Healing In Action
Welcome back special guest speaker: Nic Da Silva!
Healing is a right every one of us has. Yet, its paradoxical nature can make healing of the mind, of the inner person, seem impossible or unsustainable. What binds us is often what we hold onto more tightly than anything else, it is this constant need to renegotiate with ourselves the wants of our hearts with the concerns of the world around us.
Working with young adult patients at CAMH as a therapist and spiritual care provider, Nic Da Silva has witnessed the paradox of healing. Often, the most important thing for a person experiencing psychosis, personality disorder, or addiction, is to go beyond the problems we diagnose them with. Behind all forms of mental disorientation and personal collapse is the need to ‘be,’ a need that calls out to us from within, necessitating self-emergence or, sometimes, self-destruction.
Please join our special guest speaker, Nic Da Silva, this Sunday as we explore these themes together.
First Reading - Affirmations for the Inner Child by Rokelle Lerner
Today I will gently push my limits.
Today I will flex my muscles and gently push my limits just a tiny bit further than yesterday. I will accept that some pain is normal for growth and welcome it. At the same time, I will be alert to damaging pain and stop pushing.
As a child, I never learned to work through difficult situations. I stopped playing piano when there were too many sharps and flats, I stopped doing math when I couldn’t understand equations, I stopped trying to ride my bike up the big hill when my legs started to hurt. “If it’s too hard, then quit,” was my motto.
These days, I no longer am afraid of the pain that goes along with progress and change. I welcome it and know I will work through the pain to the next level of growth.
Second Reading - Aging: The Fulfillment of Life by Henri Nouwen and Walter Gaffney
Chapter: “Caring as a Way to the Self.”
Our first question is not how to go out and help others, but how to allow the elderly to enter into the centre of our own lives, how to create the space where they can be heard and listened to from within with careful attention. Quite often our concern to preach, teach, or cure prevents us from perceiving and receiving what those we care for have to offer. Does not healing, first of all, take place by the restoration of a sense of self-worth? But how can that take place unless there is someone able to discover the beauty of the other and willing to receive it as a precious gift? Where else do we realize that we are valuable people except in the eyes of those who by their care affirm our own best self?