The following excerpt is from Willowgreen Publishing’s book The Art of Being a Healing Presence: A Guide for Those in Caring Relationships by James E. Miller.

Healing presence is most effective when it is least active.

     Your desire to help flows out of your best intentions. You witness what is happening to others, and you want to make their situation a little easier or better. You may have been through a similar experience yourself. Perhaps you’ve gained wisdom from others. You may be someone who has been a natural caregiver for as long as you can remember. Or your caregiving may be a recent role, whether you wanted it or not. Perhaps you’ve had professional training, so when you see someone in pain or fear or grief, you’ve been prepared to do something about it.
     It’s possible, however, that your good intentions and natural inclinations may limit your healing presence.
     Sometimes helping isn’t helpful.
     There’s a common idea that helping means doing something for someone else, and the more you do, the better helper you are. This isn’t necessarily so. When you do for others what they could do on their own, or wish to attempt on their own, you potentially take away their authority and control. You diminish the satisfaction they may feel in their own accomplishments, as well as the knowledge they might gain or any strength they might build from their experience or situation.
     Trying to reduce others’ psychological or spiritual anguish, to diminish their apparent pain, is also inappropriate. To interfere in this way despite all good intention will discourage or delay the healing process, a process that often involves intense feeling. And the unfortunate message conveyed is that they don’t have the resources or the competence to feel or to learn on their own.
     Sometimes helping isn’t possible.
     The other may refuse your helping, no matter how much help you think you have to give. And some forms of help are unseemly or impossible. You cannot take on or take away others’ discomfort or pain—it’s theirs alone. You cannot handle or change their feelings—that’s beyond your ability. Nor can you manage their healing for them, since every person must heal for herself or himself, however difficult that may be, however long it takes.
     Sometimes the most effective helping doesn’t look that way.
     Healing presence will look less like helping than you might anticipate. You’ve probably heard this reversal of a popular expression: “Don’t just do something—stand there!” Any help that you are as a healing presence follows the same philosophy: Don’t just do something—sit there! Don’t just rush to say something—hush there! Don’t hurry to make things better—just listen, support, allow.
     Your helping may take the form of reflecting back in your own words what you are hearing. “This is what I am sensing,” you might say as you begin. Using as few words and as much clarity as possible, you share your perception. Then you hush and listen some more.
     The help of healing presence involves the act of pulling alongside.
     This is what the help of healing presence looks like: visualize one person coming up beside another who’s walking along and then falling in step beside that person. In such a situation, what is it that helps?
     You help when you walk with them, matching your pace to theirs. You help when you walk in the direction they’re moving, even if it seems directionless, rather than leading them the way you want to go. You help when you walk close enough that you can hear and be heard with ease, but you don’t walk so closely that they feel crowded. Sometimes you look at them and sometimes you don’t, but either way, they know beyond a doubt they’re being seen.

     This excerpt is from the book The Art of Being a Healing Presence. It includes fifteen short chapters, each of which deals with a specific aspect of healing presence. A companion book has also been written by Jim Miller: The Art of Listening in a Healing Way. Both use many quotations from the ages and artwork based upon or utilizing Jim’s photography.

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