The discovery that you have healing gifts, along with the discovery that you suffer if you don’t find a way to express them, can be a rather lonely discovery. It can be hard to talk about, even to yourself. 

The path of the healer is not necessarily satisfied by any of the conventional roles mainstream society offers. This is particularly confusing if you sense that your healing gifts cannot be separated from your own inner growth or your spiritual path. 

Who’s a healer? The popular image of the “healer” is so inflated that it can sound unbearably immodest to claim to be one. When we use the word “healer” it seems to imply that some of us are healers, while the rest of us aren’t. But healing potential exists in each of us. It would be fair to say that this particular quality in a healer is not only a potential but is consciously developed, active and strong. First and foremost, it is important to recognize that it is not so much that the “healer” heals another person, but rather that he triggers the other person’s own self-healing potential.

Some people who understand that they have genuine healing qualities can get so puffed up in their image of themselves as healers that they need to undergo some kind of ego bypass operation before they are able to do anybody any good. Or they might go in the opposite direction and get caught up in false modesty, saying to themselves, “who am I to presume to be a healer?” When that happens, they end up neglecting gifts that they actually have. There is, therefore, a need to back off from the inflated, heroic images of the healer, while still doing something to help these qualities—it is not inappropriate to call them spiritual gifts—to express.

Healer Education
While some people glide serenely into the active expression of their gifts, others may find them an unwelcome burden in an already complicated life and view them as anything but a welcome gift. Those who are seriously drawn to spiritual development and healing are often sensitive people who have their hands full trying to marshal dimensions of life that most folks are not even aware of. Meanwhile, the most effective healers and spiritual adepts are those who have learned to manage themselves, sort out their spiritual gifts and dedicate themselves to service.

Learning to Manage the Tools of Your Trade
This brings us to the notion of using tools and practices to cultivate our healer qualities. Though the potential for healing may be present in all of us, its positive expression requires a parallel spiritual development. Without a deep respect for the spiritual links between ourselves and the infinite dimensions of life, what can and should be a comfort in our lives can be quite the opposite; our gift can turn on us and cause harm. For most healers, there comes a point in their lives when their growth stopped being exclusively personal and they began seeking ways to use their deeper qualities to benefit others.

For many years, I have been intensely interested in the education of healers. Many people with the gift of healing find themselves resisting this idea. I have heard healers say, “I’m afraid that if I get too structured, it will clog up my intuition” or “I’m afraid I’ll get too left-brained.” But healing requires both intuition and rational knowledge. Flying by the seat of your intuitive pants into someone’s energy system, though it can bring about fascinating results, often leaves both you and your treatment partners without any insight and without any long-term benefits. On the contrary, there is potential for long-term damage! There is something to be said for knowing something. Education allows intuition, understanding and respect for the powers of healing and its deeper dimensions to blend.

Structured learning and spontaneous intuition are not really at war with one another. Indeed, factual understanding creates a pole toward which intuition can move. The more truly differentiated our knowledge base and the more tools it has at its disposal, the greater the variety of our intuitive repertoire. The healer-in-training learns the names of things, develops skills, sensitivity, and a broad acquaintance with a number of fields of knowledge, from science to religion and art, from psychology to anatomy and physiology. 

The education of a healer consists of input from many different sources, traditional and the non-traditional. Traditional learning comes from all that has been handed down from past generations, and from the particular habits, lore and wisdom of our culture. Non-traditional learning comes from our own direct “fall down and go BOOM!” experience, as well as ecstatic states in which we transcend experience. One thing has become abundantly clear to me, however: healer education needs to provide, alongside factual knowledge, opportunities to gain direct, first-hand experience. Since we are so often working outside consensus reality we need to be able to draw from resources that we ourselves hold within us, and learn how to trust them.

excepted from “Energy Healing- A Pathway to Inner Growth” by Jim Gilkeson