Loving Someone and Healing

Loving and healing are two very different ways we can open ourselves to others – friends, clients, anyone. Many of the people I interact with either have a life-threatening illness or are grieving the loss of a loved one, situations that cry out for spiritual healing – merging my mind with the one mind and then merging my mind with the mind of the client or friend. In no way am I doing the healing nor am I focusing on the illness or suffering or imbalance, but instead resting in inherent wholeness and realizing that my friend also is inherently whole. Basically just remembering God, dissolving into that essence and then remembering my friend in her wholeness. Resting in wholeness is the deepest healing practice.

Maharaji said “I see no impurities.”and “It is a mistake to teach by looking at individual differences in people.” Can we, at least at times, go beyond the differences and the stuck places that are so easy to focus on when with another person and instead rest in this place of wholeness that allows healing to unfold? This healing may be healing into death, into health, into whatever God/karma/ the universe has in store. The outcome isn’t up to us. Rather than addressing the person or condition causing suffering, we are invited to acknowledge the illusion that we and our friend are separate and impure. I am always uplifted when I “do” this practice.

Yet I am not able to rest in this wholeness all the time. Very, very few of us can. Love is cultivated and deepened during the experience of humanness and finiteness. Suffering is real as well though also suffering is grace. Rather than focusing on wholeness or basic goodness, we open with compassion to the suffering we see in and around us. Relationship is fundamentally different from healing into wholeness. We are meeting suffering directly. Compassion supporting love.To love someone we must understand and honor their suffering. We are simply distracting ourselves from our own suffering when we attempt to love without having compassion for the other. To try to love without compassion separates us from the other and often wounds.

Compassion without wisdom is mushy and fragile. Compassion without wisdom leads to compassion fatigue. Wisdom without compassion is dry and brittle. The Dalai Lama says “Without the unity of wisdom and compassion we can fall into despair.” We may feel something that we mistake for compassion but this feeling leads to despair because it is not grounded in true wisdom.

What is the wisdom that supports compassion? It is the wisdom that sees reality clearly. Suffering is not caused by cancer or by painful emotions. Suffering is caused by resistance or attachment to cancer and to painful emotions. It is the recognition that we are not separate. The wisdom that there is not a solid “I” that exists beyond concepts. Compassion supported by wisdom is not an emotion. Compassion supported by wisdom is a spacious heart not lost in concepts; a heart connected to self, to other, to God; a heart that can equalize and switch yourself with another person.

Truly loving someone requires understanding their suffering and having compassion for them, a compassion balanced with wisdom. A heart that can love is the gateway to spiritual healing.

– Dale Borglum