Fourth Week of September: Healing the World

Earth Sunrise and Milky Way Illustration. First Sun Lights. Space Illustrations Collectio

Some years ago, both in front of groups and in published print, I shared (with not a little self-satisfaction) the story of how I let go of migraines that had plagued me for most of my life. In a great burst of insight I recognized the unconscious payoff that migraines offered and had one of those wonderful spontaneous healing moments I so love to talk about in my work. After my revelation, I went months, then a year, then longer still without a migraine for the first time in my adult life.

But, in early September of 2005, the week following Hurricane Katrina, I was struck with the worst and longest-lasting migraine of my life. It let up finally after the members of my weekly class declared me “it” for the evening and gave me a taste of my own teachings by supporting me while I wailed, screamed, and cried my head off (and my headache away).

As I suffered through this awful bout with pain, I noticed a number of people wondering out loud, “What’s in the air?” saying they and all their friends seemed to be feeling anxious, antsy, and depressed for “no reason.” Yet it makes perfect sense that in times of tremendous collective suffering, we all feel the reverberations in some way, no matter how far we may be from ground zero. The spiritual and quantum truth—a truth that exists beyond the illusionary appearance of our separateness from other beings—is our oneness. Consequently, this month of healing work wouldn’t be complete without giving attention to world healing.

One notion I want to dispel before going any further is that when the world suffers, the more sensitive souls among us soak it up, like vibrational sponges. The interpretations we choose to give our experiences have a big impact on how well we manage and grow from them, and the “sponge” metaphor is damaging in that it assumes and perpetuates powerlessness. After all, a sponge is a passive object that can’t help but soak up whatever substance it encounters. Is that how we want to go through life?

What I find to be a truer and more empowering explanation for why we’re affected by the feelings of others is not that we’re absorbing their emotion. It’s that we’re joining with them at an energy level that’s also very alive and active within us. The matching emotion we share flares up to vibrate in tandem with a similar energy. As like meets like, each amplifies the other. When the world screams, the unreleased suffering that lives within us, perhaps so neatly buried that we don’t even know it’s there, is dredged up, agitated and magnified.

There are some who might say that to suffer with the world is part of being a compassionate being. Yet, taking on the wounds of the world simply leaves us more wounded. We become another soul in need of emergency care rather than one able to offer help and be a guiding light.

The key to turning disempowered woundedness into powerful compassion lies in feeling and releasing suffering rather than carrying it. As we clear painful emotion, we don’t stop feeling. Rather, intense pain transforms into intense love. From this well of love we become heroic. No longer carrying the weight of the world, we become free to serve it.

In a Sunday Service I gave on September 11, 2005, with the Gulf area stilling reeling from the catastrophic storm, I led the members of a Minneapolis Spiritual Community in weeping for the world. We screamed, wailed, and cried. Many genuine tears were shed and afterward there was a palpable feeling of peace and clarity that wasn’t present before. The last remnant of my week-long headache released. We were better able to discern some spiritual purpose to all the pain and felt inspired to make a personal commitment to action.

When we find ourselves feeling burdened by the world’s suffering, we can help heal it rather than carry it by releasing a piece of our own pain in the name of world healing. Just as we are affected by each other’s pain, so are we impacted by one another’s healing. Instead of imagining yourself as a sponge, see yourself as an oscillator, setting in motion a rhythm of healing powerful enough to draw others into it.

Exercise I: Clearing Suffering

Make a ritual of this. You can do it alone or with like-minded others. Feel the suffering of the world; experience the weight and darkness of it. Then find the collective tears, the wails of pain, and the screams of rage, and let them out. If you don’t have a private place to make a lot of noise, use the muffling power of a pillow, but don’t deny this the volume it deserves. Imagine, as you do, that you’re clearing a piece of your own personal pain as well as the world’s, making yourself a more open channel for assisting the healing of the whole. As you allow yourself to feel emotion, remember that interpretations are powerful. Be sure to remind yourself that you’re clearing the world’s pain, not just submerging in it.

When the energy of rage, despair, and pain is spent and you feel peace, let your awareness expand to a place beyond hurt where there is only love. Imagine yourself becoming part of this healing vibration of love. Ask your Higher Mind to reveal to you whatever you need to know about the spiritual purpose underlying your own pain and that of the world.

Last, but not least, offer a prayer or simply hold an intention to be shown what you can do to help. Don’t worry if an answer doesn’t come immediately. Simply trust that you will be guided appropriately and that you have already made a difference.

Healing the World

The spiritual principles we use in this course to bring about our own personal healing are the same ones that make us effective as world healers. Here are a few of the basics for becoming an agent of positive change.

· What we give attention to we make bigger. We live in an era of rapid change where it’s always possible to find convincing evidence that the world is hopelessly falling apart—or evidence of a powerful coming-together. We can choose to give our attention to everything wrong and fight it, protest it, and despair about it, or we can align ourselves and our efforts with the positive growth emerging from the rubble of what’s falling apart. Whether we take a fighting, despairing, denying, or creative stance in response to collective suffering is probably not dissimilar to how we approach our own personal struggles. As has been addressed in recent weeks, when we give more energy to our pain and outrage over what’s wrong than we do to creating an alternative, the power of our attention actually holds the problem in place.

· Despair is disempowering and not an effective state for bringing about healing. Our personal despair weakens our immune system; our despair for another makes us ineffective as a healer and helper; and our despair for the world renders us incapable of making a difference.

· Rage isn’t the most effective source of motivation. While less immobilizing than despair, the highest potential of anger is to win a battle. It doesn’t have the power to create peace. Anger is only capable of creating a temporary “cease fire” through dominance—one that only lasts until the next war.

· Inner peace is the only state that creates outer peace. Just as unconditional love and inner peace are the most powerful states for personal healing and manifestation, they’re the only states that can bring about true peace and well-being in the world. Peace comes through finding what we love and serving it, not by seeking what we most hate and fear, and fighting it.

Translating Spiritual Principles into “Real World” Action

How do these principles translate from spiritual theory to personal action in relation to the real world crises of our time? Does it mean we join the Peace Corps instead of the military? Do we withdraw altogether from the hot debates of political activism or the competitive stress of the corporate world and devote ourselves to more spiritual pursuits? There may seem to be a pacifist or political agenda underlying these ideas, or even a head-in-the-sand denial of real world issues. In many circles rage is seen as a necessary force for change—as a bumper sticker I’ve often seen puts it, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” But, in truth, there is no single right course of action suggested by these principles. Rather, they’re guidelines for creating a state of mind that will make whatever we do more effective. A healed state of mind sees options that were previously invisible. When we’re at peace inwardly, we call forth peacefulness in others in a way that dominance and rage can’t.

Everyone has a unique path and purpose in the world. Our own personal right action naturally emerges from a healed state of mind. When we have achieved inner peace, we simply know where we’re meant to be and what we’re meant to do. While some may feel called to withdraw from the fray of mainstream life and create alternative lifestyles, others are meant to bring peace to the mainstream. Some of the most powerful people are those whose paths involve taking inner peace and unconditional love into those arenas that more typically affirm separateness, fear, anger, and the power of dominance.

Recognizing the Shadow

Fulfilling our life’s purpose requires seeking out what we love and serving it, and in other lessons, we give attention to discerning where our true passion lies because where there’s passion, there’s energy. Passion is a potent force. It’s highly creative and our passionate yearnings often signal the urgings of inner guidance. Sometimes the high voltage of our most passionate excitement for life can be frightening and we learn to suppress it. Unearthing and nurturing back to life this inner creative spark is an important focus in this course during the lighter months of the year when the emphasis is on manifesting our hearts’ desires.

Hatred is also a powerful passion—albeit an ugly one that we often train ourselves to suppress and deny. Just as our zest for life needs to be rekindled in the process of cultivating creative power, our hatred needs to be uncovered and recognized, too, in order to grow our healing power. What we most love to hate shows us where we’ve given power away. What annoys us the most in others invariably reflects some disowned attribute of our own personality. Just as passionate love often signals our path of purpose and highest good, passionate hate shows our path to wholeness and healing.

Carl Jung, father of transpersonal psychology, used the term, “shadow” to refer to a part of the unconscious personality consisting of personal, unknown aspects of the ego that we’re more likely to see in others (and feel an emotional charge around) than recognize in ourselves. In Jung’s last book, Man and His Symbols, a collection of writings by his closest colleagues that he edited, Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz writes of this process:

If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a ‘projection.’ Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.

And there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow. If we identify our own shadow with, say, the communists or the capitalists, a part of our own personality remains on the opposing side. The result is that we shall constantly (though involuntarily) do things behind our own backs that support this other side, and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy.

Achieving wholeness and true empowerment requires recognizing that a piece of the “enemies” we encounter in life also live within us. As Elizabeth Kubler Ross put it, “We all have an inner Mother Theresa and an inner Hitler.” This holds true not only in our personal relationships but also for those things we find most hateful about the world: its leaders, ideologies, structures of power and resulting practices; things that seem larger than life and removed from us as individuals. These collective representatives of power become the perfect screens to hold the projections of our personal shadows precisely because they’re so removed from our personal sphere and seemingly out of our control. Our very powerlessness makes it feel easier to justify hatred.

Healing our hatred of others really is nothing more than healing our self-hatred. Maturing into wholeness ultimately brings a shift in our passionate nature so that we genuinely love to love more than we love to hate. We forgive, not because it’s the right thing, but because it’s the most self-serving thing.

Healing World Leaders

The next healing exercise begins with the premise that whatever or whomever in current world events triggers our strongest outrage, reflects some part of us: a piece of our shadow self—our “inner Hitler.” The world leaders we vilify the most are the ones who best embody our own hidden self. So, we’ll combine the personal work of shadow healing with the bigger work of world healing in the next exercise by directing healing to two of our world leaders.

I suggest focusing attention, first, on the current political leader of your country. The second leader will be of your own choosing. Since we are working with healing darker shadow energies, be sure that at least one of the two is someone who triggers your rage and judgment. You may, if you wish, focus on one leader you admire and one you judge.

Though I’ve emphasized the self-healing nature of this work, what we’re doing is also a significant act of healing for the individual subjects. There’s absolutely no difference in the impact of laying hands on someone in a face-to-face healing session and offering healing from a distance, unless you believe there is. In his book, Healing Words, Larry Dossey, M.D. compiled a wide range of research convincingly documenting the power of prayer to heal, even at a distance, even if the recipients are unaware of prayer being said on their behalf.

It’s also important to note that the healing we’re offering here isn’t about giving an advantage to the “bad guys.” Healing for the highest good brings out the best in everyone. Remember, healing follows intention, and here our intent is that of spiritual healing: to join with the Higher Self of another to help call it forth. Our higher spiritual Selves are the part of us that exists beyond the illusions of separateness and power over another. At this level we’re aligned with the highest good of all and can’t help but serve the collective good.

Exercise II: Healing World Leaders

This exercise involves assessing and repatterning childhood wounds that affect present health and well-being. It works on a similar principle as the healing we did last week, only instead of drawing from our personal memories we’ll practice using our psychic and intuitive faculties. This way of working may or may not come easily to you. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it. If you feel drawn to working in this way, the more you practice, the more easily it will come.

Essentially, what we’re going to do is make an intuitive guess about the subject’s childhood experience. Just as we imagined back to our own younger time in last week’s exercise, we’ll let imagination show us a time in this person’s past, and in a similar way, we’ll envision healing for the child this adult leader once was. Imagination is often the way we begin to receive true intuitive and psychic impressions, so what you imagine through this may be remarkably accurate. Having done this exercise a number of times with groups, even people who’ve never done anything like it before often are astonished at how correctly they’re able to describe details of each other’s childhood experiences. The images that come to you may be literally accurate, or your impressions may come in metaphors describing the emotional truth of a situation.

Offering healing toward the emotional wound instead of the presenting symptom is quite powerful. I first stumbled upon this method of healing when I was just in my twenties and leading a weekly healing group. A frequent participant was a sixteen year-old boy who, on this day, arrived with a badly infected cut on his hand that had angry red streaks shooting way up his arm. Though he lived with his mother, he was left mostly on his own and he was in the habit of staying away from home for days on end. I was quite alarmed at the severity of the infection and was making plans in my mind to rush him to the emergency room the minute the group ended.

As I placed my hands on him during the healing session, I received a strong impression that he was crying out for a father’s strong guidance. He literally needed an older man to take his hand. I held his hand and pictured a fatherly spiritual being reaching out to him, taking him by the hand and leading him. This image nearly overwhelmed me in its clarity and vividness. When I opened my eyes, we all were astonished to see the streaks were gone from his arm and the cut looked like a wound on the mend. It healed quickly over the next week. The healing communication didn’t require words—I never shared my experience out loud with him but, nonetheless, the root emotional cause of his infection was addressed and he received, I believe, at some spiritual level, the male guidance he was calling out for.

In a similar way, we’ll offer to our world leaders, even those we love to hate, the spiritual assistance they’re most in need of—as a service to them, to ourselves, and to the world.

The Healing Meditation

Relax your body and quiet your thoughts with some deep, slow breaths. Turn your attention inward and let your sense of identification shift from the small self of your personality and body to your spiritual Higher Self. Imagine yourself as more than your body, thoughts, emotions, and personal history. Recognize yourself as a beautiful, radiant being of light and see the Higher Selves of all the other students in this program, past, present and future, now joining you. We’ve all gathered, beyond the illusionary limits of space and time, in a magnificent, sacred arena in the spiritual realm. Together we form an unstoppable force for healing and good. Recognize how much stronger we are together than separately. Every time this circle meets, its energy increases through repetition, and empowers each of us in our personal growth and as healers to the world. Take a moment to feel the healing power of the circle building.

Now, picture in your mind’s eye the political leader of your country. As you hold this person in mind, be aware of your personal feelings toward this individual. If you have judgments or anger, it’s not necessary to resolve these issues of your personality just now. Simply put them to the side so your identification can remain with your Higher Self. Use the perspective of your spiritual self to see this leader now as a person rather than as a symbol. We can’t heal a symbol, only a person. See this individual through the eyes of your Higher Self: as a radiant spiritual being, an expression of Divine Love, and fully worthy of your love. Take a moment to experience the Divine Love that is you joining with the Divine Love that is this other.

Now, from a place of wise perspective and unconditional love, picture the person and see him or her becoming the child they once were. Let your imagination show you an image of the child at a time when he or she needed something that wasn’t given. Let details start to come into focus. See what age the child is (if you’re not sure, let a number sound in your mind), notice where the child is, who’s there, what’s going on, how he or she is feeling. See what’s needed and not there.

As a picture of this earlier time comes clear, invite the help of a healing guide: a spiritual being who will provide the child with what’s most needed. See who shows up as the perfect helper.

Now, your work is done, except to witness and love. Step back and watch as the Guide offers help and healing to the child. See how the early life experience and its impact change now that the Guide is here to offer the love, support, safety, guidance, approval, or whatever the child never got. Watch this healing take place and imagine it creating a new pattern that sends a ripple of healing forward in time, all the way to the person in the present. Let the scene reach a natural completion and then let the child, the adult, and the Guide disappear into light.

While still in a state of higher perspective, imagine there to be many nonphysical master teachers and guides present: beings of light and love, working to assist the evolution of our planet and humanity. Feel them to be very close; see their light; receive their love. Ask to be shown the higher purpose to any world events that particularly trouble you. Ask to see the bigger picture, as they do. Ask to be shown this world leader’s role in the Divine Order.

Take a couple of deep breaths to let your attention shift and to complete our healing work. If you need to make some notes to help you remember your impressions, do so. At your earliest convenience, post your impressions online so we all can compare.

Now, or at another time, repeat this healing process with another important world figure.

Before Using this Healing Method on Others

We’ve used the preceding healing modality in the distant and impersonal sphere of world leaders. As many of you engage in healing work with friends and clients and may wish to incorporate this method in your work, I’m including here a few guidelines related to safety and ethics in spiritual healing work.

If you use this technique in a more personal context, I recommend using this mode of assessing as a means of information gathering for yourself rather than as something to share with your client, unless you become very experienced and very good at this. It’s too easy to be wrong, and easy to do harm by being wrong. Even if your impressions are accurate, it’s a very sensitive matter to give this kind of feedback. The power dynamic that gets established when you’re doing healing work on another gives added charge to whatever you say. You need to be very skilled in determining when it would be helpful and when it would be too much.

On a related subject, I generally don’t recommend assisting people in retrieving repressed memories. Many such retrieved memories are false. What’s more, giving too much attention to a dramatic memory can create new problems and distract from the healing process. This is one reason for not sharing scenes of abuse and trauma that you may pick up intuitively. By giving it too much attention it’s easy for you and your client both to get stuck in the drama of victimization instead of aligning with the power to heal.

Ethics and Safety Issues

As we do healing work with other people involving the realms of energy and intuition, it’s important to both maintain our own boundaries and not invade the other person’s. The best means of personal protection is to always align with our Higher Self as the first step in any healing process. The Higher Self, as I think of it, is the divine aspect of our being that can be defined in absolutes: absolutely safe, wise, loving, one with all, etc. It is the part of us that is intrinsically safe and needs no protection.

This also helps us start from a place of being in service to the other person’s highest good and heightens our intuitive sensitivity to what’s helpful and what isn’t.

The more we believe we need protection the more endangered we become. Some people are concerned that as they work more intentionally in psychic realms they become susceptible to the psychic debris of others. This isn’t an inherent danger in doing psychic work. Essentially, the more we believe ourselves to be endangered and focus on it, the more we are.

I don’t mean to dismiss issues of safety and boundaries. If we don’t address them, whatever unconscious beliefs and patterns we enact around boundaries and vulnerability in other areas of life will simply play out in this arena as well.

Having poor boundaries tends to facilitate psychic openness. People who had a lot of boundary violations and abuse as children often tend to be more psychically sensitive as adults. So, if we feel at all vulnerable as we work in the subtler realms, it’s important to give attention to strengthening healthy boundaries. The best way to do this is by affirming our safety rather than focusing on danger and protection, and we can do this simply by aligning with the Higher Self.

Don’t override someone’s will. In doing healing work for another, no matter how well-intentioned we are, it’s intrusive to try to psychically override someone else’s will. We may inadvertently be doing this if we feel we know what’s needed better than the subject, and project the psychic intent that they shape up and heal in the way we think they should. For years I maintained a prayer ministry where people could leave requests for prayer. We invariably got many requests to pray for a loved one to change their habits, their religious beliefs, and their attitudes according to the writer’s will. We always translate these into “highest good for all!”

It’s never an override of will to pray or offer healing in an unspecified way for someone’s highest good, and Larry Dossey, M.D., in his book, Healing Words, cites research suggesting that this type of undirected prayer might even be more effective than praying for a specific outcome.

Never attempt to diagnose an illness, even in your own mind. Not only can this get you in legal hot water if you’re not a medical professional, but identifying a diagnosis can help to set the physical reality of this condition in place. Thought and words constitute a powerful force, so instead of using them to define the reality of illness, look for energy conditions that are in motion and easy to change instead of trying to identify a fixed, physical condition requiring more effort to change.

Take a moment for closure. This is helpful whether we’re focusing on our own healing or that of another. Closure includes such things as picturing an energy field peacefully closed at the end of energy healing, ending a meditation with some bit of how it began, physically stretching, and putting feet squarely on the floor to alleviate light-headedness, and sometimes, talking about the experience. After any intensive energy work, a drink of water is always a good thing. It helps close the experience, ground energy, and flush toxins out of the body.

Exercise III: Incubating a Dream

The aforementioned Carl Jung worked extensively with dreams as a means of bringing unconscious elements of personality, such as the shadow, into conscious awareness. The book quoted earlier, Man and His Symbols, is a wonderful introduction to Jungian psychology for anyone interested, as it was written specifically for the layperson, inspired by a dream Jung had that he was speaking to masses and they actually understood him!

So, in homage to Carl Jung, our last exercise this week is to incubate a dream that will introduce us to our own shadow (who, according to Jung, often appears as a figure in our dreams) and show us something about our path toward wholeness. The following are simple steps for generating a dream any time you need guidance on a specific topic. Even if we don’t normally remember dreams, our dream life is amazingly responsive to our conscious intentions. Doing a few easy, intentional things as you go to sleep and upon awakening, such as these steps here, can make a big difference in your remembering.

Steps for Incubating a Dream

Write a note to your Higher Self requesting the dream. Place this note under your pillow before going to sleep.
Incorporate any elements of ritual that will give your written request added impact: a lit candle, music, a moment of quiet reflection, etc.
Place pen and paper or a recording device by your bed before going to sleep.
Hold your dream request in mind as you fall asleep.
Upon awakening, recall all the details of your dream before opening your eyes or even turning over in bed. If you don’t remember a dream, close your eyes and reposition your body exactly as it was just before awakening.
If you still don’t remember a dream, make one up quickly and spontaneously, immediately upon awakening.
Record all details of your dream.