The is no such thing as a person who is free from illness, incompleteness, and injury to his or her personality. Some of us can simply hide from our woundedness better than others. When we can no longer hide from our woundedness, we are ready for individuation. Many said that simply acknowledging their own pain felt strangely healing. Our fear is understandable.
Illness is an awful summons, a hellish grinding between millstones.
The road to healing has its own stations of the cross. The model common in traditional societies that a sojourn in the Underworld might also gestate healing strikes us an alien and even a dangerous notion. Spiritually, particularly as repackaged for the New Age, is often a confection of love and light, purified of pilgrimage and penance, of defeat and descent, of harrowing humility. In the broken place. The archetypal stories seem to tell us that the path of healing is not back from where we have come, but beginning a new cycle of life.