You are not who you think you are.....
The greatest potential for authentic healing comes from the deep experience of ourselves as Love itself. This experience has been transmitted through the ages by numerous mystics and masters. For most of us in the post-modern era, the actuality and experience of this is a mere intellectual exercise. For many of us in the post-modern era where so much of experience is culturally conditioned and dependent on context, we have literally cut ourselves off from the deep and joyous encounter with ourselves as Spirit. As we transcend limiting developmental states of consciousness while including the most useful parts of them, it IS possible to encounter, commune with, and be transformed by this deep and abiding presence.
I work with many people every day who are seeking “healing.” Most folks simply want to “feel better” so that they can get to where they were just before they started to hurt or feel uncomfortable symptoms. This is our cultural story around health care and medicine: It is there to get the uncomfortable stuff out of the way so we can get on with the business of living our lives just as we were before we felt uncomfortable. Yet, what if this very very lifestyle and all the choices we made was the reason we got to where we are? If that is the case, I would submit that our very symptoms are our wake up calls. They are the calls from deep within, from a place of profound wisdom that is calling us back to wholeness (NOTE: I am no way discouraging proper medical care when needed. Thank goodness for the life-saving technology of interventional allopathic medicine). Yet, most of the time the very self that is seeking healing is the very self that created the problem to begin with. This very self is rooted in a lifetime of programs of behavior, thought, and relationship that do NOT reflect our deepest, ever-present nature as Love and Spirit. Thus, does it make sense to attempt to solve a problem at the very level of mind that created the problem to begin with. As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Let us, then, differentiate healing and curing. Healing entails a new, evolved, and vertically integrated manner of living, thinking, and being that reflects a higher state of moral, spiritual, emotional, and physical development. It means our relationships are healing, our relationship to Spirit is healing, our behaviors are congruent with our deepest reality of Love, and we begin to move towards a concern for “all of us” – not just ourselves or the selected few of our families, tribe, clan, or culture. Healing is integral and encompasses every aspect of our lives – nothing is excluded. In healing, we so not always arrive at the outcome we initially desired. Sometimes the pain doesn’t go away, sometimes we don’t go into remission, sometimes the questions do not get answered. In healing, however, a radical evolution of every part of our lives is always available. Joy is always available. And the healing of our fragmented and broken selves is always available. In fact, this re-integration is our birthright and part of our very curriculum on this planet. As we become free and experience ourselves as Love, we invisibly give everyone in our web of existence permission to do the same.The freedom, joy, and peace of this experience is beyond words.
To heal you have to have guts. You have to be willing to walk through the fire so that everything that does not reflect your innate wisdom and goodness can fall away like snake skin. For most of us, there is a lot to shed, so I suggest you hang on for the ride. Nestle your head in the breast of a community of support and find yourself in Spirit. Ask for help from the elders who have walked before you. Find the Master and sit at her feet. Trust God, forgive everything, and awaken to infinite Love. I assure, no matter how far down the scale you have gone, this is possible. It is WHO you ARE.
This experience is one of the most powerful remedies for health and healing. As someone who spent years studying herbal medicine, nutrition, acupuncture, chiropractic, and manual medicine, NOTHING transcends this authentic experience in the path to total wholeness and radical wellness.
Cures can occur in this environment. There are numerous reports of spontaneous healing that occur in the presence of masters or at holy sites. As I look at my bookshelf now, I have an entire annotated bibliography of spontaneous healings that have occurred with all types of fatal illnesses. Miracles happen….all the time. However, they are simply part of the journey, not the goal. Healing and integral living is the goal. Love is the goal. If you are, by definition, Love, then You are the goal.
I have always had a deep connection to St. Teresa of Avila. If her writings she stated, “Remember, if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much, but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.” Awakening to love is health.
St. Augustine stated, “Love made me what I am, that I may be what I was not before.” Amen. May we never be the same again.
Finally, in one of the greatest Christian mystical texts ever written, the Anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing writes, “Be moderate in everything but Love.”
As my spiritual teacher, His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has always said, “Love is not an emotion, it is your very existence.”
Infinite healing and infinite love are available now. They are core foundations for the experience of health and radical wellness.
