Healer.
"It's unethical to use the term healer."
"It's cultural appropriation."
"It's too big a liability to say you heal."
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It's funny, isn't it, how easily a word - or an ideology, a mindset, a belief, can be squashed by the powers that be if you ostracize anyone who identifies with it.
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"You can't call yourself a healer!" -- but... why not?
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The truth is, I don't heal you. You heal you. I just hold the conscious space in which you feel safe to heal yourself.
"To me, healing means that patients no longer suffer from the symptoms they complained of when they first consulted, and that these symptoms do not come back after the treatment
has been completed."
Dr. David Servan-Schreiber
What's in a word....?
heal /hēl/ verb
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(of a person or treatment) cause (a wound, injury, or person) to become sound or healthy again.
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become sound or healthy again.
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alleviate (a person's distress or anguish).
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heal·er /ˈhÄ“lÉ™r/ noun
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a person who seeks to cure diseases or heal injuries by means other than conventional medical treatment.
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a person or thing that mends or repairs something.
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something that alleviates distress or anguish.
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In the painful wake of a birth that nearly left me for dead, in my own desperate pursuit for healing, I was told by my healers that I was one as well. Their words flew through me like electric shock and I felt anger, discomfort, and combative retort.
"I don't want to be a healer!" I rebutted. "I want to be CEO of my tech startup." I firmly ascertained (with my strong/toxic inner pursuit'y masculine strong at the reigns of what I thought it meant to be live a 'successful' life). Every part of me wanted to be the thing that others looked up to and drooled over: powerful, affluent, bulletproof. Except that in being those things, I wasn't those things at all. Despite my lavish lifestyle and hedonistic trysts across the globe I was emotionally void, energetically decimated, spiritually disconnected, and - if I'm being perfectly honest - just burnt the fu*k out.
On the outside I was everything others oogled. On the inside, I was dead.
When the world locked down about a year later I was thrown into my shadows in a way nothing could have prepared me for. As I woke up in utter panic day by day, opening my eyes and barely able to catch my breath as I obsessively checked the previous day's "cases", the Universe clearly had other plans for me. Unbeknowst to me at the time, my journey of healing took a massively sharp turn... one in which the healing became the healer.
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I have, unknowingly, studied pain my whole life. I have trained in university, with Buddhist monks and with Andean Priestesses. I have learned from empty-pocket backpackers and Bahamian billionaires alike. I have practiced. I have healed. I am healing.
And to silence the word heal is to silence a practice that the World, and each of us within it, collectively need today. More. Than. Ever. Before.
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I am a trauma therapist. I am a shadow therapist. I am a vehement lover of your inner child. I am a healer. And so are you.​
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We are all healers.