Somehow, when it comes to healing, our culture seems to think a body is a body is a body. Maybe you will require a bit more or less medicine than the next person, based on your size, age, and gender (though even those distinctions are often ignored). But basically, we see the human body as more similar than different.
Donna Eden, an energy medicine pioneer who can see the body’s subtle energies, says frequently that, although there are common patterns (chakras, meridians, the aura, and other energy systems), “each person’s energies are as unique as a thumbprint.”
Can you imagine working with a healing practitioner who helped you identify what can support your individual moving dynamic of energies to thrive?
This is a very different approach than our medical mentality of asking: What is wrong and how can we fix it? Allopathic medicine assumes that a blood profile is usually sufficient to understand what is happening, ignoring the fact that even the time lapse between the tests and the consultation brings a change.
What if we understood the body as an ongoing story, with multiple plotlines weaving in and out? What if instead of looking to eradicate what is wrong, we focused on bringing those plotlines into greater clarity, harmony, and balance?
The notion of sameness makes us miss crucial cues in healing and self-healing. It keeps us from understanding our own breed and individuality and measuring our expectations against that. For example, if your natural energy is slow and stately (like a tortoise), then trying to keep up in a world full of hares will cause you stress and eventually illness.
Knowing what kind of person you are is key to self-healing. Knowing what your soul’s purpose is, what energizes or drains you personally and specifically, what particular foods are nourishing to you, is part of being able to heal. Yet this conversation rarely comes up in allopathic contexts. We may be told to lower our stress, but each individual has a very different relationship to stress. What stresses me may make your heart sing. Recognizing individuality is crucial if we don’t want to jump from one set of shoulds to another.
The idea of measuring ourselves against a norm is deeply ingrained in us. It affects how we interpret our health and success. If you can suspend your socialized mind enough to see yourself not as a body (species human, subtype female or male) and instead see yourself as a web of energies, a web of meaning, you can see how medicine that is individualized to your unique web would be more effective than something designed to manipulate the chemistry of a generic physical body.
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: