Healing: people often associate it with prayer and other spiritual practices. In the context of spiritual and contemplative practices, what does healing mean? Today, I’m exploring healing while sharing my own experience as well as the experiences of others. Perhaps this will give you insight into healing and spiritual practice for your own life.
The following is a text version of this blog posting.
Healing and spirituality. Those two ideas are often intertwined. Some people talk about spiritual healing. Others talk about healing prayer and prayers for healing. My focus in this brief reflection is on some of the ways healing of psychological wounds happens as one engages in spiritual practice over time.
The most common experience people have when they begin to regularly engage in spiritual practice, particularly contemplative practices, is that they find a new sense of peace, contentment, and focus. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s probably the most usual experience when beginning regular spiritual practice.
Over time, it’s not unusual that someone who engages in a contemplative practice may experience some emotional discomfort. This often happens during the spiritual practice itself. While it’s important to be aware of these feelings, during the time of spiritual practice, it’s best to continue the practice. Let me be more concrete: if during meditation, a memory or image from a painful life event emerges, note it. But return to the practice. Follow your breathing, repeat your prayer word, and do whatever it is that you do when you encounter a distraction in your spiritual practice. After you have completed the practice, then consider what happened and what it may mean. Often, this is a memory of something that’s not fully resolved and the residue of that memory or event is causing you pain. It’s some aspect of life in need of healing. It’s important to take these memories and images seriously. They may come from events that we thought were resolved or that we thought shouldn’t bother us. They may be related to microaggressions or something more significant. Where they came from isn’t important, but what is important is that they are there and need to be noted. In contemplative practice, you have the opportunity to experience healing and let them go.
In some cases, the regular pattern of spiritual practice opens us to experience a resolution of emotional pain in another setting. This is what happens to me. When I’m regular with my meditation and experiencing deep quiet regularly, some kind of resolution of past hurts will sometimes happen in my dreams. I recently had a dream involving someone I knew many years ago, a person with whom I worked but I forgot about the person. In the dream, I remembered the pain the person caused me. I don’t remember the dream clearly, but I remember the feeling. What I recalled the next morning was that in the dream, I turned away from the person and walked away. That’s when I woke up. As I thought about the dream, I realized that in the dream I had let go of something I didn’t even know was still bothering me.
I know of people who have cathartic experiences while engaged in spiritual practice. One person had struggled with something for many years but one day heard a voice while in meditation saying, “It’s all as it should be now.” He finished the meditation in tears but felt like the struggle he experienced was gone. I spoke with a woman whose mother had died before she was able to make amends for a series of arguments. Years later, while walking a labyrinth, a kind of walking meditation, she felt her mother walking with her. At the center of the labyrinth, she felt as though she and her mother hugged and came to a resolution. The woman told me that she walked alone out of the labyrinth feeling loved by her mother.
These things don’t happen in one particular way for everyone. The experience of healing is unique for each of us. But what does happen is that if we regularly engage in contemplative practices, if we go deeper into our inner lives and our hearts, then healing occurs. By going deeper, old pains, resentments, or discomforts are dug up. Many of them are naturally resolved on their own. There is a deep healing that occurs.
There is nothing magic here. Instead, healing is a fruit of contemplative practice. The healing comes when we allow it. But the best way to shut it down is to try to analyze it as it is happening. Our analytic mind turns off the deeper awareness that is emerging.
There is no recipe or timetable here. Instead, a lot will have to do with your personality and temperament. But I do know that contemplative spiritual practice leads us more deeply into who we are and opens us to healing the old wounds we carry with us.