Many years ago, while participating in a healing clinic, another healer commented, “I’m frustrated with all of the expectations that people have about healing.” I asked, “Like what?” She replied, “Like when people expect to feel better after a healing.” I laughed. It does seem reasonable to expect to feel better following a healing; however, “feeling better” can have many meanings. Let’s talk about what a healing is and how it affects one’s life.

A healing is an opportunity to bring one’s life—in all aspects, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—into greater alignment with one’s being. As spiritual beings, we are overflowing with talents, wisdoms, and curiosities. Healing allows us to release our blocks in order to open to fuller possibilities of exploration and expression. As we open we can be increasingly present in wider circles of experience. Opening up to life involves releasing that which has kept us closed, or those things that we accepted in fear. Release is a letting go that can feel more like a falling apart than a coming together.

People can be surprised that healing (aka change that brings a person’s life into greater alignment with his/her being) is possible at all. We are surprised because the healing grants us access to the places in which we have our energy stuck, those places within ourselves that we have forgotten how to reach. If our energy cannot move, it cannot come into alignment with us in the changing circumstances of present time, and it becomes difficult for us to shift and move in the ways that are required for us to keep our balance. Healing asks that we open ourselves through our own stuckness. We must learn to move through the energy that has been challenging to us. All of the places in us that seem as if they could never change—but that we do not like—must be re-negotiated. As we move through these places in ourselves, we strengthen our healing abilities.

In order to traverse the places in us where we are stuck, we may need help from someone who does not hold those particular limitations. The beauty of working directly with a conscious healer is that a healer can see each of us as a being and can hold the space open for each of us to be present with our own unique reality. The extent to which a person embraces that alignment between who that person is as a being and his or her reality is the extent to which a person receives a healing from a healer.

What frees up our energy and keeps it from becoming stuck? Neutrality. That’s what forgiveness and acceptance are all about: finding neutrality so that we can heal ourselves and prevent further stuckness. When we are neutral in a situation, we see the possibilities that are available to us. When we can love ourselves in the midst of a pickle, then we are free to stay put or to begin to move in a new direction; we have healed ourselves in relation to that circumstance.

While the initial result of healing may be a heightened awareness of the challenges that lay before us, as we face and clear those challenges, the long-term effect of healing is that we do, indeed, “feel better.”

Written by Heidi Szycher, a staff member at the Boulder Psychic Institute. Check out her personal site at healings.biz.