Throughout my almost 50-year career in medicine, I have been interested in healing – as something deeper than the wellness of our minds or bodies. But what is healing? How can I find it? And can I help others find it?

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Mid-life, mid-career, I realized that despite all that I had learned and was teaching about “self-care,” I was burned out.  I was burned out because I did not know how to be with pain and because I thought it was all up to me.

 

Then, I came across a bird’s nest in a stream and understood that I needed to allow my heart to open, like a loose and open weave. Shortly afterwards, I visited a great redwood tree that had been burned and broken and left for dead some months previously and found that it had regenerated into a forest of new green shoots. It had not just survived but was thriving because its roots were tapping into a living web of thrumming interconnectedness. 

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I knew then what I needed to do: I had to learn how to let the pain flow through me, like water through the nest in the stream, but that I could only do this if my feet were rooted, like the redwood’s, in what is not afraid and does not die. 

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My Native teachers, Wolf and Lisa Wahpepah taught me how to listen to the Earth. My friend and mentor, Joanna Macy, helped me to recognize that I too am beloved of the Earth. His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, showed me that I am interdependent with all life on Earth - that I am, that we all are, interdependence. 

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Then, as I sat one day under the Bodhi Tree, in Bodhgaya, India, the very tree under which the Buddha had become enlightened, I heard the words, “Michael, it’s OK. I am already holding you in my dark, soft roots. All you need to do is to allow yourself to be held.”

 

I realized at that moment, that healing is the embodied knowing that I am already home, that I belong like a tree in a forest, and that I, that we, find our deepest healing by coming back to Earth.