Healing can quickly open therapist and client to intuitive awarenesses of underlying psychological problems that may be buried in the unconscious, often brought into consciousness by the unconscious mind through physical and emotional symptoms. Healing facilitates releases of buried emotional hurts. Psychotherapy helps people to integrate the insights and emotional releases derived through healing.
My ankle fracture was the result of a slip of my bicycle, crossing an invisible patch of black ice on the road as I came down the hill from my village in rural England. Most people would simply call this an unfortunate accident. I consider it a message from my unconscious mind and higher Self. More accurately, it is a series of messages. First, to slow down from my Type A, driven personality style of pushing to complete the updates for the publication of the revised edition of this book, as I near the signing of the contract with my new publisher. Then, to begin to ask why I haven't been spending more time meditating and communicating with my inner Self, so that it wouldn't have to shout at me and trip me up in order to slow me down long enough for me to stop and listen to it. Next, to ask why my unconscious mind would agree to such a drastic communication, when I have generally enjoyed good health most of my life. This is serious business.
Spiritual healing deals with the biological energy body and is strongly rooted in a systemic approach to problems. For instance, the releases of an energy block in one part of the body free up the flows of energy throughout the entire body. Reductions in emotional tensions are accompanied by reductions in physical tensions. Changes in one member of a family very quickly reverberate with others in the family. In fact, if healing is consciously directed towards tensions between individuals, it can bring about healings in relationships as well as in the individuals involved.
I return to look at my throbbing foot (raised to a blessedly restful position again after a trip to the bathroom, when it swelled to the painful limits the cast would allow because it is irritated from the traumas of injury and surgery).
Spiritual healing from Rita, my wife, and absent healing from many other healers continues to help with pain, anxiety and emotional upset during my convalescence.
I ask myself, "What psychological and relational problems may have contributed to my allowing this "accident" to happen?" This begins to touch upon deeper layers of emotional hurts I have already spent some thirty years exploring through various psychotherapies. It resonates with a broken ankle at age 3 when I was left alone with friends by my mother while she attended some summer courses. It reverberates with the hurts of several sprained ankles along the way thereafter that -- the last during a rough patch in my life when I felt lonely and abandoned and had no one to turn to, ending up swallowing many of my hurt and angry feelings. It was no coincidence that this current fracture occurred on the very day that Rita and my stepdaughter, Elizabeth, flew off to a week's holiday in the Caribbean. So I have much to chew over and journal -- awaiting the return of my Jungian therapist from her honeymoon holiday in India.
This raises all sorts of issues concerning my relationship with Rita, as well as other, unresolved dependency issues from my childhood relationships with my parents. I am certain that a part of my ankle's healing will involve insights into these issues.
Spiritual healing opens people to intuitive, mystical and spiritual awarenesses. These are areas that our materialistic and reductionistic western society have largely rejected from the mainstream of accepted culture. Scientific methodology insists on measurable phenomena and therefore has difficulty in knowing how to address the subjective. inner awarenesses of spiritual healing. Easier to reject these than to question the basic axioms of conventional science. Easier to distance ourselves from that which makes us uncomfortable than to delve into why we feel uncomfortable.
Healers often introduce cosmologies of astrology, numerology, tarot or other forms of divination, and explanations including religion, reincarnation and the like. Such cosmologies reframe people's problems, putting them in contexts much broader than their immediate hurts and illnesses. Hope is introduced because the passage of time brings new figures and relationships into the equations of numerology and planetary positions. Religion and reincarnation turn disasters into challenges to one's faith and spiritual growth.
In my practice of psychotherapy I introduce as many ways as I can for people to view their problems from new perspectives. I find Transactional Analysis, Parent Effectiveness Training and a wide variety of books (I call this bibliotherapy) helpful for cognitive reassessment of problems and searches for new solutions. Gestalt therapy, dream analysis, hypnotherapy and analysis of transference and counter-transference bring in the emotional awarenesses needed for resolution of problems. Group, marital and family therapies, with systemic and paradoxical approaches, help with interpersonal relationships. Relaxation, meditation, breathing, imagery, and spiritual healing help to integrate physical, psychological and relational difficulties. Selected reading, prayer, a variety of meditations, energy medicine exercises and healing introduce spiritual dimensions to the therapy.
I am slowly, ever so slowly, adjusting to my frustrations at having to slow down and accommodate to this ankle. I am grateful for the time I now have for meditation and contemplation. I am pleased for the time it is giving me to read several remarkable books that have been beckoning to me from my "to read" shelf for several months, including The Alchemy of Healing, by Edward Whitmont, a remarkable Jungian homeopath, several excursions into the Kalahari with Laurens van der Post, and assorted books on angels for a chapter in volume III, dealing with spiritual aspects of Healing Research.
Most of all, I am grateful for the deeper insights into feelings of hurt from very, very early in life. I begin to touch the edges of a hurt that is beyond verbalizing, because it started before I had words to describe or the concepts to understand it. This is a hurt of knowing there was no one around who was sensitive to my needs, an ache so deep that it is beyond screaming out that I FEEL I AM ALONE ON THIS EARTH IN A VULNERABLE CHILD BODY, WITH NO ONE TO LISTEN TO MY WORRIES AND FEARS, NO ONE TO COMFORT ME PROPERLY.
This was the very early beginning of a determination to stand on my own. And now I have been forced for three weeks to lie helplessly in bed with my foot elevated to keep it from swelling, and to be dependent on Rita and some kind friends and neighbors to bring me the necessities of life so that I can keep my foot up and free of swelling. At age 54, for the first prolonged time in my life, I am learning to ask others to help me - rather than be stoically independent in order to avoid any chance of disappointment, with reawakening of the earlier feelings of having no one there for me.
Carl Jung had the wisdom to put much of this very simply. He pointed out that all of us have aspects of ourselves that are strongly developed and more within our conscious awareness. We also have polar aspects of ourselves that are very weakly developed and more within our unconscious awareness. For instance, we might be strong in thinking, in which case we are likely to be weak in expressing and dealing with our feelings; or we might have highly developed intuitional inner senses, in which case our polar aspect of outer senses might be weakly developed. Our weaker, unconscious aspects exist in what Jung termed our inner shadow. One of the greatest challenges and lessons in life is to bring the light of conscious awareness into the shadow. Because it is an unknown to us, we tend to fear and avoid the shadow. On an individual as well as on a collective basis, a deepening awareness of our shadow is one of the most important healings we can bring to our lives. When we ignore our shadow sides we do so at our peril (as I am learning with my ankle) Jungian approaches to this challenge are through psychoanalysis, with a focus on dreams and drawings that reflect not only the individual unconscious but also a person's connection with the collective unconscious of all of creation. Marvelous as Jungian analysis can be, most Jungians stop short of involvement with energy sensing and healing awareness.
Even if we take all of the above and hold it in a collective, simultaneous awareness, this description doesn't begin to touch upon the complexities of the entire picture as a whole. Our individual life dramas are merely sub-plots in a cosmic epic of such vast proportions that we are each as a single sub-atomic particle in an atom in a protein in a cell in an organ in a creature of which we are an intimate part but of whose life and purpose we cannot begin to have even the dimmest awareness. One of this creatures' smaller sub-cellular organelles is the planet earth, that we are beginning to appreciate again as Gaia. We are doing well if we simply recognize our relationship to a something that we appreciate is vastly greater than ourselves, and seek to communicate with it through our higher Self -- in respectful relationships with nature, in meditation, prayer and the like.
See more on WHEE and on talking with your symptoms in my new book, "7 Minutes to Natural Pain Release" and More by and about Daniel Benor, MD