Thoughts on healing: caring and bearing witness

It could be a tenet of Wicca (but it's not, since Wicca tends toward tenetlessness) that Witches Heal. Though we often speak as though healing is something we do for another person, as in a doctor healing her patient, in fact we can only heal ourselves. I can care for another person and provide some conditions for healing, but only he heals himself. Similarly, and of concern to many Pagans, we cannot heal the earth; but we can care for the earth and provide conditions under which it will thrive and heal itself.

One of the most important things we can do as healers is to bear witness: to hold a non-judgmental but discerning space for the person or being who is healing. We need to be able to discern what would help them (an action, a holding, a medicine, a clean needle, a kind word, a pointed observation, a touch), but we cannot sit in judgment, for judgment limits and constrains where healing needs room for natural expansion and contraction. Bearing witness means being able to see things as they are, not as we wish they would be, and to "hold space" compassionately for whatever arises. Much of the work of a healer lies in being present to another, not buffeted by or frightened by their emotions, not sucked in, not closed down, not colluding, not withholding. Being with. And in that being, seeing what else might be needed.

4 years of desire

Just a quick note to celebrate that I've been keeping this blog for four years. So much has changed in my life, but writing about that will have to wait. Happy blogiversary to me!

Witches heal

I found the following on this week's page in We'Moon '09. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last couple years; I think she's exactly right.

I began thinking about ancestral memory and what if? What if the wounds I carry are not solely from my lifetime, but also from my mother's, my father's, and grandparents' passed genetically and psychically? What if the multiple abuses I have processed in therapy are from ancestral wounds as well as current, and what if the connections extend beyond even ancestral lineage to some kind of interspecies link?

I feel lighter when I entertain these thoughts and constantly renew my commitment to my path of healing, not only for my family and myself but also for all beings. I am beginning to see that the web of life weaves connections between all of time, space and place. And how each small healing benefits the whole cosmos.

(Janice Young)

Now on twitter

I started tweeting last week and am having lots of fun spouting random thoughts onto the web (like blogging, but more pithy). If you're a regular reader and would like to follow, drop me an email and I'll tell you how to find me.

A sense of wonder so indestructible

Happy birthday to me! I'm 39 today and thrilled to be incarnated. Still, I called my mother this morning and apologized for that whole labor thing.

A quotation I want to remember for Lucian's Wiccaning/baby blessing ceremony:

"If I had influence over the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life." (Rachel Carson)