The Healing Power of Not Knowing - Ian Watson
Given my background of a lifelong career in natural health and personal growth, I immediately saw how valuable an understanding of the Three Principles could be for my colleagues working in homeopathy and other helping professions. Not only is it massively reassuring to have something that is universally helpful to fall back on, it is also liberating for the practitioner and empowering for their clients to realize that we can shift the emphasis away from fixing what is wrong with people. Instead, as we begin to genuinely see the well-being that exists within everyone, we evoke both the well-being and the innate wisdom that knows exactly what is needed for a person's growth and healing at any particular moment.
One of the ways that this occurs is that this understanding helps to deepen your listening, and it helps you to get comfortable with not knowing. You start to realize that there are two very different listening modes that you can bring to any conversation. You can listen through the filter of your existing ideas about who this person is and what they might need and what you might have in your box of tricks that could be helpful. Or, you can allow yourself to get quiet and listen with no agenda, no preconceptions, nothing on your mind. You can put what you already know to one side and get deeply present.
And you discover that when you do this, the person you are with has a tendency to relax into a deeper, wiser place within themselves, and a beautiful and surprising thing happens as a result. They start to have insights, and they suddenly see things they hadn’t seen before. New possibilities literally emerge out of nowhere, and they bring an uplifting energy to the room.
In short, the client begins to find their own answers, which means you don’t have to do that on their behalf. You’re off the hook! You are relieved of the burden of responsibility that you had been carrying - the need to know the answers and get it right, having to be the ‘expert’, wanting to fix things and make everything okay. All of that begins to fall away, and in the space that gets created a whole host of self-healing possibilities arises all by itself.
Invariably, it takes you by surprise, because it will include possibilities that you couldn’t even have imagined just a moment ago. And so you learn things that you didn’t already know, and it humbles you because you realize that in this moment you are now the student and your client is the teacher. And in the next moment it could be the other way round, because you will have insights too and you will learn to trust what comes to you in that quiet emptiness.
And then, it may occur to you that wisdom itself is the real teacher, and we are all students and we can all discover amazing and beautiful things whenever we are willing to trust in the unknown and get fully present and really listen.