Living With Trauma: The Healers, 24

How to be a healer. I don't think there is an instruction manual. Perhaps I could write one: "Healing For Dummies" I could call it. There is a self-help book published every minute and two to swallow them. But how to be a healer? This is not a step-by-step, it is a process. It is a living and ongoing process that has no real beginning or end. It is a reality that one could call, shall we say, very chicken and egg. To be a healer connotes that there is something that must be healed. In this case the disease is us, it is our broken, damaged and so chronically wounded humanity. It isn't that I'm promoting here the notion of Original Sin, which is really a theological debate I would prefer to leave alone on these pages. Sin or not, we are certainly originally damaged. Our way of living, of treating one another, our horrible blood-drenched history of war, massacre, rape and genocide is not going to suggest that we are in the greatest condition, and I've already touched on some of the lovely things we have been doing to our planet and our natural environment. This isn't to infer that we are totally incapable of good, but it seems that all of the good things that we do and have done throughout our sad and tragic human history have been to correct, ameliorate, reduce damage, to try to heal and make reparations. We are not moving forward, we are merely moving backwards a little more slowly. Any healing that we can offer ourselves is going to be mostly palliative. This isn't to say that we will never move forward, but for now, likely for many centuries to come, we are going to have to work on slowing our backward motion. When we have really begun to transform into a collective humanity that operates and thrives on the currency of love, then we can say that we are actually moving forward. Till then, should we ever see that day arrive, I wouldn't hold my breath. In the meantime we have the healers and the wannabes. The wannabes have always had it pretty good. They haven't really suffered a lot on their own account. They have never been crushed or broken. They're lives have never been anything but privileged. They come from well-off, well educated families, and many have graduated with honours from the best institutions of higher education. They have enjoyed, as their birthright and entitlement, success after success in life, enjoying good robust health, they are well-married, well-familied, well-employed, well-travelled and well-connected. Not stinking rich, maybe, but they have never wanted for anything. They have no knowledge of that horrible knowledge of life and absolutely no insight into the terrible wisdom. That's okay. We still need them. They are the administrators and policy wonks. The wannabes, those who are motivated by noble visions for a better world, run and work and volunteer in not-for-profits and NGO's. They organize and coordinate. They are often doctors, nurses, social workers, case managers, rehab professionals, artists, visionaries. They are not the real healers, but they provide the foundations, scaffolding, walls, roofs and ballast that the real healers often are going to require if we are going to flourish in our sacred calling. Some of us, perhaps many of us, for all the trauma we have suffered, will be sufficiently recovered and able to participate in the work of administration and ballast, as well, just as there will be those of the wannabes who also are going to encounter such tragedy and trauma in their own lives as to enable them to cross the divide. I know some of these people and they are as wonderful as they are rare. In the meantime, without dodging, criticizing or envying one another, we really need to get to work, because alone none of us is going to accomplish a lot. That's it, Gentle Reader, white-knuckle it, and repeat after me, "Today, I will not badmouth the yuppies", or, "Today, I will try not to call a panhandler a loser." Okay, it's a start.