There’s an idea that I like from the medical field, going back to ancient times with Hippocrates: the idea that a doctor does not actually heal anybody.
And that if we talk about a person being a healer, or somebody healing somebody else, that this is really a shorthand.
But there’s no actual direct healing that anybody causes.
Instead, healing is something that happens on its own.
It’s beyond what we understand.
It’s the mystery of life itself.
Why does life continue? It’s through the power of life itself that we heal.
And the doctor, or any kind of medical person, is somebody who is supporting by creating the environment, helping to create a good environment for the healing to happen.
Maybe, you know, cleaning.
You could clean a wound.
You could provide good nutritional- a chance for good food to come in.
Take the person away from the poison.
Whatever it is, you’re changing the environment, but you’re not directly causing healing.
And that in some way it’s kind of a passive activity.
The healing itself is something that we just have to let happen.
So I think this is a very powerful idea for how we look at anything to do with life, the feeling of this kind of life force, with our feelings, and you know, we want to live a great life, and we want to have all these great feelings and live at our best.
So we try to make choices to improve our lives.
But I like to apply this idea to everything in our lives, that we cannot cause life.
We cannot directly change our lives, directly make our life do something.
We can’t directly make ourselves feel something.
We can’t make ourselves grow in a certain way.
We can’t make ourselves heal from something.
We can only set a good environment.
We can remove poisons, remove things that are interfering with our healing and our good life.
We can set up a framework, a system, so that we can have a better chance to live the life that we want.
But we cannot directly make life happen.
So I think this is something that can be lost when we are so used to thinking about taking direct action and making direct changes.
And we can use it as a shorthand.
You know, “I improved my life.” You know, “I’m living my life in this way.” And make it sound like we are doing the living.
But I find it very helpful to think about this, that there’s a central mystery of life, that you know, we are living.
We don’t know exactly why we’re living.
We don’t directly control our heart beating and all the countless functions that are happening in amazing harmony to keep our life going.
We don’t directly control our own lives.
We don’t just run it, you know, like we’re running- like we’re just going step by step and we’re executing these steps and making life happen.
Our life is happening to us.
There’s something inherently passive about it in terms of our will, that we don’t directly control our basic life processes.
But what we do have control over is we can make adjustments to our environment, to what we’re feeding ourselves, what we’re putting in, what we’re surrounding ourselves by.
We have the ability to make changes to our environment, to make it an environment that best supports the life that we want.
But I find by thinking about it this way, number one, can avoid trying to force change when really change will always take time.
We can give a new environment and a new system, but then life will then kind of grow into it.
And so it’s not something that we can simply force ourselves to make an immediate change.
And if our life is not going the way we want, rather than seeing something wrong with the life itself, there’s just something wrong with us, and you know, we’re just basically broken or basically bad, instead we can look at it as there’s something- maybe we’re feeding ourselves a poison.
Maybe we’re surrounding ourselves with something that is not good for us.
So we can make these changes around the edges of life, and then simply let life happen from the inside.
#life #lifehappens #mysteryoflife