The system wants to heal
People throughout the ages have sought a panacea. But the cure to all illness and suffering isn’t to be found in the darkest undergrowths of the Amazon, or some far-flung mountain range in Kazakhstan, but within your very own consciousness. Once this is properly understood and applied, it can unlock levels of healing you thought were impossible to access without the need for expensive potions. And it really is very simple.
I want to name straight away how some of you may be reading this in severe, chronic pain. Or you may have a health issue that hasn’t healed no matter how many specialists, healers, and plant medicines you’ve tried. If you’re in that place, I feel you. This isn’t to diminish a situation that’s felt really real and painful for anyone. The fear, the tests, the exhaustion, the hopelessness, all of this isn’t something to be skimmed over. You might feel like ‘I don’t want to even hear anyone talking about healing anymore, let alone saying it’s simple’. And that’s the point. That’s where the process begins.
It can be hard to stomach a concept that says, the root of all our dis-ease is our own ‘stuff’. Let me unpack what that includes so it doesn’t sound like an accusation. Firstly, it includes things from this lifetime – all the emotions we have been unable to process, that at whatever age we repressed and swallowed one uncomfortable moment at a time, not knowing what else to do. Emotions that eventually may have sunk so deep into the cells that they reached the DNA and flicked some switches. That then crystallised into tiny little calcium deposits in our channels and organs to block our energy systems and create imbalance. That the body and psyche then tried to compensate for and created extra layers of protection and confusion. That’s not nothing, and it’s not necessarily your fault. But it is your work.
And then factor in all the things from other lifetimes – karmic patterns that have carved grooves in the structure of our soul, and how that expresses in physical form and behaviour. Why one toddler and another, born on the same day to the same family can be so entirely different in personality, and they end up leading such different lives. It’s the vow we made never to love again and the ways we compromised our freedom to keep ourselves safe then forgot. We don’t come in on a clean slate. Our souls have lived so many lives and we’re here not as a one-off event but as an episode in a much longer series. The full plot only makes sense from the outside. Our healing journeys reflect the arc of a much wider narrative not as a punishment, but as a means of our own evolution.
Our own ‘stuff’ also includes ancestral patterns. Our bodies carry the histories of our ancestors in a very concrete way – the nature of our blood, the folds in our intestines, the very C-A-G-T that spells us is a reflection of the inherited wisdom, the hardships and the trauma of our family lineages and what they went through. It’s your great great grandmother’s miscarriage your womb remembers. Or the years of famine your gut’s still trying to reconcile. Our healing is our service to our ancestors. It’s a way of honouring the gift of life they brought us and saying, ‘I’m going to break the patterns brought by the suffering you had to bear for my life’.
And it includes what we don’t think of as ours but is: the collective. No one is an island and we’re all indeed one land mass united through consciousness thinking we’re separate individuals. That’s not a woo-woo spiritual claim, it’s a practical statement which explains why we feel a lot of things that aren’t ‘ours’. The state of the world impacts us before we even interact, and suffering in the collective lives also within our tissues and our unconscious. As we heal ourselves, we become a release valve for collective trauma.
All this may sound daunting from a healing perspective, and in a way it is. It’s why so many health issues don’t go away with a single kick at the machine. The root cause can be impossible to determine and actually becomes kind of irrelevant when you consider that time is also illusory.
But if you step outside your own brain just for a moment and consider the perspective of the Self – the one, Universal Consciousness however you think of that – well, it’s just life. Source is having a great time creating and experiencing existence in all its forms and doesn’t distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘pleasure’ or ‘pain’, it’s all valid experience to Source. The point is the freedom to have experience itself, and it needs to be felt. That’s why when we, our past selves, or our ancestors repressed their emotions, it’s a block in the system of Source’s experience itself and it doesn’t just go away. We are Source. So the key to healing is taking the perspective of Source and embracing the experience of what life is bringing in each very moment. That’s the whole game.
Once we start doing that, healing is a natural byproduct. The nature of conscious awareness is itself healing. Once we touch something, however lightly, with our consciousness, we change it. Treating life as medicine. The sexual shame we don’t want to admit. The jealousy we’d rather not own, all of it welcomed back into awareness, and with that, already beginning to be transmuted into something else. Acceptance. Wisdom. It’s why mindfulness – the process of lovingly bringing attention to what is present in the moment – was the technique the Buddha taught. He was an excellent doctor and understood the mechanism precisely.
The place people get stuck isn’t in the deepest layers of their trauma. It’s right now. It’s in the ‘I’m sick of healing’, the ‘it doesn’t work’, the ‘but how do I ‘fix’ it?’, the boredom, the discomfort, and the ‘I don’t have time right now’. This is exactly where the resistance lives. Pretty much everyone I speak to about a problem is in this boat and they’re coming to me looking for an answer ‘over there’ rather than being with what’s in front of them. You start where you are.
I’m not saying there’s no role for assistance here. The Western medical system has its place. A therapist is often an important facilitator of the process of bringing things into conscious awareness. The plants also do this powerfully in their way, and can be tremendous allies in helping clear unconscious layers of resistance so we can unblock ourselves. And the point holding technique I offer also works powerfully on this premise. A Hawaiian technique with roots in Lemuria – these longer sessions are where you apply spiritual energy and attention to a specific point help you zero in on an aspect of your life and health and reset the whole system around it. In those sessions I also facilitate the process of bringing the layers of emotions into consciousness as it takes a bit of practice to get good at it.
And if you’re sitting in pain feeling an emotional response to this – please don’t be discouraged by that but let it be a doorway through into whatever is looking to arise within you. The system wants to heal, we just have to give it permission.
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