The body’s capacity for healing amazes me. As I slowly recover from my spinal surgery (I had surgery on May 1st), I’m more and more aware that my primary task is not to help the healing along, but to trust that healing is happening, sometimes even in spite of my interference. 

My first experience of myself after surgery was of shocking physical damage. There was a puckered ten-inch incision down my back, held together with staples. There was a raw four-inch incision across my throat, held together with glue. Ten vertebrae in my upper spinal column had been pulled apart, rearranged, and bolted back together. Nerves and muscles and blood vessels in my neck and back had been severed. I couldn’t reposition myself in bed, turn my head, swallow properly or manage my own beleaguered senses. My heart sputtered under the strain, and I felt so sick, feeble and disoriented that I really couldn’t imagine ever being whole and strong again. 

Yet, almost immediately, the healing began. Soon, the wounds in my back and throat became neat seams. The chaotic sensory panic signals found a tentative rhythm, so my body’s communication became comprehensible again. Each day I felt better as I relaxed my ineffectual instinct to struggle against this experience. My body had been overwhelmed, but my body knew how to heal. All I could really do was cooperate, bear witness, and rest.

Before the surgery, with the progression of my neuro-muscular disease, it was almost impossible to believe in healing. No matter what I did or didn’t do, the symptoms steadily worsened. Yet healing was happening even then. Sometimes healing can be an increasingly profound spiral downward into the unknown, even into death. Or sometimes things just have to get worse before they can get better, and that’s how it was for me. The disease intensified to the tipping point, against my will, but in the post-surgical wreckage of my body, healing began to show itself as naturally as a green shoot breaking through rubble. Now, it seems to be growing easily in me. I’m not approaching death (not yet)—I’m relaxing into possibility. 

Five months after surgery, all of my current symptoms can be seen as forms of healing in themselves. The inflammation that causes me pain is actually promoting bone growth in my spine. My weakness and lethargy are my body’s call for patience; I truly need the rest that this fatigue imposes. My heart’s arrhythmias slow me down, because it’s good for me to go slowly. 

I’m not making this happen. Healing resists my interference. But noninterference can be active; it certainly doesn’t mean apathy. I’m fully engaged in recovery, and my noninterference includes caring deeply, using all of my senses to discern what to do and what not to do, how to nurture the green shoot of the moment as it spirals upward. 

I have a strong preference for long-term survival and physical well-being, of course—but ultimately it’s not up to me. Ultimately, I will die, even the earth will die, and when the time comes, it could be a kind of healing, a not-yet-conceivable transformation. However, as long as I’m alive, healing must include appreciation, and participation in the life force that sustains my body and the earth. Interference is always a lack of appreciation, a lack of respect which creates distortions in natural cycles and developmental processes that would otherwise resolve themselves in balance over time.

Dreams are healing processes, and good dreamwork is also about noninterference. I don’t think there can be any effective prescriptions for interpreting dreams, just as I don’t think there’s any medication or surgery that will “fix” my body permanently, or any intervention that will “fix” our planet. Dreamwork is a fluid process, not a “fixed” method. Dreams move in the direction of healing and wholeness—but the key word I’m using here is move. All healthy processes are changing, moving. “Fixing” invariably means interfering by interrupting that movement. 

If I claim that certain dream images always symbolize certain things, or that a dream’s meaning can be found only according to a particular method, or that there is only one correct meaning to be found in a dream, then I am interfering with the momentum that makes the dream what it is. A dream is a changing, unfolding, un-pin-downable experience. We can’t “fix” it or define it without violating its wholeness and preventing its potential. Yet dreamwork through noninterferenceinvites engagement, commitment, and patience with our own unknowing. 

As I heal, I’m being invited to trust. I’m being invited to enjoy my life, with all of its discomforts and upheavals, and even with the inevitable unknown potential of its ending. As I explore dreams, I’m being invited to enjoy the sometimes disturbing and confusing impressions that those dreams make when they break through the rocky soil of my life and grow wild, escaping my understanding. I can nurture the green sprouts of healing possibilities, through trust and appreciation, without interfering at all.