Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to discuss what it means to be a healer and why that might be relevant to you. There are many ways people might define a healer and those definitions will change depending on the kind of healing being done. For instance, a healer in an emergency room might be different than a healer in a therapeutic setting. I'm going to talk about it primarily in the context of your psychological, emotional, and even spiritual healing.

And I believe a healer in this context is someone who knows how to create a container for you to exist as you are in all your strengths and imperfections, so that more dimensions of your humanness can be seen, accepted and integrated, helping you move toward an experience of wholeness. And notice how this is different than a definition that might suggest you need to be fixed or a defining healer as someone taking you to some better version of yourself. All of that can be useful and we might have those aspirations, but the foundation for this definition is the belief that the deepest healing and growth comes from making peace with yourself on the deepest of levels. So many of our frustrations, stressors and complications in life come from being at war with ourselves. We cast parts of ourselves into the shadows of our awareness, covering them up with shame, which only creates more dysfunction in our relationships and tensions in our psychology and our emotional landscape.

This is the power of mindfulness. It's inviting you to meet yourself in all your perceived goodness and your perceived inadequacies with curious, compassionate awareness. And in this way, you could argue that you're becoming a healer for yourself. And if you are looking for healing with another person, which is always great and sometimes really useful, I would just encourage you to make sure they're also helping you to move toward this integration that we're talking about. It's okay to hold yourself to a high standard, but unless we're learning to make space for all parts of us, we'll continue to have one foot on the gas and then one foot on the brake.

So you're doing great. And thank you for your practice and thank you for becoming a healer for yourself. Our world needs more people doing that, in my opinion. Let's settle in for today's meditation.