Understand the Interplay between Body, Mind, and Spirit
Early anatomists dissected corpses to understand the organs and workings of the body. This evolved into a practice of medicine that is still focused on the body as an object, apart from whatever might animate it. The cosmology behind this suggests a separation between the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of our being. Allopathic doctors are not trained to deal with our emotional or spiritual health. This is problematic if you believe your body, mind, and spirit are interrelated.
On the other hand, cultures that have developed highly evolved forms of energy medicine (China, India, Tibet, aboriginal, and so on) evolved out of a cosmology that considers the mental, spiritual, and physical realms to be interrelated. Practitioners use observation and experimentation, herbs (chemistry), and physical manipulations, just as Western medicine does, but they also use intuition and expanded mental abilities to glean information.
Insights into the health of the body are developed in the larger context of who you are. Evidence is gathered from the patient, the family or tribe, the body’s behavior, movements of the subtle energies, and elemental factors based on the group’s spiritual understandings of how we are constructed. In most cases, healers look at what is needed not only on the physical level but also on the level of soul and mind.
Yoga practitioners do not just identify weak muscles and do exercises to strengthen them; they work to build strength throughout the body, mind, and spirit.
This is more than preventive medicine — it is proactive medicine, or practices that promote wellness.
Understanding about how the soul constructs the body, and how the body reacts to mental and spiritual conditions, is part of most energy healing traditions. But it is often mocked and discredited in allopathic contexts and may be discredited by your friends and family if they see the allopathic model as exclusively valid. It may be seen as superstition or guesswork, primitive or ignorant of reality (as defined in our rationalist, scientific culture). If we want to develop a contemporary understanding of self-healing using energy medicine, we need to recognize this. Social prejudice against complementary healing has diminished greatly in the past twenty years. But it is still alive and kicking in many settings.
As you set out to learn the language of energy, I invite you to keep your outsider perspective handy, to explore and experiment, to try things on for size, to tune in and investigate what feels true for you. It is not necessary to reject allopathic medicine to learn self-healing through energy medicine. But it is necessary to be willing to work from the inside out, determining for yourself how you are constructed, how to dialogue with and bolster your own unique thumbprint of energies, and what energy nourishment would best support your journey in this life.
• • • MEDITATION: EXPLORING THE WEB OF MEANING • • •
Read these instructions into a recorder or ask a friend to read this slowly for you:
Shut your eyes for a moment and tune in to your body as a creature, like a dog or cat. You may even want to give yourself a good rub, as you would your family pet. Wag your tail. Flex each foot and feel it as you set it down again. Stretch and bend the fingers of each hand, feeling how intricate and amazing your hands are. Shift your back in a swaying motion side to side, feeling how your spine can flex and bend. Feel the flesh, muscle, sinew, bones, and organs that make up this miraculous instrument.
I call this creature your Earth Elemental Self. It feels solid, but each organ, bone, and connector is a community of cells, which are in their turn small energy generators made of molecules and atoms, communicating endlessly within themselves and with other cells to collectively create this thing we call a body.
Now, tune in to your mind: the knowing, thinking part of you, the Talking Self. If your attention is up in your head, in your brain, let that awareness of mind expand to include the knowing, the me, that fills your whole body. Feel into your heart area and its wisdom, your solar plexus, your gut, your hands and feet. Let your awareness travel wherever this Talking Self resides. Your Talking Self isn’t limited to your body space. You can send your mind out into other situations, other places, using your imagination. Feel this part of you that creates dramas, develops your identity and life story, codifies experience using language, thought, and perception. This self is also made of energies, more subtle perhaps than the energies that compose matter.
Now, tune in to your Wiser Self. Feel into your soul, or Source Self. Does it take a form, have sound, color, sensation, light, or come into your awareness through direct knowing? Is your Wiser Self standing apart from you, or is it cohabiting the same area as your body? Is your Wiser Self alone or standing with others? Your Wiser Self is also made of energy — perhaps the most obviously energetic of the three selves. How do you perceive those energies?
The life-force energy you are made of is not neutral; it has light, color, vibration, movement, pattern, and meaning. Just as each note in the musical scale comes together into songs that communicate to us, the energies that you are made of aggregate and communicate meaning. Feel all that meaning that creates you. Let yourself feel the web of energies, spanning a spectrum from spirit through mind through body, moving and exchanging and communicating and pulsing with life.
This pulsing field of meaning is you: a web of energies communicating and connecting, forming patterns and working independently. You are a web of meaning. Feel that, as you felt your own physical body at the start of this exercise. When you are ready, open your eyes, and look at everything in the world around you as interacting energies your instrument has learned to perceive, then interpret, as form, thought, or spirit.
PRACTICE TIPS
•Adopt an energy medicine mindset, like putting on a pair of outsider glasses, to get a handle on what is happening in your body, mind, and spirit. What might your situation look like to an alien, recently landed? What tools do you have — from language, from literature, from life, from friends and teachers — that allow you to understand what is happening for you now?
•Try using nonscientific language to describe your situation. Metaphors are great: “I feel like a volcano about to erupt.” “I feel like a mouse being toyed with by a cat.” “My body feels angry and rebellious — like a teen trying to find her own identity.” Be subjective in characterizing what is going on for you.
•Spend time gathering and assessing evidence of what your body needs, can tolerate, and is expressing. Put aside what you have read about nutrition, body chemistry, even spirituality, and just see what your own body wants to tell you. Treat yourself as an infant who can’t yet talk but who can still express wants and needs. (I provide more guidance on how to engage in energy dialogue in later chapters.)
•Try the “Mother Teresa Touch” (page 15) on yourself when you are feeling emotional, physical, or social imbalance. What are you hearing/understanding about your situation as you do it, and what are you communicating?
•Explore any illness or imbalance in relation to how you function. What is the story that gives it context? For example, I recently caught a cold that everyone around me was getting. It is valid to just say “a cold is a cold.” But in my specific case, I caught it after three months of high stress. It hit my throat at a time when communications were particularly challenged for me. It didn’t affect my lungs, but it hung on and on, sapping my energy to move forward. What can these conditions teach me about how I need to adjust my functioning and nudge my body toward wellness? What needs did the cold meet (albeit in an unlovely way)?
