What Does Healing Really Mean?
Everything worthwhile in life depends on good health–and on the ability to heal when we are sick, injured, or suffering. In an ideal world, access to healthcare–both physical and psychological–would be a basic human right. But alas, we do not live in such a world.
While there are limits to how much we can heal our physical bodies on our own, there are abundant ways we can tend to and heal the more intangible parts of ourselves: the mind, heart, spirit, and soul.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which swept the globe from 2020 to 2023, took a profound toll on people's mental and spiritual well-being. In the United States and many other countries, the surge in diagnoses of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse far exceeded the capacity of the mental health system.
People of all ages struggled, and many who reached out for help discovered that there were not enough therapists available to help them. Even in more stable times, those without health insurance or financial means have often been excluded from access to mental health care. Tragically, in 2022, the suicide rate in the U.S. reached its highest level since the Great Depression nearly a century earlier.​
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The old adage goes: Catch a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. When it comes to personal healing, the wisdom of this saying could not be more relevant. Learning to self-heal is a skill not just for short-term relief, but for lifelong self-care. And the only thing better than the ability to self-heal is when the means to do so are made free and freely available to all.​​​