In times of great suffering, we look for teachers or healers who can show us the way out.  The need for guidance is so pressing, we want to find someone perfect, someone who has it all figured out, someone with all the power we seem to lack.

Disillusionment can arise when we learn that teachers and healers are never really complete in being a teacher or being a healer.  They’re not perfect.  They’re not deities.  Like all of us, they contain both divinity and humanity.  They face things in their life that they don’t fully understand.  They experience pain and adversity.  I’ve never met a teacher who has it all down, so to speak.

Yet, they can still teach us something, and they can still heal.

So what distinguishes a teacher from a student and a healer from the wounded?  Other than the acquisition of particular skills, a healer is someone who places their attention on the act of bringing about healing, and a teacher is someone who places their attention on the act of conveying wisdom.

All they have really done is reverse polarity.  Rather than thinking about what they can get out of someone or how someone can correct them or teach them or fix them, they focus on what they are giving or offering.

What are you offering?  You can recognize that, as a healer, you don’t really have anything the other person does not have.  All you have is the intention to heal.  As a teacher, you don’t know anything that the other person does not have access to.  All you have is the intention for them to know wisdom.  As a lover, you can be focused on giving love instead of trying to acquire.  It’s not that you have anything the other person does not have.  You merely have the intention for them to receive.

I think this is why people who have suffered eventually gravitate towards being teachers or being healers.  They realize that ultimately no one can give them what they don’t already have, but the mere orientation or posture or intention of having things go out from you connects us with all the wisdom and healing we need.

Entering the role of a teacher or a healer without believing we have anything another is lacking is how we discover what we have, how we find our own source of healing, how we touch wisdom.

Perhaps the power of a healer is to give someone a rationale, an external prompt, to allow their own healing to unfold.  The worst thing a healer can do is to convince the wounded that they cannot heal themselves.