When we talk about ‘healing’ we’re not just talking about relieving the physical aspects of illnesses. The symptoms of any dis-ease in the body are the final stages of a deeper process that has taken place on the unseen realms of our existence over a long period of time. For anything to manifest, incarnate or be brought into the physical there is a process of involution which starts out as non-physical, as an energy, group of frequencies, as a thought or as a level of consciousness. In the context of healing, over time these forces move towards form as they sink deeper and deeper through our energy bodies into denser and denser manifestation and they arrive in our physical body as sickness. The origin of these forces can be karmic, can be generated by our subconscious programmes, by our conditionings from this life and from traumas from childhood or past lives.
Disease itself is a form of active energy misaligned with the rest of the harmonic energies and forces that keep us functioning healthily. The energies of disease are working against the plan of the whole but we don’t need to demonise them or view them as just something to get rid of, dis-ease can teach us so much.
“There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh
Understanding the forces behind our illnesses allows us to heal on both an emotional and spiritual level as well as the physical. The preventative and holistic approach is normal healing practice outside of the Western world and when we address the root cause of an illness, an unhelpful thought pattern or even a small frustration, we start to cure ourselves properly. We can start to clear away the karmic baggage we incarnated with, our energy bodies become lighter and we start to become more open minded, emotionally balanced and overall more healthy.
Most people however, don’t understand how deep they need to go with their healing, how much their blockages are holding them back or how detrimental their negative emotions are. This type of healing has been the preserve of spiritual traditions and cultures all over the world, but it is here in the West where it is needed most. Yet quite often we have to hit rock bottom and life to become unbearable for us to be moved into action and to start looking for a ‘path’ out of the darkness.
Be careful though because the word ‘path’ in the context of a healing path or a spiritual path can be misleading as there is nowhere to go outside of ourselves, it simply indicates an inner change or a process of inner changes. The word ‘path’ keeps us locked in our linear way of thinking and believing that something outside of ourselves can fix us or is the key to our spiritual development. The healing process is in no way linear, there is no beginning, no middle and no end. We only have to look at the cycles of nature to see that everything in our world is circular, spiral and cyclical. I often see websites listing the stages of healing as if it were a linear process and once you reach the last stage you’re enlightened! Hurrah! While these types of lists can be helpful to see where you are in one particular issue they are not holistic and lock us into the dualistic illusion. If we really want to take responsibility for our health, our mental health, our soul, our own self-mastery or our purpose for being alive then accepting that the process is a lifetime’s work helps bring some humility back to what has become an ‘industry’ of quick fixes.
To understand healing we need to understand energy, how it works, how it moves, how it is transmuted and the main thing to understand is that healing is spiral in nature. We move through layers and layers of our issues and as the conditions are in place for the deeper layer to be dealt with then what we thought we had dealt with raises it’s head again to be addressed. It can be disheartening to realise that the months or years of processing we went through to reach a place of acceptance and transcendence with a particular issue has not been fully healed. But to reach the deeper layer means that we have progressed, we have attained a level of consciousness able to understand this deeper layer of the issue and so we are experiencing more and more profound levels of self-awareness, emotional freedom and unconditional joy.
In my personal experience, healing happens in a spiral fashion due to nothing being in isolation. No trauma or unhelpful emotion exists separate from the rest of our traumas and emotions. By chance (or fate) I attended a talk in Ireland about birth trauma because I was the next speaker at the event. The therapist giving the talk had had the same birth trauma as I had and the effect of having been born jaundiced and kept blindfolded under UV in an incubator for the first 2 months of her life had effected her in many ways. The proverbial lightbulb went on and I started my own investigative journey into my own similar birth trauma. To cut a very long story short, the effect of this trauma was so widespread throughout my whole personality, psyche and behaviour that I didn’t know how I was going to heal the effects of it. Abandonment was compounded by fear of the unknown which was compounded by my third eye being shut down, compounded by a sense of feeling lost in the world, resulting in projections of anger towards others, anxiety, depression…you get the picture. There are many contributing factors to one trauma but over a period of years I went deeper and deeper into the healing process, peeling away the layers until finally I was ready for a teacher plant to take me back to the incubator to re-live the experience and change the outcome. I am not under any illusion that all my problems are now solved, but the main doorways have been closed and I can move into a deeper level of self-acceptance and most enjoyably a calm mind, knowing that those psychological issues will not create dis-ease in my body in the future.
We are never alone in our healing process, there is a whole kingdom of plants and trees willing to assist and guide us on our journey. All plants are teacher plants in that they show us how to live in harmony with ourselves and with the world. They support our transitions to greater levels of awareness, they bring the light during our darkest moments and they are much more reliable as teachers than humans! But ultimately we can only truly heal ourselves and we have to realise we need to step onto the spiral if we want to live a more healthy and joyous life.
Blessings of the plants
Emma x