My Healing Journey

My Healing Journey


I used to think that healing was a physical thing, a recovery from some illness or injury that can be seen, measured, defined, identified, and therefore treated. Disease was “bad” and health was “good”. Over time I learned that disease is a sign, an indicator of imbalance and unhappiness or stagnation in my life. I learned that healing is an ongoing process, a communication between the universe and me; my body, my emotions, and my spirit. If I am sick, it is because of an imbalance, and it is up to me to identify that imbalance and to formulate a plan to bring things back to right, to wholeness. Sometimes I can do this by myself. Sometimes I turn to my plant or other spiritual allies, and sometimes, when I am blinded or overcome with confusion, I need to turn to a Healer; for his or her advice and clarity of vision.

Life, health, is a spiral. Healing isn’t about making that bone knit, or making that fever break, or even about making my digestive system function normally. It is about balance. My balance. Finding my place in the universe and fitting myself into my own little niche that no one else will fit into. Healing is about happiness, about joyfulness and playfulness and being alive and enjoying every minute of it, regardless of how my physical body feels or functions.

I can be healed and still have disease in my body. I can be perfectly healthy yet still need healing. Healing is about living. Healing is solely my responsibility. No one else can make me sick; no one else can make me well again. It is up to me to continually examine my current state of being, and to strive for happiness and fulfillment.

As a healer my role is much the same. I can heal no one, just as another can never hope to heal me. I am a seer; I look for and find the happiness and wholeness inside a person and show it to them, encouraging them to see it and to strive toward that which makes them happy and fulfilled. I am a cheerleader, encouraging the hopeless to hope. I am a magician, empowering my potions with my own magic and my own desires, increasing their powers until they are no longer simply plant material in a bottle, but a potent combination of the powers of a plant spirit mingled and joined and working with my own.

My medicine works with the mind and spirit of those who come to me seeking the path to wholeness. My visions aid in opening their eyes, showing them the path. I am the go between, matching people and their desires to plants that can help them attain their goals of physical and mental and spiritual health and happiness. My medicine stimulates their body and mind to change the present and to heal themselves.

In return I am given happiness. I am fulfilled. When my medicine works and I see someone heal I know that I have made the right connection. I have shown them what they needed to see, and they in turn have taken that vision and the wisdom from it and have healed themselves.

My small part in this grand process is what makes me tick. I file away the knowledge that helped someone in hope that it may again be what someone needs. I add to it the daily teachings from the local plants, my fellow students of life, and my teachers. The spiral continues. As I grow, my capacity to help grows, and more and complicated people come to walk with me on this journey of life. I help them. They teach me. We all grow. We all heal.