Fixed, or Healed?

A few days ago I found myself with an ailment. It was alarming at first, and my instinct — like everyone’s — was simply to get rid of it. So I did the sensible things. I sought medical attention, I took the appropriate medication, and I followed the practices I was given to help move it along.

Over the days that followed, I watched the slow progress of the fix. It became a focus of my attention, and I reflected on it a good deal. Then, two or three weeks later, I went back for an assessment, and the decision was made to do something a little more drastic — to remove it completely. And that is what happened. It disappeared. It was good that it was gone, and only then did I really understand what it had meant to carry it, now that it was no longer there. Fine. Life continued.

But this morning, as I was waking, a thought arrived. A simple one:

Many of us want to be fixed. Very few of us want to be healed.

I have been wrestling with that thought from the moment it came. It took me straight back to my own situation.

The inconvenience we rush to remove

As we journey through this world, all sorts of things occur to us — or occur with us. And in so many cases we treat them as an inconvenience. The one thing we know to do with an inconvenience is to get rid of it. We don’t stop to understand it. Often we don’t even trouble ourselves to discover what caused it in the first place. We just want it fixed.

Healing is a different thing altogether.

Healing goes beyond even what we might call the cause. It looks deeper — deeper, deeper, into the real issue. And this is where spirituality truly begins to speak. Because when you journey spiritually, you come to see that there is nothing that manifests in the physical which does not have its roots in the spiritual. Nothing.

Borrow, for a moment, from science. Science tells us that everything is energy, and that we are all connected to the one source energy. So anything that comes into manifestation has to do, at some point or another, with a misalignment or a distortion of that energy. Which means the place where the trouble shows up is not the place where it begins. The endpoint is not where we start. We are not meant to begin at removing the manifestation. We are meant to begin at the deeper reality — that there is something underneath it.

Fixing and healing are not enemies

Now, don’t misunderstand me. If a person has had a dramatic experience and is losing a great deal of blood, I am not telling you to sit down in meditation and search for a cause while you bleed to death. That would be silly. You do what is necessary to hold everything in place — precisely so that you can go on to experience the healing.

You see, fixing and healing are not exclusive. This is what I am discovering: one does not preclude the other. But it asks us to be conscious. When a situation arises and we reach for the fix, we can also remember that there is a healing to be had.

And here is the beauty of it. When we are healed, there is a sense in which we are also fixed. But the funny thing is that this fix may not look the same as the one we would have chased at the start. The fix that comes through healing is a different kind of fix. The particular issue may still be apparent. It may even be something we go on carrying. But it is fixed all the same — fixed in the sense that, because of the healing, our understanding of it, our sense of it, our sense of its purpose, takes on an entirely different light. And so, while we bear it, we bear it in a way that allows us to use it. Positively.

So fixing and healing will always be with us, if we live and journey from a conscious place. That is why it matters, for me, to stay conscious of the need for healing even in the very moment we are being fixed. We must never — ever — remove from our awareness the need to heal.

The one who came back

Healing bears such great witness to this human journey.

I recall a passage of scripture where Jesus meets a group of lepers and heals them. As they are going on their way, he tells them, as the custom was, to go and show themselves to the priests. They recognize that their condition has changed. They have been fixed. But one of them turns and comes back — to give thanks. And the question is asked: Were there not ten? Where are the nine? Is it only this one who has returned to give thanks?

Paraphrasing the deeper message: that one person experienced healing. Something inward had shifted. It was not only the external condition that changed, but something within — a cleansing from within that brought about alignment. And alignment expresses itself in the clearest possible act: thanksgiving. Gratitude. When everything within a person is aligned, gratitude is really all that can come out of them.

Healing is the true target

So healing is the true target we are being invited to. Not merely to be fixed.

Let us, in our journey, stay mindful and conscious of it. And let us pray for it — our own healing, and the healing of others.

This reflection is part of HIER Life — the ongoing conversation from HIER Space.