We have been examining phases of learning energy healing, but in truth, these phases can be found in the learning of practically any discipline, since the mastery of one phase tends to segue naturally into something beyond itself. These stages repeat themselves; we never stop learning. Only novices in a discipline delude themselves with the notion that they’ve “got it.” Masters, on the other hand, regardless of the discipline, are humbled by how much they don’t know. In healing work, you can have all kinds of tools and skills at your disposal, and you can have evolved your own approach to using them, but the techniques and approaches by themselves can get pretty boring if they are not in the service of the fundamental healing relationship between you and your partner. And yet, even the healing relationship will ask for something more, something beyond itself.
Approaches are bigger than individual techniques and tools, and the healing relationship with another person is larger than any particular approach, but what is larger than the healing relationship you have with your client? To get at a real answer, we need to clear out our limited categories of thinking and understand that each of us is part of a greater whole. When you give a treatment, for example, you are not only treating an individual, but you are also touching a part of a far greater body. The person you lay your hands on is a cell in the body of their family, their group, society and nation, the human race, the living planet, indeed the person you touch is a cell in the greater body of all sentient beings and all creation. It sounds a trifle high-falutin' to say that, but really only the limitation of our hearts and our imaginations prevents us from experiencing this.
Invite that level of things into your awareness and see what happens. Your ability to be conscious that you are touching into this hidden wholeness as you do your work—both in your inner work with yourself and in healing work with others—opens the door to the fundamental spirituality of energywork. Healing work, with its multitude of techniques and methods and the special partnership that develops between you and your partner, can become a connection to the universal principles that guide Creation, the unseen give and take of energy and life-force, the operation of Love on a grand scale, a dance with the Source of Life.
• • •
To wrap up this series on phases of learning energy healing, I'll express a hope: In moving toward a practice and teaching of energy-active bodywork, we need to provide educational settings in which these four phases can be honored. Students of bodywork will not stop needing solid fundamentals of anatomy and physiology, therapeutic massage and bodywork, business and an ethics of truly skilled healing relationship. But those who are attracted to energy-oriented bodywork and therapy are in need of an education that prepares them for spiritual process as well. This is because the tools of energywork are derived from age-old spiritual practices, the ancient technology of consciousness, aimed toward nothing less than receiving what Joseph Campbell called "the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos," something which has implications far grander than even our contemporary notions of “optimum health.”
Thank you for being a subscriber. Your thoughts, comments and questions are welcome.