For generations, before psychiatry and pharmaceutical labels, communities had people who held space for life’s deeper questions. They listened without judgment. They told stories that helped people find their way back to themselves. They pulled meaning out of the unseeable. In different cultures and languages these figures wore many names — wise woman, elder, seer, keeper of stories — but their role was always the same: to help the community carry what cannot be carried alone.
This quiet kind of wisdom does not make headlines. It does not broadcast itself on television or social media; there is no need for likes or followers. Yet, it still lives, in towns and neighbourhoods across the world. It lives in the gentle way someone listens, in the simple ritual of sharing a story, in the garden herbs tended with care and a wealth of age-old knowledge. These are the modern echoes of an ancient, essential human role: the healer, the witness, and the meaningkeeper.
Even though today we live in a world that is brilliant in its science and technology, a startling number of us feel adrift. Depression and anxiety are at record highs in wealthy nations. And while contemporary mental-health care has brought lifesaving tools, there is a part of human suffering that medical models are not equipped to deal with: the loss of meaning, connection, and story.
Meaning matters. This is not just intuition; it is backed by research. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, found that meaning — not comfort, not distraction — is what sustained people through the deepest suffering. In his classic work, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, he observed that those who could hold a narrative larger than their pain were more likely to survive, more likely to continue, more likely to live.
Anthropologists such as Byron Good and Laurence Kirmayer, document how across cultures, healing is not just about eliminating symptoms. It is about restoring someone’s sense of place in a story, a community, and a world of shared symbols. When we lose the cultural roles that hold meaning — the storytellers, the listeners, the meaningmakers — we lose part of our ability to integrate suffering into life.
The healer (the one who listens and holds meaning) did not disappear entirely. They went quiet. They took refuge in the everyday, in the relational fabric of community. There will be one (or more than one) in your neighbourhood; maybe even next door. If we look closely, they can be recognised as:
• The neighbour who tends a garden of medicinal herbs and knows how to make teas that calm the spirit
• The friend who sits with you and lets you speak — without interrupting, fixing, or diagnosing
• The person who reads stories aloud and creates a container of rhythm and presence
• The elder whose lived experience speaks in silence and gesture
• The intuitive listener who holds, without judgment, the mystery of what you carry
These figures are not demanding proof. They are not offering themselves as miracle workers. They are offering presence, attention, and narrative — the very things that help pull someone back from isolation and into belonging.
We can all be healers. Doing something as simple as sitting with someone who is struggling, and saying, “Tell me a story.” It could be a story about nothing at all — a memory, a childhood moment, the way the wind moved through the trees last autumn. The content does not matter; what matters is that together you create a shared narrative space, a tiny bridge between isolation and connection. Healers can use stories, tinctures, rituals, plants, quiet conversations – these are just the portals to healing.
The true gift is not in the object or the story itself, but in the relational space that is created. The healer’s work is to hold that space fully and openly, without trying to make the other person do, say, or think anything in particular. They simply allow presence to happen. That presence, subtle and undemanding, is the conduit for meaning, for restoration, and for reconnection.
We do not have to seek magic or explanation to experience it. The healer next door — however humble, however quiet — carries that timeless, universal gift: the capacity to hold space for another human soul, and in doing so, to remind us that we are never truly alone. Even when there is no one else to listen, the most quiet and humble Healer of all is God, who listens to our hearts and offers subtle, powerful support of love and upliftment.
Michael Frank is a teacher of Rajyoga meditation with the Brahma Kumaris and is based in Halifax.