THE MEDIOCRE SPIRITUAL TEACHER-HEALER

© 2012 Howard McQueen

It starts out innocent enough,

 a casual conversation begun.

Goodwill is opened, friendship warmed,

 all this seemingly under the auspices of genuine inquiry.

As the questions continue however,

 there is the sense of a rigid and analytical agenda firming up.

Information about me is highlighted and then inflated,

 supposedly on my behalf.

The conversation is herded along so that a pronouncement,

 a grand vision-conclusion can be bestowed.

I am now not feeling part of any free-flowing exchange.

Perhaps the feeling is more akin to being a seminar sardine,

 caught in the net of in a case-study that,

 even in a stretch, only vaguely applies to me.

I am thinking: “hey, I’m here to celebrate kinship and conviviality. 

Why is this one person trying to analyze and heal me,

 when I didn’t ask for,

 and probably don’t need,

 any contextual,

 in-the-moment healing,

 or summing up of my life experince.”

You’ve just become caught up in the rap of the well-intended,

 often ineffectual healer.

Needing to do the work on themselves,

 and so constipated with their own

 under-applied and unresolved advice,

 their tendency is to spread advice to almost everyone else.

Effective healers are largely freed,

or can set aside, their own biases.

Rather than deal in and dole out personal,

 stylized roles of behavior,

 their responsiveness arises in the moment

 to what is most alive,

 not in them,

 but in the other.

Effective healers do not offer solutions,

 knowing that what resonates in them is but their own work-around,

 that is, until the resonance and awareness awakens in another.

Effective healers are not wed to outcomes,

 as they embrace the unknowing

 of when and where the necessary medicine will come from.

I sense that effective healers are often born out of the ashes of mediocre healers, growing up and letting go their subtle meddling and manipulation.   

Be bold and hold up the mirror to those aspiring to be effective healers.  They too need an assist now and then to see through the smoke and fog and all the distortion shrouding their lives.  

Take off the kid gloves and, if necessary,

 man-handle me so I can see and be so much more

 that a mediocre leader, and healer.