Iyar - How Do We Know When We Are Healed?
You’re looking at a newly minted psychedelic facilitator. Last month, I attended Lauren Taus’ Inbodied Life psychedelic-assisted therapy and integration training to officially begin learning how to work with medicine and attend to careseekers before, during, and after their medicine sessions and support not just their healing, but their humanity along the way. I went to observe good work being done well by seasoned professionals, but moreso, to be observed by and receive feedback from them so I could one day step into the role of facilitator with the hekhsher of people I respect and trust. With a wonderful cohort of healthcare providers and others, we were led through all of the important topics one should begin to consider when entering into this work, journeyed through various doses and delivery methods of ketamine, and held space for others, with many dance parties along the way. Through all this, the question I kept coming back to, and continue to wonder about regarding this modality, is: how do we know when we are healed?
I have written previously about the many types of Biblical and post-Biblical healing, some effectuated by human ingenuity, but most largely being granted by Divine grace. Most of these examples follow the traditional triad of “patient—cure—physician” where, even in the miraculous cases, the catalyst for healing lies outside the afflicted and the “medicine” is in some ways the opposite of the “affliction.” Yet, in Rabbinic literature, there is a strong theme of Divine healing with the very thing that brings the afflicted harm. Stated eloquently by a prominent yet problematic figure, Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, the Rabbis developed a sort of homoeopathic theory of a “law of similars, whereby one paradoxically uses either the disease itself or something similar to the disease to affect a cure. This principle, well known in biblical times, finds its explicit expression in the idiom employed by the sages in reference to healing, where a condition is cured by applying the rule of "like to like." Furthermore, our sages teach that this is the method employed by G-d Himself, Who sweetens (heals) "bitter with bitter." The 'law of similars" shows that the cure lies within the disease itself. The ailment is a foreign "shell" that always conceals within itself a kernel of good. This Divinely-inspired insight into the nature of reality in general and the human condition in particular, corresponds to the wisdom embodied in the letter yud of HaShem's four letter name.”
There are multiple examples of this concept wherein the Rabbis understood that we would not be fully healed until we encounter the thing which is responsible for our suffering itself. One of the most powerful of these is found in Midrash Tanchuma:
Said R’ Yishmael, the son of R’ Yochanan Ben Beroka: See how great are God’s miracles: A human being heals the bitter with the sweet, but the Holy One of Blessing heals the bitter with the bitter, as it is written (Jeremiah 30:17), “I will bring you healing and cure you from your wounds.” By that with which God wounds, God heals. God told Moses to put something bitter within something bitter to sweeten it. (Bashalach 18:2)
Returning to the scene of Moshe learning plant medicine from God immediately after being saved from Egyptian enslavement, Rabbi Yishmael sees the awkward phrasing of the verse from Jeremiah as a clue into the nature of healing. The verse, a poetic doublet, states the same idea twice “I will heal” and “I will cure” in apposition. If God brings healing, what is the novelty of the second half of the doublet? It must mean, according to Rabbi Yishmael, that it doesn’t mean “from your wounds,” but “with your wounds”—I will heal you with the very wounds themselves. And thus, by that with which God wounds, God heals. The Rabbis see an even starker example of this with the most afflicted figure in Tanakh, Job himself. “That with which God wounds, God heals, as it happened with Job. God afflicted him with the stormcloud as it states “God crushes me with a [storm], and wounds me for no cause.” (Job 9:17). But when he was healed, it was with the storm, as it says “God spoke to Job from the storm…” (38:1). A second encounter with the storm which caused his affliction ultimately brings him healing and restores his fortunes.
When do we know we are healed? According to this particular source tradition, it is when the medicine we seek are the very wounds we carry. When the wound is the medicine, when crisis becomes cure, we exercise our wisdom and agency—often what is robbed of us when we are harmed—and return our disconnection and victimized selves to their optimal state. Our story is ours—our actions, mind, and body are in the service of our spirits, and not as objects of another. We tell the story of ourselves as always in the process of coming to wholeness, regardless of the pain and loss we may encounter in our fragile and beautiful finitude. When we meet the tempest, we do not hide but ask it to meet the storm inside us, and in the way of the law of similars, negate the damaging aspects of its potential, but harness its power of transformation.
May this Iyar filled with sorrow and loss become the vehicle for our deepest healing work of return and reconciliation.
Z
