062 - What is Healing?

Portals of Perception

Imagine a process of healing that is powerful enough to restore wellbeing and transform a life, a family, a community with just a one-degree shift in perception or attention; a state of health and wholeness not defined by medicine or ecology, culture or location.

In a time of cultural and environmental upheaval, the natural and regenerative paths to relief of anxiety, pain, and a sense of separation offer us deeper awareness of the true nature of healing — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. A healthy and balanced mind and body can be the natural outcome of a life rooted in the understanding that wholeness and healing are a human birthright, inherent in our design and purpose. The transforming perception of our natural integration and potential can be the journey of a lifetime, or it can happen in a single moment.

In this conversation, Aviv Shahar is joined by two practitioners with extensive experience in the process of restoration, wholeness, and healing: Lonny Jarrett, author, scholar, and teacher of East Asian medicine who has practiced acupuncture and herbology for more than 40 years, and Alexander Love, an acupuncturist, life coach, and cranial - sacral therapist, who brings a unique integration of modalities.

Lonny and Alexander discuss their understanding and life-long experience with the healing process, including personal stories of trauma and regeneration.

Among their insights:

• The main medicine the world needs now is to transcend ego and recognize our dependent arising, our intimate relationship with each other, and the biosphere in all things.
• We are trained from the youngest age to take everything personally, to know ourselves as separate individuals, in denial of the subtle spiritual dimensions of experience.
• We have a choice. It doesn't start with waiting for the other person; it starts with me. Maybe I get a little curious instead of self-righteous. Healing is an act of inquiry; it’s being present.
• How do we unfold the past in a way that is vibrant, awake, and full so the virtues and wisdom within those experiences of pain can inform our life today and become fertile ground?
• Each person is a portal into the one conscious. When we make a choice for the truth, even in the face of our own conditioning, it's the cosmos evolving.
• It’s an emergent process where everything frozen in time is released into the currency of this moment now; as if working with one person is working with the entire system, and potentially the whole world.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“So honestly, I can remember the moment when I was about three or four years old and my mother read me Bambi, and Bambi’s mother gets shot by a hunter, and I burst into tears, and she said when you grow up you can be a veterinarian, and I said, what's that? And they said, a doctor who takes care of sick animals, and righ t then and there I knew that I was going to go into medicine, and of course the medicine I eventually went into was not veterinary medicine, but I knew my whole life that that's what I was here for and that's what I was going to be doing.” (Lonny)

“In a way, history isn't a burden, and it isn't a hauntology or a ghost that sort of grips us from beyond the grave. But it's been brought into the present as the cultivation of virtue from having faced fragment, and fragments realized its own nature as wholeness.” (Alexander)

“So we can have gross levels of illness, and we need to take responsibility for the dimensions of them that we can, so getting enough sleep, hydrating, eating the best food we can, exercising, this sort of thing, but when it comes to the subtle and the very subtle dimensions, I would define illness as a misappropriation of attention. A conditioned identification with finite and materialistic dimensions of the self that perpetuate the illusion of separation and, from the perspective of wholeness, separation as pain.” (Lonny)

“So for me, the starting point is a recognition that the past, the present, and the yet-to-be-fully-formed future are all right here, right now, the last 14 billion years, with all of their glory and all of their suffering. It's right here, right now. Not theoretically or philosophically, but it's unfolding at this moment. Some of it is these hidden pockets of history that we don't see. Some of it is visible, like the fact that I am able to speak in a language that took 1000s and 1000s of years to develop, and it's still a visible expression of something that has come previously.” (Alexander)

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