‘You don’t know all of you, but all of you knows you.’ Harry Uhane Jim, Hawaiian philosopher and teacher
Most people who have a problem with their body, make the doctor their first port of call. Soon after that, if the problem is serious, they find themselves in a hospital, and very soon, they have something else as well as the original symptom. They have a diagnosis, and with it a host of beliefs and fears about the future. Sometimes the problem can be dealt with immediately, with surgery or drugs, but even when that’s so, as a healer I don’t believe that is the end of the matter.
The fact is that if your body is not functioning perfectly, then it is drawing your attention to some way in which your life is unbalanced. Neither surgery nor drugs will help you in the long term if you don’t get the message from your body.
After much thought and experience of healing, I have come to see the ‘reality’ we experience as something composed of layers, a bit like the three layers of the ice-cream they call Neapolitan. I’d be interested to know what you think about it. My analogy works like this: everything that we are and that we perceive around us is composed of these same three layers.
The bottom layer, the chocolate layer if you like, is the material reality that we all live and function in and which many people perceive to be the only reality. Here your body and the matter around you obeys the classical laws of physical matter: birth and death, gravity, friction and so on. Everything we perceive exists at this level, and the conventional medical system treats us as though we were solely mechanical beings.
However, in human beings, we know, there is an emotional reality which has a profound effect on the material or mechanical reality it inhabits. This is like the strawberry layer in a Neapolitan ice-cream, existing and inhabiting exactly the same space as the mechanical reality. This layer does not obey the classical laws of physics. This layer of your being obeys the dazzling and extraordinary laws of quantum physics, which means it can be both matter and energy at the same time. It doesn’t take up any space. It IS the space your mechanical body inhabits and it has more power over it than mechanical inputs (like, in this case, drugs or surgery) You know all about this layer of your being . It contains your unconscious thoughts and feelings and has a profound effect on the autonomic functioning of your body ( that 95% of you that goes about its business without your conscious intervention) .
You may not be in the habit of listening or paying attention to this layer of your life but your body is continuously expressing it. A healer will interact with this layer of being, and many doctors acknowledge that it is the determining factor in whether their patients get well or not. In the old days, before medicine reached its current level of technical wizardry ( for which of course we are all grateful if we do find ourselves forced to have surgery) doctors always considered the patient’s emotions or ‘state of mind’ of paramount importance in determining the outcome of their treatment.
Back to the Neapolitan ice cream analogy ( I don’t even like the stuff!).. Healers know there is another layer. Above the mechanical (chocolate) and emotional (strawberry) reality of each individual, there is a vanilla layer, more powerful than both the layers beneath it. This is the layer of time, fate, karma, the divine – whatever you want to call it: our individual portion of the great overall spirit that we all share in and choose to call Life or God, depending on our experience. This layer imbues everything we are and that we see around us. We can communicate with it if we choose, but we do not control it. We express it though we cannot change it. We are simply part of it.
When I am healing I am conscious that this power helps me as much as I allow it to. It is in me, and you, part of our deep psyche, and I need only to open up and submit to it to feel its power. Healing works in a mysterious way. I’m someone that likes to find an explanation for everything but after many years of working with healing, being healed myself and giving healing, I just have to accept the mystery.
When you have something you need to heal, pay attention to ALL these layers. Some people believe that if you are using healing then it is some kind of betrayal to use conventional medicine as well. Of course it’s true that many convention medical treatments have a powerful effect on the body which it can be hard to recover from, even though the original symptom may have gone. The words ‘sledgehammer’ and ‘nut’ come to mind. But I believe that you need to throw everything you can at bringing your body back from the symptom you have developed. It’s not a question of either /or, although each layer is more powerful than the one below.
So, herbal medicines, diet, changes in exercise or lifestyle, are all valid remedies that belong with drugs and medicines in the mechanical or ‘chocolate’ layer of our existence. More powerful, in terms of your ability to recover from the symptom, is the emotional (or ‘strawberry’) layer of your being.
What thoughts and feelings is the tension in your body expressing? This is the deep language of your body that healing reveals and you need to become aware of to effect a permanent recovery and discover a happier way of being.
Finally, we all need to face the limits of our power. We need to accept that the circumstances of our birth, our experiences, our sorrows and joys, have been the right ones for us to learn and evolve through. We embrace the power of the supreme layer of spirit (the ‘vanilla’ layer) with acceptance of our limits as individuals and an expectation that it will respond to our needs. The Hawaiians would call this the superconscious or The Father. We have the capacity to communicate with the Father, they say, through our individual connection with the superconscious element in our minds as individuals, but we have no more idea what it’s like to BE the superconscious than a dog knows what it’s like to be a human being.
I go along with that. It works for me.