My First Healing the Whole Person Conference
How I went from HWP newbie to innovating a new format - Healing the Whole Person: Racing Through My Wounds
Editor’s note: this is a guest submission from an attendee of the Healing the Whole Person (HWP) conference hosted at Holy Apostles parish in New Berlin.
Even before the registration opened on Milwaukee’s April Healing the Whole Person Conference, I was sure I wanted to go. My internal dialogue went something like this: I’ve been doing a lot of counseling, prayer journaling, and engaging my story in the past few years so this will be the perfect retreat to round all that out and get me to a nice, good, stable place. With that end in mind, I was psyched! Having no firsthand experience of this particular brand of healing work, I nevertheless became a hype person and up to the very day it started I could be heard spouting such motivational phrases as, “Who’s ready to be healed????” Obviously, I was ready.
Then the conference began. I knew beforehand there would be a lot of participants (hundreds, in fact) so had made some attempt to prepare myself for the fact that this was going to be a large event, a Steubenville rally or FOCUS conference of sorts but for grown-ups like me who are clearly very emotionally and psychologically aware. Unfortunately, I’d also never been to a Steubenville rally or FOCUS conference–those events being for the masses, not for special people like me–so that inhibited my ability to imagine what was coming.
When I walked into the registration area, I immediately became uncomfortable. Not that I was fully aware I was uncomfortable (by no means), I just had a general sense that something wasn’t quite right and improvements could be made to the flow so that special people like me could make their way through to the HEALING without being inhibited by dozens of others who seemed to be there to pick out prayer shawls and books. Prayer shawls and books are fine, but this healing work is serious business!
Finally, we launched into the first night of talks, which included a meditation on the Caravaggio painting that is literally everywhere on the Healing the Whole Person marketing materials. Despite that, I had never really taken a good close look at it, and during the meditation was able to discover a feeling I had about it: while I was ok with the small wound on the left hand of Jesus, the hand he was using to guide Thomas’s hand, I didn’t like that big wound that He had in His side. That’s right, I was personally judging the wounds of Christ. This should have been a big clue to me about my interior state, but was it? Nope.
Meanwhile I was astounded that the conference included socializing. How could people be expected to talk to each other while going through the important work of dissecting their own wounds (I mean, with Jesus, but also, scalpel out and blood spraying everywhere–definitely need to keep this area sanitized)? In the back of my consciousness was a sense that people, and I in particular, should be kept safe and protected and not made to talk to anyone. I still tried, producing such conversational gambits as, “Well, here we all are” but felt in general my ability to connect to others to be about equal to a ringwraith from The Lord of the Rings.
Another easy topic of conversation throughout the weekend was, “Is this your first Healing the Whole Person Conference?” I kept wanting to say, “Yes! I’m a Healing the Whole Person virgin!” but managed to hold it back as it would be too inappropriate. And again, to me any conversation in the first place was inappropriate so the quickest path out was to say, “Yes, it is” and then leave. Here’s where I apologize to all the friends I awkwardly tried to talk to, brushed off, or didn’t talk to at all at the conference! It wasn’t you, it was the fact that I was a ringwraith with inappropriate jokes going off in my head.
We then had our first night of adoration with prayer/journaling and while I was mostly able to enter into it, my general sense was that everyone was too close to me, I was too cramped and warm and surrounded, and I wanted to leave. I came out of that night with the same indignant feeling I get when I’m in line for Confession and am told the priest is out of time to hear mine–how dare they?! Speaking of which, I didn’t even try to go to Confession at all during the conference. No way was I going to be part of the very public and long line of people funneled into a confession with who knows what priest. Not this special snowflake!
The next night, instead of sitting down in the church like I had the first night, I thought I would “sneak up” to the choir loft, only to be a little surprised (and slightly disappointed) that this was actually a legitimate seating area. It wasn’t nearly as crowded as the lower area of the church, though, so I was able to get a pew mostly to myself and spread out a bit. Here we go, I thought, now the healing will start to happen. And I was pretty into it, following along as best I could and trying to let the Holy Spirit lead me into some memories.
I was led into a memory of staying with my grandmother, who lived four hours away from my home in a small south Texas town, and coming down with some kind of flu while I was there. Not being an extremely warm or caring person, she didn’t fuss over me but instead gave me some orange juice and mainly left me alone to rest. I felt abandoned, rejected, powerless - but also, I struggled at first to connect this to the top of my sin tree, where I had sketched out the fruits of lust and grasping after relationships. This little memory shouldn’t have been such a big deal, after all, shouldn’t have shaken my faith that my parents loved me and that I was valued and wanted. I shouldn’t have made a decision based on such a small thing to leave home and go far away before I was abandoned again, to make certain by the control and co-dependency of lust, that whoever I was with would take care of me and never leave me. Even as a kid, I should have been smarter than that, shouldn’t I?
Without verbalizing these judgments to myself at the time, I thought I was ready to move on to any more significant wounds, because though to me the pace of the conference felt a bit quick I was not ready to admit defeat! No, I was going to get the absolute most out of this time, and if that meant pushing through to find all my wounds so be it. Rest is for the weak. By Saturday, I was all in on my personal new conference format: Healing the Whole Person: Racing Through My Wounds (trademarked it already, sorry). Out of my way, people in my community who might know and care about me–no time to talk to you, gotta focus on all these wounds!
So I pressed in and found another wound, this one more disturbing to me than the first because it touched the relationship between me and my mother. I was able to see the anger I had harbored toward her, as well as my pride in vowing that I would not be like her in taking up all the emotional space and in her own pain and woundedness ignoring or not perceiving my pain. In the forgiveness meditation, I brought her with me to the foot of the Cross and as my meditation led me to imagine the heart of Christ pierced by a lance and blood and water flowing out, I was reminded of the Divine Mercy image that my mom gave me almost 20 years ago that I’ve hung on my bedroom wall ever since. So the meditation in a way felt complete, even though the conference wasn’t. And this was going to become a problem for me because of my mentality, completely hidden to my own consciousness of course, that I was somehow going to achieve the gold star of the Healing the Whole Person conference.
Then we had a lunch break. I could admit to the human limitation of needing food, so I tucked my scalpel away in my pocket and went to grab a sandwich. I said hi to some people, and one sweet friend wanted to have lunch with me so we looked for a place to sit down. Firmly convinced I was exceptional, I plopped down at a table clearly marked for those who were handicapped and needed accessible seating. A nice lady came and asked me to sit elsewhere, mentioning there was cafeteria seating downstairs. Sit with the masses? Oh heck no! I sullenly went over to a corner by the window and sat down on the floor with my back to everyone. Eventually my friend and a few other friends joined me, and I felt a little more like a normal human person rather than a Very Serious Wound Healing Person.
I really could have used someone to talk to about what was going on in my heart, but I wasn’t ready to admit it, or even if I could admit it on a certain level, I didn’t think anyone would be there (abandonment!) so I was just trying to push that feeling away. I felt very isolated, even among so many people. And I hated that feeling.
So in the final prayer session, when a bigger wound came up, a wound I couldn’t see the edges of or fully name, I was done. I just wanted to leave. The retreat was wrapping up with a song of thanksgiving and praise, and I wept my way through it, feeling not the smallest shred of gratitude and barely able to bleat out the chorus. I knew I should feel healed, grateful, whole, ready to go forth and praise God, and I didn’t. In that moment, I even forgot the other two wounds that the Lord had revealed and offered healing for–I only saw the big one in my side, the one I didn’t like and didn’t know what to do with.
In the Lord’s mercy, there was a final moment for prayer over others and up in the choir loft, I reluctantly but honestly raised my hand: I needed prayers. And before I knew it, I was surrounded by prayer warriors. One woman, Andrea (God bless her!), asked me what she should pray for, and through my tears all I could muster was: “my heart.” So she prayed a beautiful prayer over me, as did the woman next to me, and the others prayed and praised the Lord. I felt a measure of peace come over me. I knew I wasn’t fully healed but that their prayers had done the work of bandaging up the wound I’d so cavalierly sliced open as part of Racing Through My Wounds (trademarked, remember?).
So in short, when someone asks me how the Healing the Whole Person conference went, will I say, “Really good!” like everyone else? Absolutely! Would I go again? Yes, I kind of have to at this point, though more gently, God-willing. And more important even than continuing the healing journey for me is realizing that in entering into it, I’m not better than anyone else, even than anyone who chooses not to try “Healing the Whole Person” at all. Finally, in the future, I’ll do my best to stick to the original Healing the Whole Person program rather than invent one of my own!
Want to be healed?