Qualities of a Healer

At some point in spiritual practice, there is a gripping, heartfelt pain associated with seeing how much suffering there is. Many practitioners who are healers cannot endure that feeling; it is so powerful that it seems to be deeply rooted in perhaps a past life. This needing to be a healer, to acknowledge that suffering t is far-reaching. It is like having a bad toothache that you cannot stop touching. Every time you touch it, it causes the pain to intensify, but you cannot stop touching it.

There are many different kinds of healers but there is a kind of healer that I love so much. A highly motivated healer who is trained and capable is someone who is also spiritually alert. Those who are called to being a healer have idealism to doing good in this world. It is an emotional response to one’s own spiritual development because it is possible to end suffering.

The awakening of altruistic motivation needs to be cultivated so that we do not ride an emotional crest that can be disabling if used too long. Instead, we need to gather other elements besides emotional caring and empathy. Those who are called to healing must have special vows as well as disciplines that they follow, or they cannot be a healer and they cannot be protected themselves in their practice of healing. Therefore, the intelligent response to this heart breaking understanding that suffering is tremendous and that it cannot be healed with ordinary remedies is to seek a special practice that provides what a healer needs.

Another element in the creation of a good healer is their amazing personal discovery that everything is energy. In meditation, we can discover definitively that all others and we are only made of energy. A sudden realization comes; what if I could do something with energy that changes the way others are? When that light switch goes on we become alive to the possibilities. A healer is someone who has this compassionate awakening that includes benefiting others.

There is something that the healer can do consciously to create change, by creating a special disruption. Have you ever noticed how small children in an adult’s gathering might run among the people, hanging onto and shouting at their mother? Soon, the mother and the people in the room can’t tolerate it, isn’t that so?
I was in a restaurant once and there was the cutest little boy, exercising by screaming. When he began to scream I was seated only two tables away. The mother did not do anything; she just looked at him. He screamed and screamed, and finally I moved to a table about ten tables away but still felt like I was sitting right next to him. Finally, I had to move all the way to the other end, and I could still hear him a little bit, but it was tolerable.

Like that, the healer is trying to create a disruption in the current dynamic of the one who wants healing. However, what this little boy did in a negative disruptive way, the healer does in the positive disruptive way. The healer must get that person away from their usual way they hold their energy. How that is accomplished is up to the individual healer.