What Healing Really Means: Rediscovering Your Inner Wholeness

There are certain words we use so often that we forget to ask what they truly mean. Healing is one of them. It’s a word woven through my nursing career, my holistic practice, my personal story, and the lives of the people I’ve supported. Yet for all its depth, it’s also a word that has been stretched, reshaped, and reinterpreted in countless ways. Recently, I found myself wondering what healing actually means—literally, historically, and personally. That question led me back to its Old English roots… and it also brought me home to my own understanding of what healing has become in my life and in my work at Meridian Wellness and Awakened Lakeshore.

The word healing comes from the Old English haelan, which means “to make whole.” Originally, it wasn’t spiritual, emotional, or metaphorical. It was literal. A wound healed. A bone healed. The body returned to health. Wholeness was restored through the natural biological process of repair. But that early meaning—to make whole—holds a quiet wisdom we can easily miss: healing was never about going back to who you were; it was about becoming whole in the shape you’re in now. Even in its earliest use, healing spoke to restoration, not reversal.

In my years as a nurse, healing lived in the measurable world—the world of vitals, labs, symptoms, and progress notes. Healing looked like swelling decreasing, pain easing, wounds closing from the inside out, mobility returning, and patients whispering, “I feel better today.” These were tangible moments. You could see the body mending, cell by cell. But even within sterile halls and structured protocols, I witnessed something more. Some people healed faster when they felt supported. Some stabilized when they were truly heard. Some softened when they didn’t feel alone. It didn’t take long to realize that healing isn’t just physical—it carries emotional, relational, and spiritual weight, even in the places we least expect it.

When I entered the world of holistic healing—Human Design, sound therapy, energy work, breathwork—the definition I carried cracked wide open. Healing became remembering who you are beneath the noise; releasing the pieces of yourself you were never meant to hold; integrating the experiences that once fractured you; reclaiming your voice, your intuition, your boundaries; reconnecting to meaning shaped by the wisdom of your experiences. These truths brought tears to my eyes the first time I named them, because they are the very things I needed most, too. Healing became less about “getting over it” and more about learning to live fully again. Less about returning to a previous version of myself and more about creating room for the version emerging now. Healing became deeply human—tender, nonlinear, and profoundly personal.

When I created Meridian Wellness and then expanded that vision into what is now Awakened Lakeshore, I wasn’t just building a business. I was creating a home for the kind of healing I had come to understand—a place where wholeness is honored, where people can soften, where the nervous system can unwind, where someone can walk in feeling fragmented and walk out feeling reclaimed. Inside these walls—the treatment room, the Salt Vault, the sound immersions, the quiet conversations, the Human Design sessions—I see healing take shape in ways no chart could ever truly reflect. A client finally exhales after years of holding. Someone remembers their intuition is trustworthy. Boundaries are spoken for the first time. Tears release what words could not. There is an energy shift that comes from being witnessed, not judged. These are the moments that echo that original Old English meaning: haelan—to make whole. Not by fixing. Not by forcing. But by allowing wholeness to rise again.

If I’ve learned anything through my own life, my nursing career, and the work I now hold, it’s this: healing isn’t a destination. It’s a relationship—one you’re allowed to take slowly, gently, and on your own terms. Healing is a remembering, a reclamation, a reorientation, a returning. Returning to your breath. Returning to your truth. Returning to the pieces of yourself you lost along the way. Returning to meaning shaped by the wisdom of your experiences. Returning—again and again—to the wholeness that has always lived inside you. This is the work of Meridian Wellness. This is the heart of Awakened Lakeshore. This is the journey I’m honored to walk with others. Healing isn’t about fixing what was never broken. It is a remembering—a rediscovery of the wholeness that has always been yours.