I am a healer tired of hurting...others

Background on why this piece is interesting for me:

I actually wrote it at the same time that I was writing The Water Bearer, Not the Water, during the Mystic Soul Conference back in June. As in, I sat in a Quiet Room, dimming down from noise and other folks’ energy and journaling, and in about an hour wrote both pieces.

But the Holy Spirit had me share only one at the time, which I found odd. This seemed much more honest. The other is both true and pretty, but this for me is a much deeper look at my spiritual-emotional state. And the Holy Spirit simply said, “It’s not time.”

Having penned Off the mountain and out of the clouds a few weeks ago, I better understand why. I wrote this piece understanding where I was and what I needed to do, but not yet having opened to where specifically I was located in my experience of impostor’s syndrome, or sense of unworthiness, that I knew where to begin in my journey forward.

So earlier this week, They asked—That second piece from Mystic Soul—you ready? Which also means—are you ready to begin living it? In both instances: Yes, and yes. So here we go, y’all.

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I am a healer. I am many things, and I know as a calling and transformation coach that one of the most important things I need to remember about my Self and so my ministry is exactly this: I am a healer.

Does anyone remember that adage that if we have to keep telling people that we are something—rich, powerful, important, healed—it’s because we don’t believe it ourselves? It’s very true for me, because I want others to receive me as healer. And yet I keep forgetting that I am healer.

In his book on vocation, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer runs down how various conditions of life in this world disrupt our knowing and living who we are created to be. I had written something similar in a letter to a friend about a month before I ever read this. When I read it so clearly and concisely while casually reading his book, I about fell out:

“We arrive in this world with birthright gifts—then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse of us them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are training away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then—if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss—we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”

I am now in my “second life” of rediscovering and reclaiming who I am, since I was 28, and there are things I have been discovering, and have to keep rediscovering, that I am.

I am a mystic.

I am an empath.

I am a lover.

I am a helper.

I am created and called beloved.

I am created to help others affirm and live their own calling and belovedness.

I am created to help us affirm one another’s callings and belovedness.

I am a healer.

I would love very much to live these continual rediscoveries only in a proactive and affirmative sense of knowing my Self. We’re just gonna build great communities and love, and yay!

Yet I find myself lately sent and called to spaces in which I find myself being placed on the defensive—literally demanded to defend in various ways who I believe I am and why I am there—because the group into which I have been called believes that it has a monopoly on determining what calling is, what it can look like, and who gets to anoint and appoint everyone. (Which is funny, because I thought that was God’s job…)

Frequently, these are folks who believe themselves to be spiritually elder, and unfortunately, at least in this vein, turn out simply to be chronologically older. Or they position themselves as further along in liberation, but haven’t yet reached the point of discovering that this means that freedom doesn’t mean the world looking the way that they or any single one of us believes it should.

And then I disappoint myself in forgetting myself again. Because instead of living as a healer, helper, created/called/beloved, love, empathetically, or with the beyond/above of mysticism, I get mad as hell. I get disappointed. I get angry that I came to these folks because they are supposed to be “ahead,” and yet I discover myself in a position of needing to lead or facilitate when I really and truly just want to be somewhere in the comfortable middle. I get highly human, and forget the whole of my Self altogether.

So I sneer. And I long sigh while I explain in a voice that strongly insinuates that I shouldn’t have to explain. I don’t mean to—wait, yes I do. What I mean is that I don’t want to be at a place that I mean to, but that’s where I’ve been and that’s what happens. Every time. Because really, I’m sad and scared that I need to explain.

If I have to explain to the folks who I thought were leading, who believe they’re leading—if it turns out I am the leader in this way—I’m pretty sure we’re screwed. So I want them to hurry, and catch up, and take the reins again before I destroy everything for all of us.

While I wish my Self to be elder, I’m my Self currently still in the nascence of understanding what it lives like to engage my giftedness and calling, living and sharing them with wisdom and grace. I now know who I am and what I am called and created to do as distinct from, yet inherently intertwined with, one another. And, I am still in process of understanding what that lives like in the reality of our world—how beyond greeting and inviting, we hold holy ground and sustain in belovedness when we feel met with disbelief and distrust of our giftedness, even and especially by those to whom we were taught to look ahead.

Also at this stage, I see the enormity of and so am still somewhat afraid to be responsible for the gifts with which I am created, and how I am called to engage and use them at this particular point in human history. I still want to “play small” as Marianne Williamson says, and devolve to unnecessary tantrums as I look for someone else to be the elder in this. Surely—there is someone else. Anyone else. When it’s in fact, in this way, my turn to step up and center in living my life and Self in full. Because they already have a work and ministry into which they invite and facilitate others. This is mine.

The true irony and disappointment of it all is that, as long as I choose to remain here, now conscious of what is happening, why, and what it all means, I am undoing my own Self. I continually undercut my own belief and insistence that this “other world is not only possible” but, as Auntie Arundhati affirms, so close that “we can hear her breathing.”

When I who hear and believe in and see a world of genuine love and compassion am refusing to live it when others cannot see how, and I live instead out of my anger that they won’t just admit or acknowledge that—why and how should anyone else believe? I don’t just “play small”—I go small and incredibly petty, defeating my own purpose.

I cry about once a week because I think, “It’s just me, and I can’t do all of this!” I know that it’s not just me, and that I’m not supposed to do all of this. But I keep forgetting.

I cry about once a week because I know that the vision I see in my spirit, I will probably never glimpse in this life. Humanity has a lot of healing to do. My Self strongly included. And then I remind myself that as there are currently 7 billion+ people on this planet, I am not the only person facing folks denying their calling. And there are billions (trillions?) more who came before us in a world that doesn’t want us to pursue “where our joy meets the world’s greatest need” (thank you, Frederick!), but instead wants us to be silent and simply trudge to the end of life.

And many of those people pursued their call and their way of healing despite the odds against them.

If Moses could march a rickety ragtag group of folks through the wilderness for 40 years, himself cussing up a storm and knowing at a certain point that he was never going to see the Promised Land, that tells me I get to cuss on my mountaintop with the folks who affirm and stand there with me so I can live my calling next week.

And if Christ got up on the cross to demonstrate how much he stood in what he believed and preached—knowing full well that humanity was gone continue to act a fool even long after he died and despite what so many of us claim we heard and believe him to have said say—I get to ask God if They will take my cup from me when it’s too heavy to hold or seems toxic to drink. But when God insists otherwise, I just don’t have a lot of faithful ground to excuse my not living what I know and believe, and then complaining about the state and condition of the world.

Jesus died for loving us through and despite our foolishness, and I’m over here like, “I’m not showing up for the meeting about loving one another until they learn to act right!”

In the mindset of giving up and giving in, I become an intentional or passive part of the very human problems, hurts, and harms I decry in our world. No, thank you, please. In the name and in the vein of brown, wooly-headed Jesus.

So I’ve decided. And I have to keep deciding. So I’m going to keep deciding:

I’m living what I live for the beautiful and healed life that I can co-create and participate with before I pass from here.

I’m living what I live for every person who’s here now living towards the same—some long before I ever discovered my own journey, and so inspired me.

I’m living what I live to encourage and invite those who are on the cusp but as of yet don’t or cannot believe that it is possible. They still need to see folks like me, just like I needed to see the folks who entered before me.

I’m living what I live for those who are my peers and contemporaries, because I want to show up with them, just as I hope that others who are called show up with me.

And I’m living what I live especially for everyone who comes after us who, as elders, care enough to love enough to heal what we are able—they who will run the next leg, and take the healing still deeper.

Generational curses exist because we don’t live to end them—not because they are without end.

I’ll read this again in several months and cry because, “You forgot again! Again!” But I’ll also remember. Again. And I’ll remember longer. And I’ll remember more deeply and intuitively. I’ll be thankful for each of the journeys I’ve made before on this invitation and lesson. Because of those journeys, and because of remembering, I’ll do each turn deeper—more genuinely, and with greater wisdom and love.

And this is truly what it is to be, above all else, a healer:

To rediscover and do over and over again, as needed each time, what it means and what it takes to heal.

To notice and work to end what in the first place creates wounds.

To continually learn tending to wounds—to engage the painstaking and sometimes painful work of sloughing the excess and dead cells from the scarring, which would otherwise become keloidal.

To praise the keloids we have for teaching us to truly tend to healing wounds, rather than abandoning them to themselves as if they and their healing are not part of our greater body. Because in being many parts and one body, those wounds and their healing become inextricable part with us. How they remain with and live through us is up to us, our treatment, or our lack thereof.

To remind us that we must reopen wounds when they are infected so that we can purge them and heal them well and fully, or else our poor tending inevitability leads to further sickness and disease.

We must learn to live and do in and for our Selves what we seek to help others do in the world. Which is true of all of us, yes? I can never encourage and help others to live and do what I cannot compel and commit my Self to live and do.

So. I will forget. And I will remember. And I will heal deeper and more strongly. I will live.

Amen and axé.