends are pretty brave people. Or maybe tenacious. Or in the case of my husband, very very forgiving. I’m intense, and not an easy person to be friends with. There is something about my presence that reveals the wounds, makes those hurts rush to the skin and inflame the face, where the person who possesses them then has the choice to yield them to me and therefore relinquish their smallness to love, or to hang on to their construct and fight. And interpreting their discomfort as something that I have done, they will sometimes judge me for having innately, unknowingly called the pain to the surface. Frequently I am projected upon…as a maker of conflict, as stupid, as difficult, as fill in the blank. It makes me think of the man who called the flounder to the water’s edge…the fish came from deep within the sea to grant the man’s wishes. But eventually the man asked for too much, and when the wishes were taken away, he projected onto the fish as the cause for all his ills.
I don’t feel understood by many people. I sometimes feel I am a wild force too big to be contained, and that the only safe course of action for someone who wants to be near me is to surrender. Of course, the nature of free will beings is to resist this, even in times when their well-being may depend on it.
Perhaps it is the abundant amount of mothering energy I seem to have embodied since I was a little girl….friends in school would confide in me, seeming to know that I was a present listener. My body has always been on the rounder side, like the Great Mother archetype…soft arms for hugging, all breasts and hips, large lips and hands for kissing and holding, long feet for holding me up and grounding me to this earth, long wild and wavy hair, and big blue eyes that seem to take you in unconditionally, pain and all. I was born to be a Mother.
I don’t have many close friends. I am blessed with a host of devoted readership around the globe. I am associated with esteemed international colleagues. I have many, many soul sisters, and a few soul brothers. Perhaps this distant closeness that is created by the digital age is a way that I can feel my kinship with others without their having to be so close to be as to get burned by my healer’s presence.
My beloved and my two children must have souls of steel, or rather more accurately, the tensile strength of love and many, many lifetimes of soul wisdom, in order to be with me every single day. Of course, my sons will leave someday and go into the world, and our relationship will change. But my Beloved…goodness, the resolve it must take to love me and choose again and again to remain.
I feel best, safest, most sane when I am around others who value honesty and integrity as I do. Who are honest with themselves about how they feel, who look their own darkness in the eye, name it, and choose to do what it takes to heal it. It is a courageous path that many do not take. But those are the people that I want to know in the world.
