Old Mermaids Healing Works

When I was ill for a long period of time and looking for relief, people would often say, “There is a difference between being healed and being cured.” In other words, they were saying, I could be happy even if I wasn’t in good physical health. I found little comfort in that for a long while. I wanted to be cured of what ailed me. That is what most people want. I’ve come to realize that we are ever-changing beings—sometimes healthy, sometimes ill—and traveling along the Healing Way is a beautiful, mysterious, and sometimes terrifying pilgrimage.

This said, I have been sick and I have been healthy. And healthy is definitely better! The word health comes from a Germanic word which means “whole.” We are not static creatures. We change. We despair. We are joyful. We love. We hate. We create. We destroy. We get lost. We are found. We get stuck in the Ruts of our life on our way to healing. Sometimes we set up shop in those Ruts. And then someone, Visible or Invisible, gives us a hand up and we’re back walking the Healing Way.

Finding the Healing Way becomes easier if we can reconnect with Nature and ourselves. First we need to remember that we are part of Nature. And we need to get out of our heads. We can’t rationalize our way out of every problem. Sometimes we need to dance, create, relax, dream and lose our minds! I’m not advocating that we all go crazy. But there are ways we can turn off the chatter in our minds for a while—or at least we can turn it down to a dull roar so that we can listen to our own innate healing wisdom.

I do believe that many of the so-called incurable chronic dis-eases of our time can be cured. Often that requires complementary medicine, which is a combination of conventional medicine and traditional (or alternative) medicine. It’s true that sometimes we must learn to live with illness, to realize we can have whole lives even when we are ill or have a disability. There is no failure in illness or disease; there is no shame in it. Disease is a part of life. And often, we can turn dis-ease into ease again.

Many people feel ill at ease in the world today. Sometimes I think we are experiencing a kind of collective soul loss. We are basically pack animals, and we’ve lost our pack! We can become at ease again as we reestablish an awareness of our connections with the world around us—the Visible and Invisible worlds. It is then that we realize we are part of the whole. We are at ease with ourselves and the world: We are healthy again.