Healers are usually broken people who discovered a way of being in the world that is contrary to the norm. Wounded healers. Often their path directs them to help others and that allows them to enhance the healing for themselves. One learns to develop and eye for this dynamic in people. Ironically it is not that these broken people do not have important lessons and information to impart but it falls upon the individual student of life to understand that they, themselves, are the actual healers in their lives. This in and of itself is a lesson. We conjure up helpers, teachers and information as we need it. Others may guide us but no one is going to carry us through what needs to be lived through. We often in our appreciation confuse our teachers with a kind of loyalty as if to fix ourselves in some better relationship to our better selves but it is a fools errand. We fix ourselves as better human beings by recognizing that we are a work in progress and we are here to make mistakes.
It is popular to court the idea that anyone who can experience things outside of what is agreed upon as being "normal" must be looked at in a disparaging manner. This is a great misunderstanding about those who can read, hear and see things that we cannot. While we rarely look at animals without acknowledging that they can perceive and experience things differently from us, we can rarely enhance that generous given to other humans. Considering that possibility and respecting that somehow threatens the security of the norm.
My first exposure to allowing others to be beyond my frame of perception happened years ago. I was in therapy with a group of women and I learned to hold space for others and witness their stories. Some of these experiences were unbelievable and well outside what a person would describe as ordinary. Some regressions and confessions dove deep into the psyche and had people rising to speaking in tongues they only new as toddlers in foreign countries and broke through barriers of violent child abuse scenarios. Many of these shared experiences shattered trauma induced ramparts liberating people from intense pain and cycles of despair in relationships. This isn't territory that many people traversed at the time. It was not sanctioned as valuable forty years ago. Today we cannot stop ourselves from categorizing the vast alternative ways of experiencing life and trying to jam them into a new normalcy. We have a habit of trying to label absolutely everything. On the bright side, this is how we expand our vocabularies for things beyond our ken previously so we can speak and learn of them. It is common knowledge now that we need not remain haunted by our personal histories with no recourse as we once were.
Hafiz speaks here about developing a critical nature towards peddlers of exciting answers when it is really the questions that one needs to cultivate and study. We need to learn to consider and be aware of trends and the sources and agendas of information shared.
Thank you for listening.
Music: Don't Get Lost In The Woods, is a song, that I don't think the artist, Sari Baker was very fond of as she valued her later work more but it was a favorite of mine and many of my online friends back in the aughts. I suspect there was more to the story of this tune - or her time with it - for her but it doesn't cast aspersions upon the song itself. It survives beautifully. Here she warns us not to get lost in the woods and who doesn't find themselves there upon occasion when wondering and wandering?
...Cause with the birds you're never lonely
A sudden silence holds a clue*
Stick to the right path, honey,
Don't get lost in the woods...
*I'm guessing on the last word in this line as I couldn't quite make it out.
The original post in this series of poems by Hafiz (including an addendum regarding the authenticity of these poems) can be found here. Also, my thoughts on this series a year into these poems, HERE.
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz and translated by Daniel Ladinsky can be purchased here.
My book can be purchased HERE. E-book HERE. The Season Two blogcasts with audio excerpts from my book begin HERE: in Behind The Lines. This reading of the book excerpts in a mixed media format is Season Two of this blog. These recorded excerpts are outside the chronological order in which the book was written. Podcasts with audio only beginning with episode 22 can be found HERE.