Using Intentionality to Release What No Longer Serves You

Healing is one of life’s great mysteries that has been studied across every known civilization. Our ancestors discovered long ago that attentive care, presence, and prayer and meditation are all mental processes and acts associated with healing.

Intent, intention, and intentionality have been scientifically proved to be essential for healing.

Intentionality is a characteristic of our mental states of being about or for something. Healing is used in a multitude of ways in both social media, cultural and professional literature. The term healing is used to commonly describe the mending skin or bones after a serious injury; mending the spirit, heart or soul after the loss of those we cherish; and with our spiritual growth or personal transformation.

About two years ago, my life was unintentionally simplified when my firstborn daughter passed away at the age of 26 from sudden congestive heart failure. She had been so vivacious and full of life for as long as she lived but most of all she had been a friend, a dedicated wife and a fierce loving mother of two small children. I was devastated. While I am still a mother to two other daughters who are in their mid-twenties, this loss still stung my soul.

This was the second child that I was forced to bury in my 46 years of life.

 For many months, I felt as if my entire world was destroyed by nameless and faceless circumstances beyond my control. I was hurt, angry, numb, dazed and confused. I couldn’t understand why she was taken away so soon and how the children would take her passing.

I didn’t think that my heart would ever heal from my raw grief or my spirit would recover from having two precious daughters ripped out of my life. The intentionality of most of the doctors that I saw seemed to be focused on treating me with medications. Even the two therapists that I visited seemed to have an intentionality that was not focused on developing a trusting therapeutic relationship.

 One of the biggest similarities and differences between conventional medical professionals and alternative wellness professionals is their intentionality and their healing presence. These two factors are linked by consciousness. Both factors are important elements of what is known as the “therapeutic relationship” in healing. The term “healing” can be a challenge to those with a more conventional understanding of the body’s physiological processes.

The exact cause or process of healing is not easily explained. What is clear is that healing is a multilayered process. No matter what form healing takes, at its base is intentionality. Most conventional medicine professionals approach patients with the intentionality to treat and not to heal. Integrative, complementary, holistic and alternative medicine practitioners generally take a more whole-person approach to our health. Healing presence is the condition of being consciously and compassionately in the present moment with another or with others, believing in and affirming their potential for wholeness, wherever they are in life.

 I soon realized that none of the doctors, counselors or holistic practitioners that I was seeing were truly interested in helping me to heal.

I was disappointed to discover that they only saw me as an open purse and a wounded woman who would pay any amount of money to find relief from her painful situation. I was deeply wounded, not helpless. I decided to take back responsibility for the things that were no longer serving my life, my happiness or my health. Healing from grief is an intentional act.

 It is a little over two years now and I have only just begun to heal. My motivating intentionality has been to honor the legacy of both my daughters. I developed so many stress-related health conditions within weeks of my second daughter’s passing including shingles and ulcers. I visited several doctors, therapists and alternative healers to help me cope with these issues. I was acutely aware that their healing presence (bedside manners) and intentionality was generally lacking.

I thought back to my own doctoral training as a mind-body medicine professional and made up my mind to surrender to my own intuition for my healing. I dived deep into my training using mindfulness-based practices to develop my own regimen of intentional healing. I can honestly say that loving-kindness meditation, Vipassana meditation, Crystal Reiki, crystal body layouts, crystal gridding, shamanic drumming, mindful eating and earthing have all helped me learn to let that shit go!  

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