Health is the condition of being healed. Healing is to pursue health. The word ‘heal’ has its origins in the word ‘whole’. Healing is to make whole. This is the original and unadulterated meaning of the word ‘healing’.
WHAT IS NOW UNDERSTOOD AS HEALING?
However, over the years, the word healing has developed some karma, it now gets its meaning only when juxtaposed with a disease, it has come to be believed as ‘setting right that which is broken’, as ‘setting ourselves right’. In the rest of this article, I shall refer to this connotation of the word.
WHAT IS INTEGRATION?
Let us look at the mechanics of health restoration. All diseases have their origins in suppressed emotions. With every unpleasant emotion that we experience, the moving energy gets stranded and concentrated. These blocked energy concentrations now manifest as physical and psychological diseases. Bringing health back is to restore these stranded energy concentrations to the mainstream energy currents, to bring the hived-‐off parts back into the whole. This process of bringing a part back to the whole, is like putting two separate things together, hence its also called integration, integration of our energies.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO
Integration is an improved variation of the term ‘healing’. For a person who wishes to embrace healing, understanding this nuanced difference between the two words can have far-reaching implications.
As we saw, healing pre-supposes that something is wrong with us and we need to set it right. However, nothing can be further from the truth. We as sentient beings are perfect and made in the image of God. If at all anything needs to be set right, it is not in us but it is in the quality of our life experience. This is where the word ‘integration’ fits in.
Unlike healing which is about us, integration is about our energies, our life experience. When we see ourselves as broken and requiring repair, our self esteem suffers. However when we see our life experience as something that requires to be repaired, our self-esteem doesn’t take much of a beating. We continue to remain compassionate towards ourselves. And more than anything else, this attitude of self-compassion is conducive to the restoration of our health. We become healthy only when we see ourselves as already healthy and not when we see ourselves as broken.
