Being present in the moment is healing.
The idea about the concept of healing is related to more than one meaning. It depends on the perspective you are looking at it or thinking about.
Just as the person placing these words out of its mind’s land to the tangible screen’s phone one understands, we can easily identify a minimum, but not specifically limited, of three types of healing.
The physical healing, the emotional and psychological healing, and last but not least the spiritual and holistic healing.
While the physical healing has more to do with the doctor and nurse’s world, through the medicine as a subject of expertise, investigation and science as a trustable and proven source of knowledge, the emotional and psychological healing follows quite a similar path to its physical counterpart but it is not focused on the physical healing.
This type of healing is more directly bonded to mental health than anything else. Therapy helps people all around the world to overcome mental suffering, grief from trauma and/or any other situation that makes a person feel that they are in need of some assistance from professionals who know how to get to the bottom of the patient’s issue when the reason to look for help is related to a memory of a painful experience, either with others or themselves.
The third type of healing is the reason why this text was originally created.
Before I get into details about the third one, I would like to mention that my understanding on this matter is purely subjective, since the topic itself is so. There is no such thing as «rules» that determine precisely what a spiritual and holistic healing is. From one’s own life’s experience, each person creates an interpretation about what was lived. Afterwards, this interpretation becomes «knowledge» accumulated through the years of experience. This ends up creating naturally one’s own point of view about general life’s topics, including this one.
Getting a little deeper into this subject, Maria Kristeva thought about the concept of «Intertextuality» inspired by the Bakhtinian dialogism as «text over other texts», meaning that any text is born from nowhere, but always from other texts. We can think of this as someone who writes a book. Normally, in order for someone to write a book, that individual goes through a process in which one needs to read a lot of books first. The phrase «no good writers come from poor reading» is a straight reference to this. To have good abilities for writing, most likely reading a good amount of books will be needed to succeed in the attempt to effectively communicate a personal point of view to someone else. But, to be able to communicate a point of view, you must have previously built it. And, how do you build it? With experience and knowledge accumulated. Our own life is just the outcome of the way in which we have interpreted and reacted to our own experiences. We build knowledge from our experiences. And then this knowledge becomes the lighthouse of our path in life.
In other words, we can think of the spiritual and holistic healing as a text that has been built with other texts (experience and knowledge). Our own experience has been interpreted, and therefore molds our reality and the way we think about life.
From this perspective, each individual is a text made from other texts.
This being said, I do have my own point of view about what spiritual and holistic healing means but I prefer not to go further into too many details at the moment. Instead, I would rather just describe what I understand about why «living in the present» or «being present in the moment» is a healing thing.
My perspective is a mosaic of texts, quoting Kristeva.
It is possible to actually be present in the moment despite the current life’s moment being not good at all. You can find yourself having a bad time, with no discrimination of the source of pain that causes it. Along with this, you can still find a moment to get yourself better. With healing, I don’t mean to magically heal yourself from one moment to the next, or like Aladdin taking into reality your wish to do better with something just from one second to the other.
Feeling and being present in the moment can last hours, or can be something that goes with you for years, as a philosophy of life. But, it can also be something that lasts a few minutes. Again, there are no rules here.
Even in a moment of darkness, it is possible to have a seat and contemplate nature and life circling around you. You can go to the seaside (la rambla o al costado de cualquier mar o río), to a park, to a beach or a mountain. Regardless of the place in the world where you find yourself, a park tends to be a good spot to visualize life and nature, in case you don’t have a river, a sea, a beach or a mountain close by.
You can take a slow breath, look at what’s in front of you, and attempt to put your own thoughts on mute for a moment, the same ones that are making you feel that you can do better on the subject of your worries, or the ones that are not leaving you alone when you are living a storm in your life. Occasionally, this might be way hard to achieve when you are feeling full of pain, since sometimes this feeling knows no limits.
Independently of this, you can always make the attempt. It costs nothing to have a seat in a park and contemplate nature and life. In case you have a cellphone or another screen with you, I strongly recommend not to use it, since it works as a distraction and acts as a barrier to achieve your goal of feeling better.
Imagine just feeling the wind, looking at a point trying to breathe slowly and think that regardless of what is happening in your life, it is a fact that you still have that moment for yourself. Look at the people being happy in the park. That dog running behind a ball. The kids playing football, dreaming to be the next Messi. The day, and all the green around you. Or the sky. Or the water. This part just literally depends on the place you are. Now, just breathe slowly. If you are looking at the sky, just focus on it. Did I tell you to breathe slowly?
As said, this can take place just for a small amount of time. However, sometimes a few seconds feeling the nature and looking at life around you are enough to find some peace. While this is probably not the solution for your worries, the power of feeling the moment resides in the fact that even though for a few seconds, you can feel better about what you are feeling. And those few moments, repeated, can start to be minutes. Those minutes could eventually become hours.
If you repeat this little act, this will make you feel more connected with life and nature. Furthermore, it can give you clarity to think about what’s worrying you. This could lead you to make better decisions.
The impact of one first glance of connection with nature and yourself can be huge.
There will be one day in which you will start to feel better for longer periods of time. Pain does not necessarily last forever. There is grace and there is also happening on just taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of life. Despite whatever is going on with your life, you still stand. You still breathe. You still feel and think. You actually have the power to heal yourself through being present. You can think of it as a natural medicine for your life. Or like a sort of meditation. Each little act of being present helps. The more you have, the better for your health.
The act of contemplation dates back to the times when humanity started to exist as such, and it works as a connection with life, in all its ways. It is a power that has always been inside ourselves, occasionally waiting to be unleashed. It is a natural source of energy that can take off some weight from our shoulders and heal us, as a pill that you can take whenever it’s needed.
Being present in the moment is healing.
Bitácora del camino 