The Safest Presence for Healing: People Who Know What They Don't Know

More thoughts from this retreat. Here’s a paraphrased statement from Dan Cohen to start:

“The safest presences for healing are the people who simultaneously know what they’re doing and don’t know what they’re doing. They hold both simultaneously.

This is opposed to those who act feeling they fully know what they’re doing or totally don’t know what they’re doing. These people are stifling and even dangerous to any healing process.”

We need both knowing and not knowing in order to be effective in what we do. If we hold that we know exactly what we’re doing at all times, we stop being open to seeing anomalies in our experience - which are part of the whole of every process. And if we do recognize something outside of our knowledge, we’re likely to act as if we understand it to maintain our ego. If this happens, we risk being heavy handed and screwing things up just to keep our act going.

In a sense, there’s a critical role for ‘healthy doubt.’ We don’t know everything. We know and we don’t know what we’re doing at the same time.

This awareness is the starting point that healing and facilitating healing begins from. No one is always good or only bad. No one knows everything. No one is always right.