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“Healing” does not always mean that the physical body recovers from an illness. Healing can also mean that one’s spirit has released long-held fears and negative thoughts toward oneself or others. This kind of spiritual release and healing can occur even though one’s body may be dying physically.
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You can be a vegetarian and run six miles a day, but if you are in an abusive relationship, or hate your job, or have daily fights with your parents, you are losing energy -- or power -- in a pattern of behavior that can lead to illness or prevent your healing from an illness. On the other hand, if you are spiritually centered and call back your energy from negative beliefs, you can eat cat food and still stay healthy.
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For an alternative therapy to succeed, the patient must have an internal concept of power -- an ability to generate internal energy and emotional resources, such as a belief in his or her self-sufficiency . . . You need to become conscious of what gives you power. Healing from any illness is facilitated by identifying your power symbols and your symbolic and physical relationship to those symbols, and heeding any messages your body and intuitions are sending you about them . . . Each of us as an individual needs to explore our relationship to physical power. We need to learn how and when we are controlled by external power and, if so, the type of power to which we are most vulnerable.
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Do all that is necessary to support your physical body, such as taking the appropriate medicine, maintaining a daily exercise program, and eating properly. Simultaneously, do all that is necessary to support your energy body, such as releasing unfinished business and forgiving injuries from the past. Make whatever personal changes are necessary for healing to take place -- leave that stressful job or marriage; take up a meditation practice; or learn cross-country skiing. The specific changes you make are not the important point here. The point is to actually make the changes that healing requires.
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Healing is simple, but it is not easy. The steps are few, yet they demand great effort.
Step 1: Commit yourself to healing all the way to the source of the pain. This means turning inward and coming to know your wounds.
Step 2: Once “inside,” identify your wounds. Have they become a form of “wound-power” within your present life? If you have converted your wounds into power, confront why you might fear healing. As you identify your wounds, have someone “witness” them and their influence upon your development. You need at least one person, a therapist or a friend perhaps, who is capable of working with you in this way.
Step 3: Once you have verbalized your wounds, observe how you use them to influence or even control the people around you as well as yourself. Do you ever say you are not feeling well because of them in order to cancel an appointment, for instance, when in fact you are feeling fine? Do you ever control another person by saying that his or her actions remind you of your parents? Do you ever give yourself permission to quit something, or not try at all, by dwelling on your past and therefore encouraging depression? Are you afraid that in healing yourself you will lose your intimate connections to certain people in your life? Are you afraid choosing to heal yourself will require you to leave behind some or much of your familiar life? These are questions you need to address honestly, because they are the most significant cluster of reasons that people fear becoming healthy.
As you observe yourself throughout the day, note carefully your choice of vocabulary, your use of therapeutic language, your fluency in woundology. Then formulate new patterns of interaction with others that do not rely upon wound power.
Change your vocabulary, including how you talk to yourself. Should changing these patterns prove difficult, recognize that it is often far more difficult to release the power you derive from your wound than it is to release the memory of the painful experience. A person who cannot let go of wound power is a wound addict, and like all addictions, wound addiction is not easy to break. Don’t be afraid to seek therapeutic help in getting through this step, or any of the others.
Step 4: Identify the good that can and has come from your wounds. Start living within the consciousness of appreciation and gratitude, and if you have to -- “fake it until you make it.” Initiate a spiritual practice and stick to it. Do not be casual about your spiritual discipline.
Step 5: Once you have established a consciousness of appreciation, you can take on the challenge of forgiveness. As appealing as forgiveness is in theory, it is an extremely unattractive personal action for most people, mainly because the true nature of forgiveness remains misunderstood. Forgiveness is not the same as telling the person who harmed you, “It’s okay,” which is more or less the way most people view it. Rather, forgiveness is a complex act of consciousness, one that liberates the psyche and soul from the need for personal vengeance and the perception of oneself as a victim. More than releasing from blame the people who caused our wounds, forgiveness means releasing the control that the perception of victimhood has over our psyches. The liberation that forgiveness generates comes in the transition to a higher state of consciousness -- not just in theory, but energetically and biologically. In fact, the consequence of a genuine act of forgiveness borders on the miraculous. It may, in my view, contain the energy that generates miracles themselves.
Evaluate what you need to do in order to forgive others -- and yourself, if necessary. Should you need to contact anyone for a closure discussion, make sure that you are not carrying the message of blame as a private agenda. If you are, you are not genuinely ready to let go and move on. Should you need to share your closure thoughts in a letter to the person, do so, but again, make sure your intention is to retrieve your spirit from yesterday, not to send yet another message of anger.
Finally, create an official ceremony for yourself in which you call your spirit back from your past and release the negative influence of all your wounds. Whether your prefer a ritual or a private prayer service, enact your message of forgiveness in an “official” way in order to establish a new beginning.
Step 6: Think love. Live in appreciation and gratitude. Invite change into your life, if only through your attitude. And remind yourself continually of the message of all spiritual masters worth their salt: keep your spirit in the present time. In the language of Jesus, “Leave the dead and get on with your life.” And as Buddha taught, “There is only now.”
-- Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit
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