What is healing?

Healing is about the acknowledgement that there is something wrong, in terms of discomfort, in terms of pain, in my life, and that I'm willing to confront that wrong, that pain, that discomfort.

If I choose not to confront it, that's when suffering occurs. Suffering is when I want to dishonor my pain. I want to dishonor my discomfort.

So I suffer when I say I have a pain, and I don't want it to be here. I want to dishonor it, so give me an aspirin. Give me something just to move it and make it go away. That's not really healing. You're just alleviating a symptom, but you're not really honoring the process.

Healing doesn't mean that the symptom disappears. Healing means I've become aware why I'm having the condition and what is my contribution to it? Can I change that contribution?

Some of us find that it is very hard to change the contribution to the process of that discomfort. As such, we have endless sufferings in our lives. In the process of healing we begin to acknowledge that. That is already healing.

- Jeffrey Yuen