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I’ve talked a lot about why I don’t use the word healing. And in the changes it’s making to its guidelines, Yoga Alliance has been extremely clear that they do not want yoga teachers to use the word healing or anything that would relate directly to therapy, therapeutic work, medicine, or any diagnosis in order to allow yoga teachers to remain within their scope of practice. I admit I’m a bit on the fence about the changes at Yoga Alliance, how it further silos yoga teachers and yoga practitioners, and even yoga teachers with different interests or credentials, but really what it has done is made me think about my use of the word healing and my relationship to it.
I think the problem lies in how we think about healing. When most people talk about healing anything, whether that’s a paper cut, a broken bone, or a chronic medical condition, they think of it as well, like a superficial injury. You wash the wound, treat it, put a bandage on it, and eventually it goes away. I was reminded of this both when I realized a wound I’d received from a well-intentioned but a bit too rambunctious cat had healed nicely, the scab falling off to reveal unblemished skin beneath this morning, and when I expressed to someone just how deeply I’d been hurt by their actions and their response was “I hope you heal soon”. Healing used in that context puts the responsibility on the person injured, and doesn’t do anything to address any other person’s role in the injury or any societal or cultural factors that may have contributed to it.
And I have long professed healing doesn’t work like that. At least not the kind of healing that I have undertaken as a late diagnosed neurodivergent person with a long history of trauma leading to cPTSD. Except by denying myself use of the word or concept of healing, I’ve also been denying myself the appreciation of just how far I’ve come in my personal work.
Healing is a nuanced conversation. It’s also a conversation best suited to platforms off of social media, in places where you can take the time to explain yourself, even in one-on-one conversations as each individual works through what healing means to them. Healing is not meant to be a singularly defined word.
I’m changing how I talk about healing.
What this means is that I will be changing how I talk about healing, in what contexts, and in what it means for me. Healing goes through many stages. It can be an extremely long road to get from wound to no trace of it, and in the case of larger injuries, such as to bones or muscles, those injuries may never completely go away. I know my tailbone reminds me when the barometric pressure changes, and I broke it (and knitted bone back together) four-ish years ago.
Healing doesn’t necessarily mean moving toward wholeness either, because there is grief in healing. There is loss in healing, in the person we were before, in what happened before, and the different changes our lives may have gone through because of what happened.
The thing is, each one of us gets to define healing for ourselves in a way that feels meaningful and in a way that feels authentic to our own lived experience.
So I encourage you to think about how you perceive healing and what it means for you. Let’s talk about it. Because finding out those meanings for you mean that you can then move forward on your own terms and in your own way.
