our personal environment, family, friends, neighbors, community; and the ecology of the whole, trees, animals, plants, rocks, and all the elements. This either/or think- ing carries over and distorts everything we experience as humans, from our individual health to relational wellbeing, from part- nership to politics, from the tug and pull of honoring cultural diversity alongside the need for collective unity. When fi ltered through the persistent perspective of sepa- ration engendered by both sides of the fear and greed equation, even our concepts of what to do, why we do it, and how we coalesce the duality between good and bad become skewed.
Which brings us to the truth about what we call “healing.”
Healing is not the act of getting rid of one (bad) thing to gain another (good) thing. It isn’t about fi xing something that is disconnected or broken. It isn’t about the recitation of what we want exclusive to what we’ve got. The fi rst law of thermo- dynamics assures us that none of that is even possible. Rather, it tells us we operate in a closed system where a total amount of energy is always constant, though it
continually changes form. Nothing can be subtracted or added. Nothing is lost and nothing is found. Healing is simply return- ing to the embodied awareness of whole- ness that always is. Shard by shard, piece by piece, we assemble our world.
Perspective doesn’t eliminate pain,
or what we call misfortune. Experienc- ing what we consider bad doesn’t mean we have cursed karma or have failed to do something, whether in the practical or spiritual realm, to prevent it. Shards of pain are part of the whole. An experiential shift in perspective is the tool that allows us to change, usually minus our intention to do so, the past and the future, opening the double doors of paradox onto a repurposed and refreshed reality when the pain of what is, in the present, is simply too much to bear. Until it isn’t.
And until it is again, because shifts hap-
pen when shit happens and as we can all predict with absolute certainty, shit happens.
The gift of pain is that it affords us the opportunity to transform a windshield that has suddenly shattered our lives into a daz- zling stained-glass window at the top of a
spire in a Gothic cathedral. It points out to us with uncanny immediacy and precision where we are in a given moment on the arc of that resplendent mystery that has no resolution. Ultimately, it gives us perspec- tive on the paradox of bringing the truths of our desperate need for healing together with no need for healing at all.
Pat Heavren is a life coach, mediator, and educator who is passionate about support- ing individuals, couples and groups to fl ourish by align- ing with the wisdom of the
natural world. She is the author of Magic in Plain Sight: When Acceptance is the Healing and is former senior teaching faculty with the Four Winds Society, an international school of neo-shamanism and energy medicine. Pat has led work- shops across the U.S., Canada and Latin America and works worldwide with clients via telephone and Zoom from her Wood- bridge, CT, offi ce. She can be reached at
www.livingsource.us and 203.444.4424 for appointments. See ad on page 26.
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