E L E V E N
Healing Yourself with Love by Letting Go of Perfectionism
You are your primary healer. One of the most powerful paths of self-healing is to enter into a positive emotional relationship with yourself. Most of us need a lot of work in this area. We simply will not accept ourselves the way we are. For example, a guilt feeling is nothing but the rejection of the state in which we find ourselves in the moment, indicating that we are unwilling to accept ourselves as we are now. That is, if we feel guilty for something we have done or not done, then either we are procrastinating doing something to rectify it, we are still processing it, or we have made the choice to punish ourselves with guilt because our actions did not express our integrity. It is easier to feel guilty for something than to do what we must to keep our integrity. We fear whatever it is we must do. It is easier to feel guilty than to face our fear. Our guilt covers our fear, but it leads to self-rejection. We choose self-rejection over fear.
The most epidemic health problem we have is self-hatred. I understand that this may sound outrageous, especially to someone who has not felt self-hatred or who is in denial. But whenever you get to know anyone more deeply, you find a kernel of self-hatred inside them that runs very deep.
Rather than calling it self-hatred, we use the term low self-esteem. Inside each person is a constant struggle for self-esteem that covers the self-hatred. The struggle for self-esteem rarely stops. Everyone tries to be special in some way to prove their self-worth. It may not be conscious, but it shows in behavior, both underachieving and overachieving. There are those who try harder and those who don’t even bother. We are in a vicious cycle. We try, or blatantly don’t try, to prove we are worthy by a set of standards we laid out for ourselves in childhood. Yet when we do attain the goals laid out in those standards, we simply disregard them and pursue different ones.
We base our self-worth on what we expect of ourselves. We demand an impossible perfection from ourselves. Then we judge and reject ourselves when we do not achieve that perfection. We demand a never-ending list of accomplishments from ourselves. As we achieve each one, we ignore and devalue it. We immediately focus on the next hurdle to surmount. We don’t allow time for the accomplishment to sink in or to congratulate ourselves for what we have done or for what we have become through our effort and struggle. We do not give ourselves the gifts that we have achieved or have given to others. Just ask healers to compare the number of their self-healings to the number of healings given to others. Ask musicians if they can listen to and enjoy their own music without being judgmental.
No wonder there are people who don’t even try to achieve anything. They see the folly in the whole game, so they refuse to play. Unfortunately, they kill their creativity, spirit, life energy, and sometimes their bodies in the process.
There are two levels of causes under all this striving or nonstriving. One is the level of psychological cause. The other is the deeper, spiritual cause.
The Cause of Self-Hatred on the Psychological Level
On the psychological level, the cause of self-hatred is self-betrayal, which begins for us in early childhood. Since we were small children we have disliked ourselves when we couldn’t do what we thought we ought to be able to do, whether it was something we initiated or something that was requested of us by a parent, teacher, or some other authority. Remember, we were small children. We had very little sense of what is possible.
What we do know is that, like all children, we were born with unconditional love for those around us. We want all those around us to be happy and loving. We expect unconditional love from those around us. Unfortunately, things rarely work out that way. Here’s what happens instead.
When we see other people in our lives—almost all of them bigger than we are—expressing their negative feelings, it scares us. Many adults overpower us when they are angry or when we express our negative feelings. This happens even if we have a really good reason for negative feelings that are truly expressing our response to a bad situation. As small children, this overpowering feels life-threatening, so we suppress our justified response to a life situation.
In addition to the suppression of justified negative reactions, we have no way of dealing with the fact that people in our family aren’t always loving to each other and that they express fear and hatred. So we do the logical—to a child—thing. We try to make the hurts go away and everything all better. We deny our own feelings, and betray ourselves in the process.
Of course, to take care of everyone in this way is an impossible task. But that doesn’t stop us. The more we try to smooth things over and deny negative feelings in ourselves and others, the less true to ourselves and our original impulse of unconditional love we’re being. The harder we try to make everything right, the more helpless we feel, and the more of an impostor—betraying who we really are—we become. Underneath, we are trying to get the love we expected. The more we try and don’t succeed to get the love, the more we become convinced that we are unlovable, and the less we are able to love ourselves. (See the development of the mask self, described in Chapter 1.)
There is another part of this vicious cycle that makes things even worse. As small children, when we do succeed and get praise or help on how to succeed even more, inside we feel something is wrong because we still didn’t get the love we wanted. Instead, we got praise. Praise and love are not the same. So we try harder. Each time we go around this vicious cycle, to succeed and get more praise, the sequence proves to us ever more forcefully that there is something wrong with us.
Not only that, but when we do succeed in “being good” and get a reward, even if it is love and recognition, it is the impostor child, not the real child inside, who gets the love. The real child inside is covered by the impostor. Since the impostor gets the goodies, it proves even more that the real child inside is not worthy of love.
Every time we as children succeed in being good, somewhere within our psyche we get the message that our “real self” is not lovable. It is love that we need, and it is love that we can’t get. Through this process we never learn how to love ourselves. Rather, we forget who we are. Our true need to be recognized and loved for who the “real child inside” is—not what the impostor does—never gets met. This painful cycle continues through adulthood.
The Cause of Self-Hatred on the Spiritual Level
The other cause of self-hatred is actually the same as the psychological one, but it can be found in your spiritual life. If you are reading this book, you are probably consciously on a spiritual path of some kind. Being on such a path sometimes makes it even harder to accept the self, because much of your life’s effort may be to get clear about yourself, understand, and improve yourself. Therefore, you are probably much more aware of your imperfections and the way you create the negative experiences in your life than you were before you actively began your spiritual work. Again, it is difficult to find imperfections within and accept yourself.
There is another aspect of spiritual work that makes the imperfections of physical life difficult to accept. When we do spiritual work, we are constantly moving from one level of consciousness to another. At the higher levels, this work is full of light and bliss. But when we come down into the physical level and try to integrate what we have experienced, it is sometimes even more difficult for us to accept the imperfections of our humanness. It is most difficult to live in a physical, finite reality and to know, at the same time, that our greater reality is infinite. It is most difficult to feel our fear and, on a higher level, know that there is no need for that fear, to feel confusion in our mind and to know, on a higher level of our being, that we are clarity and light.
The spiritual teachings themselves can also make it difficult for us to accept and love ourselves. Sometimes they seem paradoxical. It is difficult to be told that we must free ourselves from the prison of our humanness and, at the same time, that we must trust the human condition. It is difficult to be told that the material world is an expression of the divine, in fact is divine, and yet to see the chaos, anger, and hatred here. It is difficult to be told that to become more spiritual, we must spiritualize matter and that the only way to do that is to accept the material world as it is. It is most difficult to accept the basic nature of duality of our physical world, and yet try to move beyond that duality into a state of oneness with it.
The way to do this is through self-love and through the acceptance of the universe as it is, of our lives as they are, knowing that always and ever there is a guidance and a protection and that there is always a higher reason for everything that happens. And when this broad aspect of acceptance is incorporated into your conscious mind, into your conscious living, you will find your progress to be very rapid indeed.
The process of healing can seem more difficult from the spiritual perspective because it does not seem rational. We are told by our guidance that we are spiritual beings of light, and yet we feel trapped in a body that may be full of pain and dis-ease. We are told to lovingly accept that pain and disease as it is, to lovingly accept that we created it, and to even lovingly accept how we created it. That means to come out of denial that it is there and is there for a reason; to love and accept ourselves, who created it; and to accept all the thoughts and actions we have done to create it. If that is what we do, it means accepting the further creation of the disease.
Even though at first it may seem like it, please note: Acceptance does not mean surrender to the disease or the disease process. It means deeply trusting, loving, and accepting our lives and ourselves, no matter what. It means really getting to know the deeper self, communing with it, identifying with it, and finding its divinity. In so doing, we find that the healthy body is an expression of that deeper self. We find that wherever the illness is in the body is where we have not allowed the deeper divine self to express itself. It is where we are confused between the real self and the impostor and have allowed the impostor to reign. It is where we have allowed the vicious cycle of self-hatred to spin.
Breaking Your Vicious Cycle of Self-Hatred
The only way to break out of the vicious cycle that holds self-hatred in place is to identify the impostor within and stop trying to rework yourself to please others. Begin to observe yourself to find out how much you become the impostor; how you manipulate, betray, and reject yourself according to what you think others want from you; and thereby how you lose connection to your true self. I bet it’s similar to the way you have done it since childhood.
To find your vicious cycle of self-hatred, ask yourself:
How do I sell out and do what I assume authorities want?
How do I reject myself for such selling out?
What kind of self-hatred do I heap upon myself for doing it?
Do I reject myself before someone else can?
In what situations do I dislike and reject myself more (for instance, losing in competition)?
What do I do to myself when I lose?
Make a list. On one side of the page, write all the things you find wrong with yourself. On the other, write how you feel toward yourself about them. Through self-examination of this sort, you can become aware of your self-judgments and negative feelings about yourself. That is already a big part of the battle. Once they are found, you have the key to go deeper to the heart of the problem. The next step is to allow those feelings. I will use the auric field to illustrate why and how this works.
How Negative Emotions Toward Yourself Affect the Second Level of Your Field
Our emotional relationship with ourselves is found in the second level of the auric field. The second level of the auric field carries our positive and negative feelings about ourselves. It is the negative feelings about ourselves that cause lots of problems. The energy and consciousness associated with negative feelings in the second level are of a nature that is contrary to life. To make things worse, we hold this energy-consciousness still, not allowing our negative emotions to flow. This lowers the vibrational frequency to a vibration lower than that which supports life and health, causing stagnation in the second level. The stagnation then affects the first level of the field, blocking the life energy flow to the physical body.
The way we hold these emotions still is by transferring some of their energy-consciousness to the mental level for dissipation. There, the negative energy-consciousness is expressed as self-judgment. The self-judgment then suppresses the feelings even more.
Let me restate this, speaking simply of energy-consciousness transfer. We transfer the negative energy that would normally be expressed in terms of negative emotions up to the third level of the field, where it turns into self-judgments that in turn suppress the negative emotions of the second level even more. This negative feedback loop compresses the second level of the field, reducing its frequency to below what is healthy for life. This then causes an emotional depression in the person.
The auric field of such a person looks very narrow on the second level. The normally bright-colored clouds of energy that should be flowing along the lines defined by the first level are dark and dirty. Some people who have bright second levels may not at all comprehend the situation and may be very uncomfortable near someone like this. Others will be moved to help them out of their situation.
It is relatively easy to clear the second level of the field. Technically, it is a matter of transferring the energy-consciousness back down into the second level and getting it to move by charging it. The moving energy will bring emotional experience that will take the person deeper into themselves, to the root of the problem, and finally into the essence of self and the core. A healer can do this by working with the second level of the field to clear it and by encouraging the client to express feelings.
You can do it on your own, once you know the process. First you become conscious of your self-judgments and understand that they cover pain. But understanding is not enough. You must let down and feel. Let your energy-consciousness back down into the second level in order to feel. Feeling it is necessary, because feeling it returns the flow of energy to the second level of the field, which is stagnated. The flow of energy then clears the stagnation and recharges the field in a healthy way.
Practice changing judgments coming from the third level of the field, like “I’m no good because …” or “I should have done …” into feelings on the second level like “I hurt” or even “I hate myself. “ Let the feelings flow, no matter what they are. It really works. Immediately, the stagnant clouds of the second level of the auric field begin to move and start clearing. Through the clearing and movement, the second level charges. Soon “I hate myself” turns into “I hurt,” which turns into “I love myself,” “I’m sorry I treat myself this way, “ and so on. Emotional expression returns the field to its natural state of flowing, bright colors of the energy-consciousness of self-love.
A businessman I’ll call Jeffrey was unable to break out of his vicious cycle of perfectionism until he began to express his feelings of pain. Jeffrey had been pushed by his family since birth to become well known in his field and financially successful. As an adult, he felt he could never do enough. No matter what his accomplishments, he simply could not find satisfaction within himself. Each success brought him less pleasure. He felt empty inside.
Jeffrey’s auric field showed a great deal of rigidity in the third level, as well as stagnation in the second. His third level was compressing the second. He was unaware of feelings and rarely expressed them. The emptiness brought him to my healing table. As he sank into the emptiness, his second level began to charge and move. It turned from bright amber-yellow to bright red as he first expressed his self-judgments and then self-hatred. By reading and working with the field as he expressed himself, I guided him to stay on track. Soon the self-hatred melted into pain.
Here for the first time, he began to feel the pain of the inner child who had been put under the stress of trying to be perfect. At times he moved into self-judgment to stop the pain. When this happened, the flow of energy in the second level of the auric field would stop and give way to activity in the third level, primarily on the back of his body where chakra activity is an expression of will—that is, the will to make the pain stop. I described what it looked like and helped him direct his consciousness and energy flow back to the front of the body and to the second level of the field. As he did this, an automatic natural flow of energy-consciousness up the front of the body would release feelings again. As he learned to redirect this flow of energy through his body, it became easier to return to the feelings.
As this ebb and flow of expression continued, the feelings from the self-rejection of the present gave way to the pain from past self-rejection. Jeffrey realized he had been carrying it since childhood. He had tried so hard to do what his parents wanted, and he was still trying, whether or not he really wanted to. He felt himself the impostor, doing anything to get his parents’ love. He got the message of what he was supposed to do to be “good,” and in some way or other, he was still doing it today in the business world.
Thus he reached the source of his vicious cycle. He found it in the young child’s conclusion that he must strive for perfection to attain his parents’ love. Suddenly he had another view of his whole life. At first it was very discouraging. It seemed that everything he had ever done to succeed was for the wrong reason—to buy love.
Once again, he tried to take himself out of feeling that pain by going into more self-judgments. As I encouraged him to stay with that pain, he fell deeply into the reality of the inner child. The need in this inner child for love was very real indeed. He loved this inner child with all his heart. He felt and recognized the essence of this child and the essence of his core. He had finally come home.
Jeffrey’s life had changed. From then on, he could see himself and every other human being in a different way. He would never be able to avoid his feelings as much as he had before. He would never be able to sustain his self-judgments as they were. He would catch himself striving for perfection, slow down, and ask his inner child what it wanted. He would let a few great deals pass by and choose being instead of overdoing.
The flow of energy through Jeffrey’s second level continued to build over time. With continued work, his second level took on a normal state of bright flowing colors. His third level also became brighter, more flexible, and more balanced front to back. His first level became stronger and more charged. As a result, his physical body felt younger and more energized. These changes moved up into the fourth level of his field, and his relationships with others took on deeper meaning.
It is through this process of emotional expression that we learn just how much we have brutalized our inner child with our self-judgments. We have not allowed it to have its free range of emotional expression toward itself, which it needs to live within us in a healthy way. And as we have done it to ourselves, so we have done it to others. Once we stop doing it to ourselves, we stop doing it to others. When we accept our own limitations, the needs of our inner child and its imperfections, we accept them in others.
As we begin to accept ourselves the way we are and get to know the inner child, we see that we have made the assumption that the inner child should grow up. There are parts of the child that need to grow up, but primarily the inner child’s spirit needs to be released into freedom. Rather, it needs to live fully within us. Our inner child fills our personality with a sense of wonder and joy of life. It gives us simple pleasure that can never be matched by adult activities. The inner child holds the keys to our “real self,” for it is part of it. Our inner child is a doorway to the essence of our core. If you spend more time with your inner child, you will find out who your real self is. It is composed of many parts from all the life experiences you have had.
Getting to Know Your Inner Child
A good way to get to know your inner child is to play. It turns out that playing is also a great way to find out your needs, especially the ones you left behind you in your childhood. Playing will automatically bring them out. Once they are activated, some of them will mature into your true adult needs. Play is also a great way to find out that your needs are good and that what you are is valuable and unique. Playing is a great way to express positive feelings about yourself. It charges the second level of the auric field and makes it fluid.
To do this, I suggest that you find a chunk of time each day, perhaps an hour or so, to just do what you want to do and nothing that you don’t want to do. Schedule the time as if it were a business appointment. Fill your desire, no matter how young the part of you is that wants it. For example, wear what you want to wear, no matter how outrageous it may seem. Eat what you want to, go where you want, play the music that you want. If you don’t like it, stop immediately, but only because you are not having fun, not because some voice tells you you are not doing the right thing. See how fast you can change what you are doing according to what you want in the moment. Let go and enjoy yourself. Remember, that is what you did as a child. You will be surprised at the results.
After you get used to having regular playtime, you will notice that there is a connection between the inner child’s needs and the adult’s. Children’s play has always expressed the deep teleological yearnings human beings carry. As the psyche matures, those yearnings are expressed in mature adult ways. Activities that begin in the child’s realm may mature into adult activities. Or they may remain as they are. Allow them to be whatever they are. Do not place demands on your play.
When my daughter was young, we used to play together regularly. One of my favorite things was putting Celia to bed at night. I got to play the role of a naughty duck, using a hand puppet. Ducky never really wanted Celia to go to sleep and would jump under the covers with her, be silent for a few minutes, and then suddenly throw off the covers! Or Ducky would constantly ask her if she was asleep yet. It was great fun!
We also painted together fairly regularly. Celia was always painting moons and stars. One time, I couldn’t figure out what to paint, so I painted an aura. Then I painted another one. Soon I had a whole bunch of them. Years later, a professional artist redid them for Hands of Light. (They are Figures 11-1 and 11-2 in that book.)
Play activates and releases the child’s fantasy. Fantasy in the mature psyche becomes creative visualization.
When I first published Hands of Light, Dorian, one of my healing class students from Colorado, gave me a beautiful white bear who became known as Buddha Bear. Everyone agreed that if I was going into the world to teach, I would definitely need a bear. They were right. Buddha Bear has been a great help to my inner child ever since. In the beginning, he even traveled with me.
In recent channelings, Heyoan has suggested that once we give our child self space to be, we must also give our child space to grow into maturity, and to be integrated into our whole being.
Self-Love Exercises
It is also good to practice direct self-love. Here are some wonderful exercises to learn to love yourself. If you have problems generating love feelings with the first exercise, the next one might help. Try them all, and pick the ones you like. Spend some of your time each day actively loving yourself. You can do this by scheduling fifteen minutes each morning and evening. Another option is to schedule it for one minute on the hour every hour!
These exercises may not be as easy to do as they sound. Usually as soon as we begin concentrating on ourselves, we begin analyzing, accessing, placing shoulds, judging, and wreaking all manner of internal nasty behavior upon ourselves. This is not self-love. If you find yourself being negative, gently stop being negative and return to the positive. It is not selfish to love yourself. Rather, think of yourself as a cup that can be filled. When your cup runneth over, the love spills out to those around you. You must love yourself in order to give love to others. Remember that all the negative things you do to yourself, you also do to others, perhaps unconsciously, and all the good things you do to yourself, you also do to others.
Filling the body and the self with love:
You may first wish to start with only a part of your body, as it is easier. Choose a part of your body that needs help, or that you dislike, reject, or are ashamed of. Simply concentrate on that part of your body and direct love into it. Fill it with energy; talk to it kindly. If you are in pain in any part of your body, give it extra love. Instead of trying to get away from it (which we all do when we are in pain), enter into that part of your body with your consciousness. Occupy that part of your body with conscious awareness and loving kindness.
Now do the same for your whole self. Simply concentrate on yourself, and direct love to yourself, as you do to those you love. If you like to use colors, first use green, then rose, then gold and white. Fill your whole body with these colors.
Initiate the love feelings with something that is easy:
Concentrate on the thing or person, such as a rose, animal, or child, that is easiest for you to love. Enter into a state of love with it, and give it your love. For example, if it is a rose, look at and appreciate its beauty. Feel its texture. Enjoy its fragrance. Feel your connection to it. Feel how much you love and enjoy it.
After you have generated strong feelings of love within yourself, transfer those feelings of love toward yourself. Do the same thing with yourself as you did with the rose. Look directly at your body. Don’t use a mirror. Appreciate your body. Look at your favorite part of the body, then at each other part of it. Touch it. Feel its texture. Feel yourself inside it. Stroke it gently. Smell the different parts of your body. Feel how much pleasure your body has given you. Love your body. Speak kindly to it. Practice this daily until it becomes easy. It will.
The following exercise is a bit more difficult, but very effective. Do it in stages, and you will become a master in the art of loving yourself. Begin with a short time, and work your way up to ten minutes.
Loving the person in the mirror:
Sit in front of a mirror, and look into your eyes and love yourself. During this time, do not allow yourself to judge or hurt yourself. As you may know, most people look into the mirror and immediately see all the things that they think are wrong and judge them. If you find yourself doing this, immediately change the self-judgment into a loving thought and action to the self. Again, speak kindly to yourself. Look deeply into your eyes, and see the spirit, the longing, the love, and the life struggle there. Notice how beautiful your eyes are. Note the positive aspects of your hair and facial features. See how they are an expression of your spirit. Look for the child inside. See its joy, its wonderment, and its love. Now look for all the other aspects of this person. See what the person likes to do. See how these favorite pastimes have helped to shape this person into what you are today. See the knowledge of which you are caretaker. What has this person come to earth for? What are the deep longings of this person in the mirror? How can you help this person fulfill their longing? Love this person, and all that you are.
After succeeding with this one, you are ready to go to the fourth exercise.
Loving the person and body in the mirror:
Stand before a full-length mirror nude. Love and accept every part of your self and your body. Concentrate on each part of your body as you did before. Fuse your conscious awareness into it. Or imagine a tiny self just like yourself, enter into that part of your body, and simply be there. Stroke the part of your body you are concentrating on and looking at. Love it. Love the person in that part of the body. When your negative self-judgments arise, speak them out loud and feel your emotional response to them. This is what you do to yourself every time you make such a judgment. Now replace the negative judgment with a positive statement about the area of your body. Then fill it with simple loving kindness. Cover your entire body in this way. First, allow the negative to be spoken out loud so that you can become fully conscious of it and the feelings that it creates. Then replace it with the positive.
Remember, concentrate on the body part first and then on the person in that part of the body. As you do, check out how you have treated each part of your body and yourself about that part of your body. Have you been kind and appreciative? Or have you treated your body and yourself like a tyrant, demanding perfection and performance and disregarding the messages it has sent to you? You will find that there are parts of your body and yourself that you continually reject, probably many times a day. Heal this negative process in you by becoming aware of it and giving extra love to those parts of your body and yourself. Replace all the negative statements you find toward your body and yourself with positive ones.
Loving the parts of your body that are ill or deformed:
After you have covered every part of your body, bring your attention back to the parts that are ill or damaged. Give more loving attention here, accepting them exactly as they are, filling them with unconditional love and your core essence. Bring that part of your body back into the nation that is you. A key to doing this and to loving part of your body that you may feel has betrayed you is to find out what purpose in your life that part has served. I guarantee you that part of your body is teaching you a lesson or has taken some form or responsibility that you were not able to do. It has helped you survive. It has helped you tolerate some life experiences you could not tolerate without it. For example, tumors sometimes carry the energy-consciousness of filling a cavity or hole in a person’s life. They fill people up when they feel empty. Weak legs help people sit down when they can no longer stand up for themselves. Misalignments in the back and neck help people control their anger because they dampen the amount of red energy that can roar up the spine in rage. When these types of problems put people in bed for a few weeks, it is because they need peace, quiet, and rest.
Once you have accepted this alienated part back into yourself and are at one with it, you can also give it a positive visualization. Tell it how it will get better. Be specific. If you have a tumor, and it has served the purpose of filling you up, tell the tumor you no longer need it to fill you up. Tell it that it can dissolve and integrate with the rest of your body. Tell the rest of the body around it to accept its integration back into the whole. Or if you have a broken bone that is having trouble healing, visualize it knitting together and growing normally, a most natural thing for it to do. If you have a chronic misalignment, visualize the muscles relaxing and getting strong in ways that hold the bones in place and clearing the fear or negative feelings associated with the physical problem.
A person I call Bob continually rejected his neck. He had a rather large neck and a double chin. This rejection went on for years. He had several neck injuries and also developed a hypothyroid. His neck was continually going out of alignment, causing a lot of pain and sometimes even mental confusion. Bob began with the mirror, and then later worked with himself as he lay in bed just before going to sleep at night.
As Bob began to heal his neck, he concentrated on loving all parts of his neck, including his double chin. Each evening when going to bed, he would put his fingers on his neck where it was weak or in pain and speak lovingly to it. He let the energy from his fingers run into his neck. As he opened up the energy blocks in his neck, he discovered many voices of fear and complaining there. In the second level of the field were all the things that he had not let himself say to others. Instead, when his block was activated, he would continually repeat the things he couldn’t say to others to himself. In this way, he tried to find an acceptable way to say what he needed to say without evoking his fear, which was also held in the same place in his neck. It didn’t work. It simply made the blocks in his neck stronger.
From the auric field perspective, he was continually taking energy from the fourth level, the “I-Thou” interaction level, that was in the things he wanted to say to others, and moving it down into the second level, saying them to himself. He was thereby clogging the second level.
During the healing process, Bob had to bring the energy back up to the fourth level and release it by shouting out what he had not allowed himself to say. In this way, he released the voices stuck in his throat. This, of course, also brought him into fear, which was released by feeling it. Some of the fear was from very early childhood, when he had not been allowed to “talk back” to his parents.
Under it all was an inability to ask for his needs. The throat chakra is related to speaking the truth. In Bob’s case, it was to speak the truth of his needs. He realized that the only way he could get his needs met in childhood was to beg and beg for them. Then after a long wait, some of them would be met. Bob realized that his enlarged thyroid was related to filling the hole of hunger in his neck, which was there from having had to wait so long to be fed. As his healing process continued over several months, he was able to speak the truth of his needs, the energy blocks in his throat cleared, and his neck got stronger.
Then he discovered an interesting aspect he had never thought of. On several occasions he found himself in certain situations where he suddenly got extremely angry at someone. As his anger began to rise up his spine, he would stop it by squeezing his neck muscles so hard that it would throw his neck out. He then realized that the misalignment in his neck helped him to control his rage. It helped him to keep from hurting people. In other words, he chose to hurt himself rather than the person at whom he was angry. When he realized what a service his misaligned neck had given, he began to appreciate it more. He also developed better ways to control his rage by noticing how he created or got himself into situations that provoked it, by not asking for his needs and not taking care of himself. In each case, had he taken his needs seriously, he would not have been in the situation where that particular rage was provoked. His anger always emerged in situations where others were not respecting his needs. When he began to respect his own needs himself, the situations simply did not arise, or there was no rage to be provoked.
Each night, Bob touched his body and told the blocks to clear, the thyroid to shrink to normal size, and the neck to get stronger. The muscles in the neck got stronger. Soon he was able to do neck exercises that he hadn’t been able to do for years. His neck quit going out of alignment. Bob took Synthroid for several months, and his thyroid function became normal. He hasn’t had any neck injuries for years.
Allowing Your Feelings to Flow
Allowing yourself to feel your feelings is perhaps one of the hardest things to do in healing yourself, if you haven’t practiced it. Remember, the energy-consciousness of the second level is experienced as feelings about yourself. If you want the second level of the field to become balanced, clear, charged, and healthy, you must allow your feelings about yourself to flow. During an illness, your feelings will range from sadness to happiness to serenity to anger to fear to deep terror to weakness to guilt to disgust to demand to self-pity to loneliness to envy to love, and so on. All of these feelings have correlates to energy in the second level of the field, and the more you can just let them flow out of you, the more the field can clear. Part of the healing process is to simply let them flow out because they have been blocked for so long. It worked for Jeffrey and Bob, and it will work for you.
I have worked with many people, and I have never found anyone to whom this does not apply. We are all so agile at avoiding the unpleasant emotions we carry. Many of us just haven’t realized how blocking the feelings blocks our creative force and actively makes what we fear more possible. On the other hand, facing the feelings and going through them releases us to create what we want in life.
Now is the opportunity to get them out. Accept them as they are. They are just feelings to let flow out and cleanse you. Do not be afraid to express negative feelings. People who are ill, who have studied positive visualization, sometimes get the idea that they should not have negative feelings, for fear the feelings or thoughts will become a negative visualization and make their illness worse. Because of this fear, they sometimes go into new levels of denial about their negativity. They may decide only a certain amount of it is allowed. After that’s expressed, they go into denial about the rest of it.
I have not found the expression of negative thoughts or feelings to cause harm if it is done with certain parameters. The first is that the expression of the negativity must not be habitual. As soon as it becomes habitual, it is no longer cathartic. The other is that it must be done with a conscious positive intent for healing. If you allow all the negative thoughts to come forth into consciousness and the negative feelings to flow with the positive intent to heal yourself, then you will not get stuck in negativity that will harm you. The important point here is clear intention. Express the negative feelings with the intention to release them, let them go, and move on beyond them. This will help heal you. If you go into denial about your negative feelings, they will still be at work in you making you sick. They will not go away by sugar-coating.
The best way to replace the negative for positive growth is to combine the expression of the negative for release and the positive visualization. First clear the negative out of the field, and then, in the space that was emptied, replace it with the positive, bright colors of visualization.
What we want is usually the opposite of the very fear we avoid. In other words, there is a direct inverse connection between what we fear and what we want to create. The beautiful poem that follows states it clearly. It was channeled by Eva Broch Pierrakos in Pathwork Guide Lecture 190.
Through the Gateway
Through the gateway of feeling your weakness, lies your strength.
Through the gateway of feeling your pain, lies your pleasure and joy.
Through the gateway of feeling your fear, lies your security and safety.
Through the gateway of feeling your loneliness, lies your capacity to have fulfillment, love and companionship.
Through the gateway of feeling your hate, lies your capacity to love.
Through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness, lies your true and justified hope.
Through accepting the lacks of your childhood, lies your fulfillment now.
Healing Meditations
To help you continue your healing process, here are some meditations to do to heal the second level of the auric field. They are simple and easy to do and are very effective in clearing, balancing, and charging your field.
Color Breathing Meditation
Since the second level of the field contains all colors, a simple way to charge the second level is to do color breathing. You can use any colors you like. I suggest that you try the following ones: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple, lavender, and rose. You may wish to add white, silver, gold, and black. Get a sample of each of the colors you want to use—like a piece of cloth, paper, plastic, or glass. You may even use the rainbow colors created by the sun through a leaded-glass crystal in your window.
Be sure that you follow the instructions carefully. Do not just think about the color, or you will make yellow. By thinking, you activate the third level of your field and draw energy to it. Yellow is the color you make when you think. To keep the energy coming into the second level of the field, you must feel the color. You must become the color. You must be the color. To become a color you must enter into the feeling state of that color.
- Hold the color in your hand, feel the color, look at it.
- Breathe the color in. Fill your whole body with the color.
- Become the color.
- Now breathe the color out.
- Breathe the color in again. This time fill your whole auric field with the color. Imagine that you are the color.
- Feel what it feels like to be the color.
- Now breathe the color out.
- Repeat this several times.
- Now breathe in the next color. Again fill your body and field with the color.
- Repeat each color several times before you move on to the next.
As you do this, you will notice that different colors have different effects on your mood. Each color is associated with a principle or quality. If you need that attribute in your life, meditating on that color and bringing it into you will help you develop it in your life. Figure 11-1 gives a list of colors and the chakra and body parts they nourish.
| CHAKRA 1 |
red |
lower part of body, adrenals, tailbone |
| CHAKRA 2 |
orange |
lower pelvis, sex organs, immune system |
| CHAKRA 3 |
yellow |
solar plexus area, stomach, spleen, liver, pancreas, kidneys |
| CHAKRA 4 |
green |
heart area, circulatory system |
| CHAKRA 5 |
blue |
throat, lungs, ears |
| CHAKRA 6 |
indigo |
eyes, head, lower brain |
| CHAKRA 7 |
white |
upper brain, eyes |
Color Meditations for the Chakras
In Chapter 2, I gave a general description of the auric field and its chakras. Remember, the chakras serve as metabolizers of energy to the areas of the body in which they are located. If you are de-energized and weak in any particular area of the body, then it is good to wear that color or to do a little color breathing meditation. (To find out what color you need, see Figure 9-2. To do the chakra color meditation, use the drawing in Figure 2-5 to locate each chakra.)
Start with the first chakra. Bring your attention to the area of the body where the chakra is located. Imagine the chakra color on that part of your body, both the front and the back. Form the color into a six-inch-diameter disk. If you can visualize in three dimensions, turn the disk into a funnel by extending its tip into your body until the small point of the funnel touches your spine. Spin the disk or funnel in a clockwise direction on your body.*
Pull the color of the disk or funnel into your body as you breathe in. As you breathe out, the color continues to come into your body. Imagine it flowing into the specific organs in that part of your body, as listed in Figure 11-1. Move on to the next chakra. Repeat several times for each chakra.
Be sure to cover all the chakras, starting with the first chakra, then continuing up the body in sequence. As you work your way up, give extra time to the areas of your body that are not well.
Self-Healing Meditation for Your Specific Dis-ease
Two wonderful books list specific meditations for specific diseases. The first is Healing Visualizations by Dr. Gerald Epstein. It is laid out in such a way that you can look up your particular problem and follow the visualization. He even tells you how often to do it. Another book I recommend is Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. It gives simple mantras to be repeated for each problem you may have. These mantras are related to the belief system you probably have that is associated with your dis-ease. For example, for thyroid problems, the negative statement made by a person is “When is it my turn?” The positive visualization to change this problem is “I have all the time in the world for me.”
Introduction to Uncovering the Healer Within
Fantasy or myth is a very powerful healing tool that lifts us out of the ordinary reality and into a world of symbols that help us experience the broader expanses of life’s journey. When we are faced with serious illness or sudden large changes in family structure, we need this help. Within such myths, we can associate ourselves with the power of the Gods, rise above the mundane, and accomplish heroic acts. Here is a metaphorical story that will help you tap enormous healing power and may even help answer questions that cannot be answered in terms of everyday reality.
In our work with this chapter, we have met the inner child who has been brutalized and wounded. We have played with that child and given it space for the expression of life. Now it is time for direct healing of this child. The wounds and illnesses of the physical body are those of the child. When we begin to walk deeply into these wounds, it may be overwhelming until we meet the healer within. Next to our inner child, we carry the healer within, who is completely capable of handling whatever we come up against in life. The healer within knows our history from the very beginning, knows our incarnational task, and deals with all our problems from that broad, wise perspective. Here is a visualization to meet the healer within you. It is a myth or fantasy for your personal healing.
UNCOVERING THE HEALER WITHIN
Channeled from Heyoan
Once upon a time, aeons ago before time was known as it is today, there was a spark of light in the heart of the divine. That spark in the divine burst forth into millions of stars. Each star had a name that was written in the word of God. One of those stars is you. As a star, you grew and developed and sang across the heavens to the other stars.
In this time before you were born as a human, you knew light, love, and wisdom. Being unborn, of course you had no body, so there was a great deal of freedom. You were completely aware of the essence of your being. You had great freedom to move about the universe at your will. You moved in the direction that you focused in. With your intention, you began creating things. If you had a wish, you automatically created it.
You created stone and earth; tree and flower; star and planet; even cloud and wind. Your essence moved easily, changing from one form to another. You experienced being a cloud, a moon, a sun, or a fish, or a cat. You continued to move as your pleasure led you. As you moved from one form to another, creating more forms, you slowly became identified with form, and shadow was born. You got so excited in the creating that memory slipped and you forgot who you were. You were so busy creating, you didn’t even notice that you began to think you were form.
Shadow grew darker, and pain was born out of forgetting that the true self is essence. The true self is the creator, that which is beyond form. That is how you created shadow and pain. You forgot who you are. You split yourself in two: the part that forgot and the whole that remembers.
Within every human being, there is the spark of the divine in every cell of your body. It is the essence of self. Within that true essence of who you are is the healer within you who has all of the creative power of the universe. The healer within you is named according to the word of God. That is who you truly are.
Move your awareness now to your inner essence, your power and light that are completely unique. You are the word of God made manifest. Move your awareness to the total essence of your being—that is the healer within you. You have felt it your entire life. The golden threads of this power have been woven through the tapestry of your life since before you were born. You knew as a small child, as you know now, what this means. Feel the essence, the power, flowing through you. It is your uniqueness. It is your beauty. It is your love. It is the sweetness that you experienced life to be as a child.
Your power lies within the sweetness of who you are. It is within the sweet longings you have protected and shielded from others. You are like a flower unfolding in the sunlight. Feel the power and the nature of your divinity, unlike any other. Now ground that well in your body. That part of you is still free. That part of you can still move freely through space, time, and other realities. Feel yourself in this freedom now.
As you are moving through time and space to different types of reality, in the far distance you hear a cry. That cry wells up and becomes more audible, and you say, “Oh, what could that be?” You hear the longing in the cry for help. Then you spot it and you see the beautiful blue and white shimmering planet in the sky. You are drawn closer to that beloved planet by the cries of need. As you get closer, you say, “What can I do to help? How can I answer this cry, this call? How can I help heal the pain that is upon the earth?”
Then you have a great idea. You decide to create a physical form by drawing it up out of the earth and drawing the pain with it. You intend to use the physical form to heal the pain.
You descended into a tiny physical body. After nine months or so, you were born into this world as a human being. The longer you remained attached to that body, the dimmer the memory of your original essence became.
As a child, and perhaps way before that, you began taking on the pain. During the experience of the pain, you completely forgot who you were. When the pain would leave, you would remember. When the pain would come back, you would forget. The pain that you chose to heal grew inside of your body.
Look over your childhood. Find the deepest pain that you have carried in all those years. With that pain, you will find your deepest longing. What is it that you want to be? What is it that you longed to be as a child that you now and then thought you could never be? Did you want to move among the stars? Did you want to heal everyone on earth? Did you want to paint or to create beautiful music? Did you want to make everyone feel safe? What was it that you wanted more than anything? If you could be or could have anything you wished on earth, have any fantasy come true, what is that fantasy? How is the un-fulfillment of that related to your very deep pain?
Look backward over your life. As you moved through each moment of your life carrying that pain, there is one thread: a repeated cycle on the spiral of life, where that deepest pain from childhood has been repeated over and over and over again in the many different experiences that you have had. If you look at all of those experiences, you will find a common thread among them all. When you find that common thread, then allow yourself to begin feeling that pain. Allow your body to experience this pain. Where has it affected your body? When you feel it in your body, where does your body tense?
Explore now throughout your body where that pain has affected your psychic, your spiritual, your mental, your psychological, and your physical being. That thread runs holographically through every portion of your being, and as it runs through your body it hits in particular places that eventually become experienced as physical pain. Find it in your body. If you are sensitive to the auric field, then find it in the auric field.
As you find that pain, on whatever level it has manifested most profoundly—perhaps a fear, perhaps a problem with relationship, perhaps in a physical disorder, perhaps in your profession—then ask yourself a question: “What has this to do with my deepest longing? How is this particular problem associated with my deepest longing of who I wish to be, what I want to do with my life, where I wish to live?”
The first job you have is to heal that pain within the body. For it is by the pain in your body and life that you will learn the personal skills that you need to fill your longing, no matter what it is.
Find that pain within your body, and put your hands on it: that which you have carried for a lifetime, that darkest belief system that has the most profound forgetting, that one major, deepest pain, be it in your heart, your belly, or in your throat. Put your hand there now, and experience the consciousness there that believes in separation. It is the shadow. It believes it is separate and isolated from everything, isolated and separate with no hope. Find that pain that has been there from the earliest of days, and let that shadow begin to dissolve.
Enter into the shadow. Accompany yourself into the dungeon within the self that needs healing. Do not deny the human experience of that real pain from the human perspective. It is not a new pain. It has been there ever since you can remember. It is not the kind of pain that goes away easily, for it is deeply, deeply ingrained. Spend some time with the pain.
Then when you are ready, move your conscious awareness to the healer within you. Here is your wisdom. Here is your longing and your light with which you came here to heal the pain that is in your body.
Move back to the pain and feel the pain. Then move to the longing and feel the longing. Move back to the pain and then to the longing again. Continue moving from one to the other until you find the association between the two, until you can answer the question, “What does this pain in my life mean to me? What is it trying to tell me? What is the message it brings to me?”
While you are feeling that pain with your hands, from the human perspective, ask the essence of healer that you are what you need to do. What is the deepest cause of this pain? Ask for help to heal this pain. Ask the healer within for help to heal that which you have been unable to heal in yourself up until now. Truly ask, and it shall be answered. Ask very specifically what you can do. What is the cause? What is the belief system? What do you need to do every day?
Allow the essence of the healer within you to work through your hands to heal your body. Be a channel to heal the self. Let the light flow through you.
After you have received as much information as you can, reach for the highest spiritual reality you know; your higher self or your guides. Reach for the memory of who you are from that highest spiritual reality. You will find that the pain within you is precisely the pain that you were drawn to earth to heal, way back before you were born, when you were that wondrous spiritual being. That is who you truly are.
So reach up to that part of the self that has incarnated in order to heal the very pain that you carry within yourself and that you have carried since your birth. For it is precisely the pain you have come to heal, and it is you who have chosen to take on this pain and in doing so you chose to incarnate with precisely the best combinations of energies and wisdom and love to heal that particular pain.
That is what you have come to heal, and you are fully equipped to do so. You have fully equipped yourself to heal it. And that wondrous spiritual being that you were before your birth when you heard the cries and the longing from the earth and were drawn toward the earth is the healer within you. You are the person who knows how to heal that pain more than anyone else. That is your healer within. Be the healer within you, and heal that thread of pain that you have carried throughout your whole life. Touch your body in places you feel pain.
As you are working, move your consciousness back and forth between the healer within and the inner person who is in pain. As you continue to move back and forth, you begin to understand the relationship between the healer within you and the pain that it has come to heal. You have drawn this pain up from the earth to transform it. Give yourself plenty of time to complete this process. You are integrating the pain within, the longing that you carry within your heart, and the healer within that can heal you.
Let the healer within you draw out that pain and return you to wholeness. Move back and forth between the human with the deep pain, and the healer with universal power. Move them closer and closer together as you move back and forth until they merge. Continue the process until you become completely merged. When you feel satisfied that the merging is complete and has stabilized, I would like you to remain silent for at least an hour. Remain silent, sit in meditation, or simply get up and go for a walk in the woods.
As time progresses, all of the above will become easier for you. After practicing self-love and allowing feelings to flow, it is a good idea to see how it is changing your life. Do a quick self-check of how well you take care of yourself now by answering the questions given below. Then begin to nourish yourself in those areas of your life. If you are physically unable right now to do it, get someone to help you create a plan to begin after your health returns.
To assess your self-care, ask yourself:
In what areas are you lovingly nourished, and in which ones are you lacking?
How and where in your life have you not been giving yourself the love that you not only need but also deserve?
How do you neglect yourself in terms of your own health?
What have you been withholding from yourself that is possible to have or do but just seems to get put off?
What do you really want from life that you have not yet been able to create?
Is there a skill you have always wanted to learn?
How can you learn it now, or if not now, after you get well?