Healed
Just as much as the absence of war does not mean “peace”, does the absence of disease mean, “to be healed”. There is more to being “whole” than not being sick.
There is more to healing than to make the symptoms of diseases disappear. “Healing” is more than “making healthy”. “To heal” means to help somebody to become “whole”.
Basically, as human beings, we all experience limitations of our “Selves”, simply by us being humans. Our personality and the way we experience our parents, most of all our mother, already during pregnancy and birth, are factors, which condition our lives.
More or less traumatizing experiences during our childhood, and the most common measures of education and socialization contribute other factors that shape the way of how we see the world.
We develop behavior patterns to get along with this world and to survive in that world. These behavior patterns may hinder us to different extents in our later lives to be truly our selves. How deeply we are affected by this depends entirely on our own feeling and can only be judged by us. We may suffer from a chronic or acute “Not-being-myself-cold”; we may get sick from a “Not-being-myself-flu”, or die from “Not-being-myself”.
To make our search for sense be the reason for our existence leads us just as much into a dead end road as the flight into any form of religion.
As humans we cannot become “our Selves” as long as we search for our completion outside of ourselves, and as long as we try to fill our inner void with concepts of life, with belief and value systems, or with other people, be it a partner, family or friends, be it an idol, a role model, or a guru. As long as we keep ourselves in that dependency to fill our inner void with knowledge, power, fame, richness, sex, diets, drugs, medicine, supplements, or alcohol, as long as we do this, all our trying to gain “wholeness” is doomed.
We can truly heal, when we are ready to literally jump across our own shadows and look them consciously into their eyes. When we are ready to admit our dependencies and fears to ourselves, ready to look at our thoughts and emotions, ready to carry the responsibility for our world, and ourselves then we are on our healing path.
Then we are ready to gain autonomy from parents, families, or partners, and we are ready to see how we have created all sorts of substitutes for them, such as followers, fans, self-help groups, the church or the state.
Then we can grow into the understanding that we as human beings are born striving for self-realization. It is the desire for the original unity, the being “one” within oneself, which means to be all one and therefore whole, which drives us.
This kind of being alone is a healthy being “all-one”. It is not being lonely, or excluded, or exclusive. It is to be “whole”. In this wholeness everything can be. Everything can be lived and experienced no matter what it is, be it pain, grief, anger, angst or fear, be it passion, desire, joy or happiness.
To be whole and alone is the consequence of realization of unconditional love for life, for “being”. It is to embrace our inner world as much as our outer world, together with the ability to judge without to condemn.
This is only possible from a point in which we can rest within ourselves – which does not mean that we have to be quiet and silent if we have reached this point. To rest within ourselves means to be full of life, filled with complete presence, as we can equally embrace death and life.
Yet, we can only rest within ourselves, when we have made the journey back within, when we have walked back through the circumstances and feelings of the experiences, which conditioned us, when we can release mental and emotional ballast.
The attempt “to go back” soon fails in therapies such as psychoanalysis or discussion therapy, where “analyzing” and “speaking out” intellectualize life. Memorized experiences stay in the head, though they are mentally resolved. They still remain energetically stored in our bodies creating a field of consciousness, an imprint in our energy field. Thought and speech as means to enter the unconscious and to actually remove these imprints lead us sooner or later to the point where the dog bites its own tail. The passage deeper into our unconscious remains denied.
What we need are people who have the gift to help resolve these fields of consciousness with us, people who can bring the conflicts that we carry deep inside of ourselves to our consciousness. Medicine people among some of the still existing tribal cultures are capable of that, and so are a few “Westerners”. People in native cultures have traditionally worked with all energetic bodies of the human being in their “Medicine”.
In our Western culture we find elements of this e.g. in Kinesiology, in the “Hellinger Family Constellation Work”, in the works of Thorwald Dethlefsen and Ruediger Dahlke and in several of the so called “Release Therapies” originating mostly in English speaking countries.
Consciously we need to speak of elements in this context. The Western culture seemingly has not yet rediscovered the direct access to all other bodies through the physical body. Historically we find hints to this type of work in Greek and Egyptian temples.
Is that what keeps us in our Western culture from being able to understand and do this a cultural blockage? The journey back within us is a large aspect of how to become whole. Yet it can only bear fruits if we develop at the same time a keen sense and sensory for the natural order which surrounds us, if we can rediscover nature for us and within us.
The moment we can recognize, that the nature of the human being is divine, that every molecule, every cell and every organ of our body has been designed in the most perfect way, is the moment we can regain the respect for our body and our senses, our bodily existence.
If we can learn again how to love the very nature of this Earth, a nature that shows us in its tiniest details divine beauty, then we can be whole. If we can learn again to love “her” for what “she” is: the element from which we are made, the substance from which we come and to which we will return in our bodily existence, then we can reunite with the source of all from which we once separated ourselves.
To be healed means to understand, that as humans we live to an unfathomable extent behind the veil of our projections cast onto the world around us by our unconscious. Our perception of the world, inside and outside, is filtered by the structures of the culture in which we grow up, that culture’s religion or religious worldview, and is interpreted by the value and honor codex of the society, in which we are raised, and the lived or not lived ideas of “how life should be like” of the families to which we belong.
Our view back onto the world is influenced by projections based on the life experience of our parents and ancestors, based on our earliest childhood experiences, which conditioned our emotions and the way we experience them. This view back onto the world is again based on our inner, psychological image of the world conditioned by society, religion and culture.
To be healed allows recognizing this as a fact in the life of every single human being, to see every single human in the light of his own truth, and to be able to let him be there. Every human being lives in his own world. Every human being is a universe and therefore merely on this planet we can already count as many universes as there are human beings living on it.
To become whole requires of us to realize to which extent we have become victims of our own thinking. It is maybe time to demand the end of all paradigms. Paradigm, a Greek word, after all means “yoke”, that human invention, with which animals mostly oxen were put in front of a cart or other agricultural device. Who wants to have his thinking yoked? And yet philosophies, religions, political worldviews and other theories as part of the history of human thought caused us to lock in our thinking, without our knowledge or against our better judgment!
Isn’t it, that to be whole, is to finally realize, that we have to liberate our thinking from the fetters that we once put on it? Yet, at the same time we have to accord to it the place in our lives and our worlds, which it deserves! This place is not on a throne, not as our Master, not as our reason for existence, but as a tool, kept in honors, used daily and cared for accordingly. It is a tool, which can serve us, but may not dominate us, on the way to our self-realization, a process, which cannot be thought, but has to be lived, in this world and with this world.
This world is all that is here and today. A Beyond is simultaneously a Here, when we have understood, that what we once experienced is still with us. True release and consequently rediscovery of complete unity can only come from our hearts, out of the feeling and with the feeling to love, not “Something” nor “Somebody”, but merely and simply out of love, out of love for ourselves, for our lives and for the world as it is.
Karen von Merveldt-Guevara © 2006
