What Needs to Be Healed

Excerpt from Healing With the Arts

by Michael Samuels, MD and Mary Rockwood Lane

• What are the gifts of your life that you have not given yourself, received, or acknowledged?
• Do you have feelings that have been pushed aside?
• How does this affect you?
• What do you know about this deep challenge you hold within?

Whatever your healing need is, the world has it as well. Your healing need can be addressed with your own creativity as an offering for yourself and others. The best service to the world is to bring light to your own healing need. As you listen to yourself, tell your story, and listen with your heart, your witness within emerges. As you listen to yourself, be heart-centered. Do not let your thoughts be pulled into the drama of your story. This is not about “fixing.” When you listen, be neutral, reside in the still point of your heart and life, appreciate yourself, and make a loving connection.

Let’s step back for a moment. This is an opportunity to engage with the core of your own being. What is your purpose? Why are you here? In your personal journey, set the intention of informing and transforming your core consciousness.

Your healing art is an opportunity to simply reflect on your own life. What is most important to you? What is your gift that you can see when you go to your essence to heal? Allow this project, this journey, to be an opening for the re-patterning of your own life. As you use your creativity intentionally for healing, you are re-patterning the whole. This re-patterning is for your entire life. It goes beyond the physical body. It is an energetic re-patterning of your entire perception of life—more than the objective world as you see it. In this field of being, we are re-patterning your entire human being. As a human being, you are not an object; you are a subjective, spiritual, whole being. Everything you do to and with your body you do with your whole being.

Your art and healing work is to realize your wholeness as you re-create yourself from your heart and your soul and restore the profound nature of your love and creativity. This process is about creating a connectedness to yourself. Within you, a divine creativity sustains and organizes your life. Your journey is about increasing your awareness of this powerful connection with your own higher consciousness.

In this process, your creativity develops your own ability to understand and share your experience with the world. All human beings belong to each other. You reside in an infinite field of divine love. Your creativity can open up channels that put you in right relationship with the universal divine source of creativity. In the still point of our being, we have access to the channels for healing. Open up to this spaciousness that is incomprehensible; it is the heart source of all humanity. In this place, there is an exquisite calmness, a dignified composure. You are able to witness your soul without ego. Who are you as a spirit-filled person? Seek to see yourself with your heart’s eyes, seeing yourself with beauty, dignity, and positive regard, honoring your very own humanness.

How do you do this? Your thoughts create powerful energy. You can heal by simply being who you are in a creative moment and allowing your thoughts, feelings, and body to express what needs to be healed. In your creativity, which is the expression of your soul, you access the power of healing by simply allowing everything to be as it is. This is the beauty of the creative process and why it is so powerful for self-healing. Your own creativity offers an experience of reflection and engagement with your deepest healing needs. It allows for the opening of the natural outpouring of your heart.

Take some time to identify your own healing needs. They could be physical, emotional, or spiritual. They may occur in every aspect of your life. They could belong to you, others, your community, or the earth. What really needs healing? It could be as straightforward as a health condition. Ask yourself, What needs to be healed? How is this illness affecting my life? Begin by writing in your journal. We invite you to be open and honest. Just let your words flow. Write any unsaid words, both positive and negative, about your own healing needs. Write about the energies you hold in your body, dissonances in your mind, and your anxiety, judgments, and frustrations.