Healing

I once belonged to a Japanese Buddhist group in Provincetown, Boston and Manhattan over some years. We practiced shakabuku. Shakabuku is a sharp psychological kick to the head ... a "Road to Damascus" experience of sorts. As practicing Buddhists, we felt compelled to share Buddhist teaching with others. So, we would shakabuku strangers on street corners or at parties or at work. We would give them literature and invite them to a Buddhist meeting of our home group. It sounds much more Pentecostal than it actually was.

 

Practicing shakabuku was intended as an act of healing unhappiness in the person invited into Buddhist thought and practice. Of course, learning to overcome fear and shyness in sharing our belief systems was very healing for those of us who practiced it. Our senior Japanese members would behave strangely whenever one of us brought a sexy or wealthy shakabuku to a meeting. One of my friends, who had brought a beautiful professional model, was offended when this happened and approached the older member.

 

"Pretty and wealthy people don't need your shakabuku!" The older Japanese member spoke this with a particularly clipped English. "The world takes care of them. They will have to work for many lives to break free from the material life. You go out and find a person with one eye and a humped back. Bring that person here. Love that person. Then you will live your Buddhism!"

 

I was very moved. My eyes watered with a deep agreement with this stern advice. My friend left indignantly with the model, had an affair that was ill-fated and eventually came back to the group months later.

 

Healing one human life is a tremendous contribution to the world. Most of us are drawn to the healthy, the young, the promising. Our animal instincts to survive and propagate drive much of this unconscious behavior. That is why celebrities with buff bodies and small brains gain financial and social power. Extending a hand to the infirm, old and/or disabled is the true measure of a healer.

 

My humanist practice developed in healing environments. Before my Buddhist experience, I had been working with street people in a state hospital and later with LGBT people in a mental health center for nearly a decade. My shakabuku came from a new friend, a Buddhist, who felt I had compartmentalized my healing work to my jobs. He was partly correct. Joining the Buddhists for several years helped me to integrate my sense of myself as person and healer.

 

Some people seek to heal by adopting children from foreign orphanages. The instinct to help the helpless infant or toddler is strong. Others confuse trying to heal others with actually trying to heal themselves. The person with low self-esteem who finds the gorgeous model with a heroin addiction, for example. This isn't healing as much as it is the blind leading the blind.

 

My experience has taught me that the only effective healer is one who has already begun the practice of healing himself/herself. Healing another becomes an extension of healing the self. It is a mutual process, but the healer must know what he/she is about from the get-go. This is one difference between mutual exploitation, or co-dependence, and mutual healing.