A Time to Heal

Recently, I noticed a number of newspaper articles about healing. Maybe I’m just sensitive to the word because it is so much part of The Center’s mission. Of course, we speak it every time someone answers The Center’s phone—"Fond du Lac Center for Spirituality and Healing." But oftentimes the front page story of the Sunday Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is about medicine or healing from some disease or societal illness.

The word “heal” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “hael”, which means “to make whole.” Whenever we are talking about healing we are talking about bringing wholeness to life, whether that be the experience of connecting body, mind and spirit, or experiencing a sense of completeness.

One person at the CELEBRATE CommUNITY gathering last Saturday mentioned that “now is the time to take action in reference to a climate change.” She was referring to letting our legislators and the people of the City know that we need to do something to change our approach to the environment.

That made a lot of sense to me on the “climate-change” level, but it also makes a lot of sense to me in talking about healing.

“Now is the time to make anything that is in pieces whole.” Actually, I believe that we have no choice. When fragmentation occurs in peoples’ lives, yoga says that they automatically do something that helps them regain their wholeness. If we don’t do it consciously, our body forces us to bring ourselves back to wholeness.

For example, when a person works hard and ignores their health, the body makes them relax and slow down by getting them sick—maybe even a drastic sickness, like a heart attack. People automatically seek wholeness in time of pain.

When I have had a stressful day or things don’t seem to be going right for me. I find myself straightening up the house or cleaning the house. I organize the magazines on the coffee table or clear papers from the top of my office desk. I tend to unclutter my world at that time as well—filing the things that need filing and recycling recyclables and throwing away the non-usable.

When I do this non-thinking activity, I feel somewhat like a zombie, gently moving from one item to the next as I remove all that seems out of place in my life. It often becomes a cleansing, meditative experience for me. In the process, I start feeling less and less fragmented. I am making myself whole again by putting the outside world into some recognizable order.

I’m convinced that we need to do whatever meditative activity that makes us experience wholeness by doing what gives us a sense of calm and peace. That activity could be washing the floor, washing the car, baking a cake, sitting and staring out the window at the birds, walking around the block, whatever!

I think that we all thirst for wholeness—the gentle experience of the union of body, mind and breath (spirit).

Now is the time to act, yes! It is the time for all of us to do whatever brings wholeness, peace, and calm back to our lives. Then, maybe that experience of wholeness will ripple out into the world around us so we can put some order into our external natural environment, whether that be our city, our neighborhood, our state, or even our divided country.

Now is the time to make ourselves whole.

Namaste’