Healing From Source

Ultimately, the question is: can we enter a healing state?

Can we enter, on a regular basis, a state where we feel we have enough safety and enough resources to go inward, calm down and let our bodies heal? And this becomes a question of what you believe.

If you deeply believe that life is a struggle, that only the fittest survive, that you have to hurry, hurry and hurry more to make the grade, then it becomes very hard to enter a healing state.

When people carry this deep-seated belief that they are under threat, it does little good to tell them to calm down. Even when someone sees clearly the mechanisms of how their stress is killing them, that understanding may just amp up their stress level even more. Even once they decide to change, calming the chronic over-excitement of the nervous system is something that takes patience, effort and cultivation, often over a long period of time.

I can calm people down with an acupuncture treatment. I can calm people down with a pill. I can calm people down with herbs or visualizations or essential oils or a million other things. But the relaxation often does not take. The mind re-engages in the story of fear and stress, and the body responds to the mind. The body over-rides the pill or the massage or acupuncture.

Here’s what I found after trying for forty years to calm people down enough to heal: No one is really, fundamentally, going to calm down until they connect with that mysterious Source from which we are all arising. Call it what you will - God, Goddess, Buddha, Atman, Krishna, Allah, Brahm, the Dao, the Mystery or bop-bop-aloo-bop-bam-shoo-bam. None of the other medicines have staying power until we make that fundamental connection.

This is why I so insistently emphasize that there is no true health and healing until we can find trust in this Universe and fall into the present moment more and more. We find trust in this Universe by connecting to that Mysterious Source. It is possible to have a direct experience of the Love and Benevolence from which all this is arising. Once we have that trust, it is easy to fall into the present moment. We could see every circumstance as that which is given by the Divine to invite us home to the Divine. Sometimes the medicine is bitter, and sometimes the medicine is ecstatically sweet, but the medicine is always right there for us to take.

In fact, in the Daoist tradition they teach that in the moment we finally let go entirely of the past and future, at that moment we stop aging and become immortal. The body is no longer constantly discharging its life force in response to thoughts of past and future. And even if the body does not live on forever, which sounds pretty boring anyway, the moment we are free from past and future the immortality of the spirit shines out with undeniable brilliance. That is true healing. That is healing from Source.