Your responses to the last letter were so very kind. I was moved and grateful and started to feel inspiration building toward writing a book. This is something I’ve been contemplating for years and your notes and sharing ignited a sense of possibility that has been absent for quite some time.

I spent the week doing a lot of writing and deleting assuming that enthusiasm would take over, but it didn’t. I came to realize how the break in my weekly letter writing rhythm had really set me back. I tend to be stiff and plodding when I get out of practice. And nothing slows the writing process more than trying to speed it up.

I got tangled in the idea that I need to commit to an origin story. It was a veiled attempt to create logical underpinnings for why I’ve become a healing artist. There weren’t obvious steps and my skills could have combined in countless other ways. It was something I felt compelled and inspired to do, largely because I felt that if I were able to make progress toward eliminating my own suffering it would prove that anyone else could.

If you’d asked me 5 years ago what motivated me to want to ease that suffering, I would have said, “Stepping into my path and purpose.” I still believe this to be true of health but not necessarily of healing. We get healthy because we dwell in the realm of relationships. We need to be able to meet our needs, care for others, and live creative lives. This is one of the incredibly unique aspects of being human. We have the broadest possibility of any animal to develop ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Healing is another story. Healing is a process that is not confined to the relational realm. It is a highly energized state that defies much in the way of description. It has a symphonic quality, expressive and large.

As I am aging, I am far more interested in the blissful or sublime elements of healing than I am in the rigorous pursuit of health. It’s an evolution that is relatively recent and also one that has occurred as a result of practicing Integrative Manual Therapy and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy underpinned by a Buddhist sensibility.

Experiences of attunement, communion, and clarity are now palpable to me daily. They are the great healer of the human heart, but also the reunifier of the mind and body. There isn’t anything ORIGINal in that which is why I struggle to frame it in personal details. It is precisely where the personal drops away that the eternal nature of health begins.

Perhaps, I am to remain blissfully unORIGINAL.

With folded palms,

Jennifer