Responsible Healing

I once read of a story about a registered nurse, Earlene, and her experience with treating patients in an intensive care unit. She cared for a teenage girl who had fallen from a horse onto a pitchfork which had penetrated her brain and left her paralyzed and comatose. At the head of her bed were pictures of what she had been - long hair, bright eyes, and wide-open smile. They were placed there to give the nurses in ICU an opportunity to focus on who this girl was as a person rather than the unresponsive body attached to a respirator on the bed.

After three months the young girl rolled out of the hospital in her wheelchair still partially paralyzed with slurred speech. The ICU head nurse came back from the girl’s send-off in tears because she couldn’t help but compare the youngster’s current state to the active, capable young person she had appeared to be in the pictures before the accident.

Healing had occurred but the teenager survived in a different form than hoped for, leaving the nurses with a sense of failure.

As an R.N. and Reiki Master, Earlene realized what effect the pictures had on everyone. And that whenever she tried to picture a friend or a patient/client well or whole, her mind moved most often to a picture that is previous to the present.

We can have no idea how or what any body will become as we nurture it.

The pictures of the young girl as well as those Earlene held in her mind of a sick friend were limiting the possibilities of healing and setting up a case for disappointment.

So does any element of expectation in “making someone whole”. We cannot know what that wholeness is. The person we are working with rarely has a clear understanding for their own personal wholeness. This does not mean to deny all hope, but that we must take care in all areas of health and support therapies to relinquish any expectation of a specific result.

We can be ready for change. We cannot predict what that change will be. We also may not dictate what that change must be for anyone.

It is true that miraculous changes have been recorded with the use of Reiki and energy healing. However, it is the setting up for the expectation of those changes that is most often a need of the practitioner to plan or control the outcome.

This is inappropriate and detrimental to the practice of energy healing and predisposes us to the idea of failure as healers. You experience failure not only when your expectation and vision of change in your client/patient is not forthcoming, but also in telling him/her their healing process rather than allowing them to live it on their own.

We must use our healing practice with care and responsibility. We must forego the temptation to “make things right”, to place our egos on the line and to pretend we know what the outcome of any healing session may be.

Which is why healers use the phrase “for the best and highest good”, stating that a change will occur and leave it up to the individual to be sensitive to his/her body and circumstances as to what that change is.