Yesterday I talked about a block to healing called the spiritual bypass. Today let me tell you about an even bigger block: refusing to choose healing. For this to make sense, we need to understand this use of the word healing.
Healing doesn't mean that our backs don't hurt or we don't feel anxious. It means we choose love over everything. That's it. And as we saw yesterday, choosing love doesn't mean we gloss over hurt. We love the part of us that's hurting, too.
It seems an impossible irony to navigate: Choosing love leads to the changes we are wanting, AND we need to keep choosing love, even when the changes don't occur.
We need to change our focus from seeking change to seeking love. That's what opens us to change. We can't force change but we can choose to choose love.
It's kind of messed up. I know. But so awesome once you get the hang of it!
If you choose spiritual/energy healing, you choose to believe there is some creative force behind the universe that is much more powerful than the creative force we try so hard to muster with our worried minds.
I wasn't brought up with any religion or spiritual practice. I used to believe worship was for the weak, chosen out of desperation or unfortunate life circumstances. I learned spirituality by touching it with my own two hands, feeling the flow of life-force energy in the human body.
I felt, first hand, the power available to us, even on the days we found it hard to believe it was there.
That's why I feel so confident in telling you it is there. And that the way to feel better is to feel for it no matter what. In the body it feels like a magic magnetic flow. In our hearts it feels like love. In our minds it feels like peace.
Yesterday I felt out of sorts. I even trudged to Reiki Circle with a heaviness in my heart. I went through the motions. I invited gratitude. I felt connected to my sisters and brother who attended.
But I didn't feel the elevation and expansion that I usually feel. It was just a day. What else is there, really? Days of connection, days of elation, days of pain, days of pity, days of faith. All manner of days we get to experience and do with what we will by the grace of the great divine.
These were my thoughts as I walked home from Reiki.
I happened to notice a low bright cloud. The sky behind it was that deep blue black that you also see in the ocean at dawn. I had to stop in the middle of Cambridge Street and look straight up. It was funny because that magic magnetic energy that I feel from a human body was now pouring down from the sky into the crown of my head. Hmm...
I'm telling you this because I want you to believe that the healing force is mysterious, but it is real. In case you've been trying and doing loops and wondering if it is really possible to ever feel better.
Stop trying. Stop searching desperately or hopelessly for how to feel better and feel better. Find something to love at all costs. There is always something to love. A cloud in the sky. Your aching neck. The love doesn't solve you. It softens you. It invites peace.
That's why those people were actually NOT hypocrites for putting on a clean shirt and showing up in church, even though they drank too much and swore, and half the time skipped confession but shook their neighbors hands and then got back out there for another week.
Sometimes I did go to Catholic church with the neighbor kids. The things I remember were Peace Be With You and Sweet Mystery of Life. I rolled my eyes and looked bored, so I could be cool like my friends.
Secretly, though, I felt the deep pang of comfort in those words, though I was only eight. To this day I want us all to feel it, to remember it, that peace and mystery, even and especially on the hardest days.
