In a conversation with a friend recently, I heard a statement that rang deeply true and I wanted to share it with you.  She mentioned that a doctor recently told her that he doesn’t talk about healing, in terms of the body’s return to normal, but instead focuses on how the body creates new ways to do old tasks.  What this said to me is that healing doesn’t take us back to where we were before but, instead, it brings us to a new place where we may again be able to do what we did before in much the same ways, but as a different person.  A journey through injury or illness of any kind – physical, psychological, spiritual – leaves us changed.  Even when we feel completely healed, we arrive at that place with new experiences, discoveries, understandings, or dilemmas – we are changed because we know more now than we did before.  We arrive as new people, forever changed by the journey.

The deeply positive information carried in the idea that we find new ways to do old tasks as we heal is that we touch into the immense and deep wisdom carried in our body-mind beings – a wisdom that has an innate capacity for repair, for creativity and resilience.  Our brains constantly create new neural pathways, as we learn new things of any and every kind, discoveries that allow us to master tasks and move through new physical, emotional, and mental developments.  In recent years, neuroscience has been able to demonstrate that we generate neurons in our brains throughout our life span, rather than having only a certain number that it was thought we could use up by the time we were elderly.

The emphasis I’d like to offer for this week’s experiment is the concept that we do much more than heal.  We do much more than return to normal when we’ve been through something.  We find new ways to do familiar things and, in so doing, we become new people in some way – large or small.  For this week, I invite you to ponder this idea and discover the changes that injury and then healing have brought to you, how you are different now than you were before.  The changes may feel either positive or negative, useful or burdensome.  If you’ve had experiences where healing has left you feeling less empowered or mobile than you were, is there something in your experience that adds any depth, meaning, or wisdom to your self-concept or your understanding of life that you didn’t have before?  If you’ve had positive and useful outcomes in your healing process, how are these coloring or expressing in your life?

It’s useful to remember how to be present to the “what-is-ness” of things as you explore this experiment:  we can seek to change the things we are able to change, but to avoid unnecessary struggle with the “what-is-ness” of those things that are beyond our power to alter.  Also, curiosity is a wonderful companion here, as always, and can support an exploration of where healing, regardless of it outcome, has opened up new doors or understandings that you wouldn’t have expected to encounter or discover.