10/04/2024
Extraordinary Healing
Extraordinary healing begins in silence. No great rush. No great Tumult. No great heroic action. No. It begins in silence, in the quiet, deep place within. No great fanfare, no pomp and circumstance, no posturing or pretense. Only silent, quiet, power, authentic and undeniable. So undeniable that it needs no outward show to prove itself. It is proof in itself.
Healing wears a few fine yet unostentatious robes. To name a few: change, flow and transformation. Openness, flexibility and realization also show their faces. It can be said that healing comprises the whole, where sickness is merely a part. Healing thus, in its wholeness embraces all… even sickness. We rise and fall, healing resides in both. High or low matters not to healing. What matters to healing is simply that which is so.
Extraordinary healing exists in the here and now, though it maintains the capacity to reach into the there and then. It resides within the depths of individual consciousness, yet has the uncanny quality of touching into all consciousness at once. When you are healed, I am healed, we are all healed.
You are a circle, you are healing me,
I am a circle, I am healing you,
Unite us, be one, unite us, be as one.
We all exist in the oneness of all that is. All that exists in the manifest realm is a reflection of that. Without you, I could not be. Without me, you could not be. Together, we are one. Separate we are one. One with all that is.
The essence of extraordinary healing knows this deep truth. It sees through ideas of distinctness. It penetrates behind the veil of illusion to realize essential truth. There is no healing to be sought “out there somewhere.” It is but for us to see it.
Life as we live can be a shared experience of breathing in and breathing out, of rising and falling. I breathe out, the trees breathe in. The sun shines on the ocean, the lakes, water transpires to the sky. Clouds form, rain drops down to earth. The oceans and lakes replenished in endless transformation. Our bodies, our lives, are a part of this great flow. This is extraordinary healing.
There is ultimately no “fixing.” There is nothing to fix. Indeed, in fixing something, we stop the flow. We attempt to hold it in place. In a configuration we have somehow come to recognize as best. Yet, such stopping of flow leads only to further disruption. We may call this illness or disease. The configuration that we have come to see as best is merely an illusion of our clinging ego. Oh, how the ego wishes to paint the perfect picture and freeze it there for all time.
Painters know the fallacy of this. A painting is truly never done. You simply come to a point where you’ve done all that you can to capture the picture in the frame. You stop painting, and call it done. The painting’s life has just begun. Viewers look at it, they each see it, in their own way, through their own eyes. So, its life continues, growing changing, evolving through the living perceptions of others.
In the great fiction work, The Portrait of Dorian Grey, we see the dangers of freezing things in time. In an attempt to hold onto an idealized youthful perfection, Dorian Grey makes a deal. He trades his soul for a portrait of himself. The portrait will age, while he does not. For many years the portrait ages away in the attic, under a drapery. In the day to day world, Dorian remains as young as ever. Eventually it catches up with him, someone finds the photo in the attic and lifts the drape. The dramatic, tragic end ensues, the portrait dissolves and Dorian grows old and dies within minutes. To try to fix someone to remain forever youthful, is folly. Only change and transformation are true to life, true to health, and true to extraordinary healing.
As we evolve, we endeavor to integrate the intensity of experience, both horrible and transcendent. We become fully who we are. The work of extraordinary healing supports this growth for each seeker on the journey.
The facilitator creates and holds this extraordinary space, a sacred container. Honoring the sometimes intense transformations, bringing them fully into awareness. With our large brains, and fantastic memory capacity, though not capable of truly stopping change, we simply manage to fixate on the extreme moments. The intensity drills its ways into our being, and we get stuck in patterns of conditioned responses. Our initial response may even have been perfect in the first instance, yet as times goes by, the old response no longer serves.
Extraordinary healing takes on the task of revealing and resolving these distorted fixations. The leakage of vital life energy that has been drained away is patched. Once the leak is repaired, the ship stops sinking. The free flow of life energy restores itself once more.
The ideal space for extraordinary healing resides in the embodied state. A state where the parasympathetic nervous system brings about relaxation. In this mode, digestion takes place, safety, calm and peace pervade the system. Tension releases on all levels of body, mind and spirit.
The sympathetic nervous system so inclined to freeze, flee, fight or fawn finally releases its grip. Wild animals, in times of danger, or on the hunt, maintain this state of high alert. When they are safe, well-fed and at rest, they lie around and preen themselves, the laziest of beings. We humans, however, being very good at freezing, fleeing, fighting or fawning can remain stuck and never experience true rest. We assure ourselves that we must remain at the ready, for the next shoe may drop at any moment. The work of extraordinary healing supports us to learn to turn off unneeded sympathetic responses, and drop into the quiet, still place where healing happens.
This space is all but ordinary. It is set apart from the everyday hustle and bustle. You could call it a most curious place. Phones are turned off for the duration of the healing. Quiet reigns. Time is devoted to the present moment, far from the dangers that conjured our disease. We go inward in safe presence and let go of that which is no longer needed. A new life, a new awareness flows into this empty space. With encouragement and wonder, it begins to thrive.
The healing artist provides space for this marvelous transformation to take place. With compassion, empathy, non-judgement and educated guidance, the artist holds space to support the healing that comes from the silence within. “I hear you, I see you, I hold this space for you, that you might go deep inside safely. Knowing that you will be able to both go, and safely return, lighter and clearer, with a deep sense of wholeness restored.” The separateness healed, it once more integrates into your wholeness.
The space you enter on this journey exists outside of normal chronological time. Memories of the past, hopes for the future, repeated patterns, perhaps even of generations, come into the light of awareness. We enter the sacred land of spirit, which the ancient Greeks called Kairos. A place outside of time, yet of perfect timing. The land of time, Chronos, is a land where Kairos does not dwell. To enter Kairos is to leave Chronos behind. We suspend the normal rules of time, traveling in, through and around all time.
On my own journey as a young man of 18, while in college, I was in a most dreadful accident. I slammed into a utility pole traveling at about 40 miles per hour. I was knocked unconscious and whisked away to the hospital with a broken arm, a lacerated thigh and a bleeding ear. As luck would have it, the bleed was superficial and my brain was miraculously left unscathed. Yet the heroic hospital treatment that got me back on my feet was not the end of the healing. That would come some eighteen years later, when at 36 years of age I would finally return to the the scene of the incident.
On the last day of my visit town, my flight already on the schedule, I had just 40 minutes for a visit to the site. I put two quarters in the parking meter, set my stop watch, and walked off across the campus to the fateful location. When I arrived at the corner, I places my long since healed surgical scar upon that utility pole. At that moment, I felt a powerful surge of what I could only call bio-electricity moving through my entire being. Somewhat awakened, I removed myself to a short distance, to a place where I could sit under a tree, and look down at the scene.
Many a passerby was walking along the avenue in the afternoon light, yet it seems I was as invisible to them as they were to me. I gazed down at the site, and there I saw a large white paint stripe and in large white letters the word FINISH was written. This corner was the finish line of a popular racing event at the university. Yet for me, the image couldn’t be more stark. I very nearly lost my life in that fateful incident! I glanced at my watch. The stop watch was rolling, yet somehow it all disappeared as I cried the deepest of tears, and felt myself releasing the pain that had been buried so deep inside me all those years. Huge alligator tears fell from my eyes, a cry of utter tragic intensity. Meanwhile, the passersby continued their walks with nary a nod to my presence.
When finally I came up out of the dark rift into which I had fallen, I thought certain that I would miss my flight. To my surprise, looking at my stop watch, but two minutes of chronological time had passed. In that two minutes I had journeyed across the decades, through eons of space and time, and experienced an extraordinary healing.
This is the key to extraordinary healing. We set Logos aside, and call upon Mythos to guide us. We enter Kairos. Chronos is held in a sacred way. In the treatment room, a facilitator’s task is to bridge the two lands, one foot in Kairos, the other in Chronos. Time becomes a reliable aspect of the structure held, allowing deep work to be done. The person seeking healing may let go into the timeless dimensions, and travel to the healing place, knowing all the while that the facilitator, like my stop watch, will guide them back to daily life when the journey is complete.
Indeed, extraordinary healing begins in silence, in the deep spaces within our being. Without rush, tumult, or heroic action. Silence and quiet reign. No pomp and circumstance, no fanfare, no posturing or pretense required. Only silent, quiet, power, authentic and undeniable. With no outward show to prove itself, tears may fall, wholeness restored, separateness consumed, healing has arrived.
