More on Healing.
Robert Greenleaf’s essay The Servant As Leader contains a section titled “Healing and Serving”. In this section Greenleaf wrote about two meetings of people that came together to better understand how best to heal people.
The first meeting was of a group of ministers and psychiatrists that came together for a seminar on the theme of healing. The seminar began with a question regarding what was the motivation for the ministers and doctors to be in the business of healing. The response that they all agreed to was “For our own healing.”
He also wrote about a legend regarding the founding meeting to incorporate the organization Alcoholics Anonymous. According to the legend, a philanthropist pointed out that “What you in AA want to do cannot be done with money. You must be poor. You must not use money to do your work.” Greenleaf pointed out that “the essential work of AA, one recovered (or partly recovered) alcoholic helping another toward recovery, will not be done for money.”
What Greenleaf concluded from these two examples was “whether professional or amateur, the motive for the healing is the same: for one’s own healing.”
It seems that too often we forget about the real reason for helping others to heal. It is not about us as healers being in a higher place and able to bestow health on others, (or about the profits that can be made), but rather the power that the act of trying to help others to heal has in helping us to grow and heal ourselves.
The first meeting was of a group of ministers and psychiatrists that came together for a seminar on the theme of healing. The seminar began with a question regarding what was the motivation for the ministers and doctors to be in the business of healing. The response that they all agreed to was “For our own healing.”
He also wrote about a legend regarding the founding meeting to incorporate the organization Alcoholics Anonymous. According to the legend, a philanthropist pointed out that “What you in AA want to do cannot be done with money. You must be poor. You must not use money to do your work.” Greenleaf pointed out that “the essential work of AA, one recovered (or partly recovered) alcoholic helping another toward recovery, will not be done for money.”
What Greenleaf concluded from these two examples was “whether professional or amateur, the motive for the healing is the same: for one’s own healing.”
It seems that too often we forget about the real reason for helping others to heal. It is not about us as healers being in a higher place and able to bestow health on others, (or about the profits that can be made), but rather the power that the act of trying to help others to heal has in helping us to grow and heal ourselves.
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