Healing vs Curing: They're Not The Same

How many times have you heard someone announce, "I’ve been cured of cancer," or been told, "I just read about a new cure for that disease"? While it’s certainly exciting that medicine, medical research, and technology can effectively rid the body of many of the illnesses that only 20 or 30 years ago would have resulted in death, they still can’t effectively teach us how to heal or actually mend what ails us. Why? Curing and healing are not the same—not in their approach, what they require of the patient, or their results. Unfortunately, even with all of the advances, medicine is still measuring itself on curing, meaning restoring the body back to the state it was in before it became ill. It’s not looking at healing, getting the body back to better than it was before it became ill, because all the causes of the illness have been addressed. However, that’s about to change as more and more people are becoming better educated about wellness and health and are realizing that their conditions require more than just seeing a doctor.

The focus of curing is to address the needs of the physical body and to relieve it of any discomfort, aches and pains, symptoms, crises, and illness. It has little to do with treating the hidden contributors responsible for the formation of these effects. Instead, curing views good health as the absence of symptoms and the elimination of whatever is causing the body to not function properly, even if that means removing a part of the body. This approach means compensation and removal. For example, if a person is experiencing muscle cramps, the treatment is relaxants; if pain is present, then painkillers are prescribed. If the body is burning up with a fever, curing seeks to cool it down; and if cancer is present, curing removes it. While this method certainly makes it easier for us to live physically, it doesn’t address the origin of the problem, only the effects. As a result, the perpetrators are still there and are continuing to gain strength, thus weakening the body’s ability to sustain good health. Curing looks at the how and what of illness. It views the body as a biomechanical piece of machinery, where most parts are necessary but may not be connected or interdependent on the other parts for proper functioning. It sees organs, glands, and systems and wants to understand how they break down and what can be replaced or repaired to eliminate the problem. It doesn’t take the mental state into consideration.

Healing, on the other hand, begins with the soul and seeks to identify, transform, and remove any obstacles preventing it, the mind, and the body from working together in a unified manner. The objective is to make us better than we were before we became ill and to re-establish "wholeness" so that we can experience good health. It involves creating a harmonious internal space so we can explore the hidden contributors behind illness at a deeper level. We get in touch with who we are and are allowed to see just how powerful we can be if we free ourselves from the limitations of our conditioning. Healing views health as being physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in balance.

Healing deals with the source of illness and requires us to dig into our psychological coffers so we can uncover unhealthy thoughts, emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and core themes responsible for the formation of illness. It’s about reinventing our self-perception and restructuring our lifestyle so that it’s conducive to good health. We remove the sources responsible for the disconnection between the soul, mind, and body. Healing begins with awareness and ends with change. It asks us to release the emotional hurts buried deep inside and let go of the identities we’ve created around those hurts. The goal of healing isn’t fixing, it’s creating—creating a healthy self-perception, healthy thoughts, and healthy relationships.

In his writings, Edgar Cayce best described the principles of psychospiritual healing when he said, "Spirit is the life. Mind is the builder. Physical is the result." This approach sees healing as a co-creative process among the soul, the mind, and the body; and sees illness as a breakdown in the process. It understands such a problem as representing something deeper, happening internally, that’s weakening the body’s defenses so it becomes vulnerable to the external contributors of illness—such as viruses, bacterial infections, environmental contaminants, or something ingested. Psychospiritual healing views illness as the soul’s way of alerting the mind that something we’re thinking isn’t in alignment with our spiritual nature, and immediate change is required before it affects the body.

This approach to healing works on three premises:

1. An unhealthy mental state contributes to an unhealthy physical state.

2. Healing only occurs when unresolved issues at a psychological level are identified and removed.

3. Only we can heal ourselves. No one else can.

This model delves deeper into the connection between illness and thoughts, emotions and beliefs, perceptions and core themes; and takes into consideration how all of these factors affect the relationship between the soul, the mind, and the body. Its objective is to show us how to identify the unhealthy contributors buried deep within our psychological coffers, how to remove these problems and release their emotional charges, and how to tap into our spiritual nature so the healing qualities of the soul and spirit can be released. This approach facilitates healing on a higher level.