There’s a little-known but very important secret about healing: when we commit to a healing or spiritual journey, we come into alignment with the entire universe. This may sound romantic or dramatic, I know, but it can be described quite logically.
Biological sciences have long acknowledged that the evolution of an organism occurs for its own benefit. All species enact strategies or undergo adaptations to try to survive and thrive (i.e. improve fitness). If they didn’t, no creature would have persisted, including ourselves. However, we notice much more hesitance to acknowledge this in the psychological sciences, not to mention various spiritual traditions. Instead, many of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are seen as ill-intentioned – maladaptive at best and pathological at worst.
A key aspect of our adaptive evolutionary process as humans is our capacity to repair and restore our systems from harm caused – including psychologically. This means we’ve evolved to be able to heal. It’s built into us as a process that’s always trying to happen, a balance that’s always trying to be restored. When we align with this healing impulse, it becomes much more powerful than the patterns that create harm for ourselves and others. This is because healing is deeply aligned not only with our psychological and biological nature, but with nature itself.
As we’ve covered, interconnection is the fundamental reality of our world. As such, it is the substrate from which our organism grows, physical and psychological. Healing, then, is simply a multilayered, psychic process of returning to this very understanding and expression of interconnection inside us. We could imagine this force of interconnection like a magnet, always pulling on the heart-mind, drawing us back home. This pull is built into our nervous systems and our DNA. This is why when we relax and let go, we feel connected. It’s also why we all contain a deep longing for reunion and why healing and insight feel so good (at least afterward!).
When we see healing this way, then we see how caring evolved as a key evolutionary force that helps us return to wholeness. Indeed, our psyches are built to care and connect, meaning they a built in the image of interconnection. Thus, they will always have a natural advantage over aversion and separation. This is good news. When we devote ourselves to the beneficial forces inside of us, they will always prevail.
If you’re skeptical, that’s good. Remember, you don’t need to believe anything or figure out the Truth with a capital “T”. Just try these perspectives on for a moment and see how they feel. For many folks, these perspectives are very practical. Seeing themselves this way does a lot of the heavy lifting on the healing path.
I’ll expand on this perspective by sharing five specific healing forces that I like to see as inherent in our internal design. Below is the first; the other four will come in future posts.
Goodness
Everything within us is trying to help.
This perspective is perhaps the most practically important mantra for healing work. Just as we generally accept for our bodily systems, our thoughts and emotions are also trying to help us. When we see with this lens, we see our distressed patterns are either trying to protect us somehow and/or show us something important. Consequently, we soften and lean in. We get curious, grateful, and relate with kindness.
Eventually, we begin to really feel the goodness within ourselves. We realize that everything we (and others) do is based in care at some level. It may not be the wise care that creates compassion. It may be an exclusive care (perhaps limited to oneself), a protective care (perhaps pushing something away), or a confused care (manipulating instead of honoring). However, each of these is a form of care nonetheless. These forms of care may objectively be unhelpful or downright harmful in a moment, but they’re trying to help – ostensibly that’s all they’re organized to do. In this way, even the most maladaptive patterns within us are made of good intentions. Their expressions just become twisted through our own disconnection and insecurity.
This perspective is powerful because it has the capacity to uproot and transform all the latent self-aversion in us. When applied to our troubled emotions or thoughts, we start to say, “Thank you for trying to help” or “Thank you for caring so much”, instead of “Why are you here?” or “Why are you doing that?”. Our inner lives immediately feel different. Suffering is given the grace to transform.
___________________
~ This is an excerpt from Justin’s forthcoming book, The Dharma of Healing, which will be published by Shambhala Books in June 2025.