Living Between Worlds by James Hollis

Author:James Hollis [Hollis, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683645627
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2020-06-22T22:00:00+00:00

6

What Is Healing?

What is healing, and what can we do to further its work in us? If it is on each of us to further our own healing and that of the world, what is the scaffolding of nature’s restorative process, and what is the intent and movement of the soul’s work? What role do we have to play in all this? How can consciousness and learning assist or impede this process?

My last book, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey, laid out twenty-one tasks, the addressing of which will lead to a richer, more satisfying life. It was, and remains, my contention that those tasks, assignments, summonses are at work within us, whether we know it or not. Our consciousness can aid them, just as our flight from thoughtfulness around these matters can undermine them.

Among those twenty-one tasks were these critical assignments for healing:

•Recovering personal authority. We all have personal authority at the beginning; it is called instinct. Our bodies know what is right for it, our souls know as well, but our adaptations so often split us off from the primal knowing and lead us to distorting life strategies. Any choice that arises out of deferred personal authority will likely prove wrong for us in time.

•Assembling a mature spirituality. Our spirituality is as mature as our character is mature. What role does fear management play in the deformation of our spiritual life? Does our spirituality preserve the mystery of the Mystery, or is it a subtle attempt to create images and practices that ratify our complexes and keep them reassured? Does our spirituality make us uncomfortable enough to require that we grow up and grow onward, or does it perpetuate the sleep of childhood?

•Choosing meaning over happiness. “Happiness” as a state of being is wholly contextual, unique to each person, transient. We can no more achieve a permanent happiness than we can predict the weather months from now, because happiness is not a place, not an abiding attitude or state of being.

These are but three of the tasks identified from a long list of accountabilities. Such accountability means that we assume partnership in our mental, physical, and psychological well-being. A sense of the rightness of our life doesn’t just happen to us; we are partners in the ongoing conversation that calls us to show up and be responsible. Just as groups are no more evolved than the level of consciousness of the least of them, so our well-being is no more evolved than wherever our neglect of ourselves is keeping the whole from moving onward.

One of the things I observe in the contemporary world is an increasing awareness that something is not right. We have, generally, the living conditions for which our ancestors longed, and yet as a culture, we are swimming in malaise. More and more folks are tumbling to the notion that they are going to have to decide what their life serves—how they can gain a sense of purpose, find emotional satisfaction from their labors, and value something more than power, wealth, and security.

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