Inflection Point: The Elevation of Healing in Society
Around a year ago, I spoke at a conference and at lunch some of the attendees were lamenting the stigma, condescension and ridicule they experience when sharing about their healing experience with earth medicines. "It's just placebo." "It's make believe." "Magical thinking." And so on...
My response - among other things - was to "enjoy being ignored while we can."
Over the course of human history, we've seen again and again how social and cultural norms and standards evolve over time. When something is new, there are always the first adopters, 'the transition team.' At this stage a new practice isn't disruptive, threatening to the status quo or impacting existing power structures, so it's largely dismissed or ridiculed. The Earth is Flat - the humans insist! - and any notion to the contrary is laughable, crazy or irrelevant.
But once enough people begin to move in a new direction though, what had recently been made fun of is now suddenly viable - something to own, control, commodify and profit off ---- and this is when the fear & control tropes begin.
"This practice is dangerous!" "It could maybe-possibly-theoretically cause harm to you!" "It is only safe in certain hands." "Guys in white coats are saying it doesn't work!" "Look, this important-sounding guy said he thinks it could hurt your heart (maybe.)"
As someone who has been in 'alternative healing' for nearly three decades, I can attest to the upside of being in the Era of Disbelief - being largely ignored, not valued in our culture, not accepted by health insurance, and 'in the fringes.' The upside ==> FREEDOM. When you're an outlier - over there, being weird, doing your own thing - there is a tremendous freedom to being underestimated. You're free to experiment with new business models, focus on your craft & learn from your direct work with clients. When you are not defending, justifying or protecting your work, you have that much more time to develop mastery in it.
But now - today - we're in an Inflection Point, a moment in time when personal healing is no longer 'over there' on the edge of society --- today, personal healing is moving to the center of our lives and culture and necessary to human evolution.
As 'alternative' and 'natural healing' is increasingly embraced and valued by society, the downside of this is the backlash & fear campaigns sponsored by those who benefit from the dysfunctional status quo and profit from public pain, fear and suffering. As a healing community, we should anticipate the imminent shift from being laughed at and dismissed to being forced to defend and protect our work from people who would happily leverage it for their own advantage.
Think of yoga in the 1970s... or massage therapy in the 1990s. A few weirdos over there, doing their thing. Fast forward a few decades and today those healing 'industries' are dominated by corporations and private equity firms, modeled on factories and franchises. Bankers sit at the top, while over-worked/under-paid/overwhelmed healers are crushed by the needs of an increasingly desperate public and trapped in volume-based models devoid of humanity.
Right now we have a chance to Do Healing Differently. To opt out of the fear narratives, avoid the pressure of needing to validate our work to people seeking to exploit it, and protect the beautiful humanity, authenticity & intimacy of our work from the forces of cookie-cutter consumer models. Nature doesn't need our validation. Honestly, it's about time humans begin proving our worth to nature, and quiet our arrogant insistence that nature accommodate and serve our human worldview. Let's allow the WAY we do healing to evolve to reflect nature and our potential, and leave behind the ineffective frameworks of the past.
