I tend to choose a word for each year, not as a slogan, but as a way of listening. A way of noticing what my life is already asking of me.
A Word about 2025
Last year, my word was deeper. And I did go deeper. Into questions I had avoided. Into old stories, beliefs, wounds, and identities I had outgrown but not yet released. I was confronted with experiences that did not allow distance or theory, only presence. I saw and felt things that changed me at a level beyond language, a change that did not arrive suddenly, but confirmed and accelerated something that had been quietly unfolding in me for years. It was difficult work. Necessary work. The kind that rearranges you at the roots rather than the branches. I do not regret it, but I will not pretend it was gentle. It changed me on a fundamental level.
In truth, the last several years have been like that. Years of growth, excavation, and reckoning. Years spent digging through belief systems, inherited identities, family stories, spiritual frameworks, and personal patterns, trying to understand who I am once the old maps no longer worked. There was clarity gained, but also fatigue. Insight, but also tenderness. Growth can be beautiful, but it can also leave the soil raw.
This year, I do not want to dig anymore.
A Year of Healing
This year, my word is healing.
A year of healing is not an achievement. It is not a finish line. It is not a promise that everything will finally resolve or feel better. I am not chasing another dramatic transformation or breakthrough. I want to tend to what has already been uncovered. To let the nervous system settle. To let grief have room. To let insight move out of my head and into my body.
Healing, for me, is about integration. It is about letting what I have already learned become something I can actually live with.
Eastern Wisdom on Suffering and Healing
I study many religious traditions, and I do not belong exclusively to Christianity. Over time, I have found that Eastern wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, often speak about suffering and healing with more honesty and less blame than many Western frameworks.
These traditions tend to assume suffering is part of being human, not evidence of spiritual failure. Healing is rarely about eliminating pain. It is more often about learning how to be present with it, without grasping, without aversion, and without turning it into a moral problem.
In Buddhism, suffering is named directly as dukkha. Healing begins with awareness, not denial. Taoism teaches us to stop forcing life into shapes it resists. Hindu traditions remind us that wisdom is not found in conquering the body or the world, but in learning how to inhabit them gently.
And yet.
Jesus
Healing Without Prerequisites
There are moments in the teachings of Jesus that remain deeply comforting to me, especially around healing.
Jesus and healing are often misunderstood. Jesus does not heal as a reward. He does not require readiness, correct belief, repentance, purity, or understanding before responding to suffering. He heals people who never ask. People who cannot speak. People who misunderstand him. People who will later oppose him.
He heals children, strangers, the unconscious, the dead, and even those actively involved in harming him.
He heals enemies.
And Jesus does not heal everyone. The Gospels are honest about this. There are people who remain sick. Towns he leaves behind. Prayers that are not answered with a cure. But when healing does not come, Jesus does not withdraw. He offers presence instead. He weeps at Lazarus’ tomb even knowing resurrection is possible. He stays near suffering without explaining it away. And in the end, he takes suffering into his own body, absorbing pain rather than assigning it. His response to unhealed pain is not distance or blame. It is solidarity.
Faith Is Not a Requirement for Healing
This matters to me because so much modern religious language around healing misses this entirely. When churches say, “Healing did not happen because you did not have enough faith,” they fundamentally misunderstand Jesus.
In the Gospels, faith is almost never a prerequisite for healing. When Jesus names faith, it is usually after healing. Not as a transaction completed correctly, but as a recognition of courage, openness, or connection that was already alive.
Healing flows from presence, not performance.
Jesus’ healing is not about fixing everything. It is about meeting what hurts without conditions. That way of being, steady, compassionate, and unhurried, aligns closely with Eastern wisdom on suffering and healing.
Healing Begins
Across traditions, healing begins in the same place.
Listening to the body. Listening to grief. Listening to what tightens and what softens. Listening to the deep, often quiet knowing that tells us what is life-giving and what is not.
That is what this year of healing is for me.
A year of healing is not about staying or leaving, fixing or abandoning, enduring or escaping. It is about cultivating enough presence to honor what my deepest, wisest parts are asking for, without rushing, without moralizing, and without forcing meaning too soon.
Some choices will come from that listening. Some changes may follow. But they are not the goal. They are the fruit.
The Deeper Wisdom Beneath Healing
I do not know exactly what this year will bring. I only know that I am practicing presence, listening more carefully to what hurts, what softens, and what feels alive. Whatever healing comes will come from there.
And maybe this is the shared wisdom beneath so many traditions, Eastern and Western alike. The opposite of suffering is not comfort. It is contact. When we stop abandoning what hurts and stay present with it, we discover we were never meant to endure life alone, not even inside ourselves. That is how Jesus healed.
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