For nearly thirty years I have been actively engaged in healing my own patterns and past. This process has consumed me, and I have been dedicated to and enchanted with it and all of its workings, both on the inner and the outer. I have also have studied the workings of energy at all levels and how that energy flow affects healing, taking years of classes and practicum, soon maintaining a private energy healing practice. In 1996, when I felt an inner urging to have this practice be more grounded in the physical, I began private study with various individual bodyworkers, and took several massage courses, revamping my healership into a massage practice that focused more on the physical and emotional aspects of healing, as opposed to the mental/spiritual aspects that occupied my time as an energy healer in the early to mid-90’s.
Within these pages I offer some signposts outside conventional approaches to healing. I welcome disagreement, debate, andstrong emotional response to what is said. My words are my opinions and my personal truth, not necessarily Truth, although opinions can sometimes be experienced as Truth if there is enough trust in their validity and practical applicability. What I offer has been time-tested in my own life, and in the lives of many of those in my healing community.
The recommendations and conclusions drawn in this book are off the beaten track and reflect a life currently being lived largely “off the grid”. They are not intended to reinforce what you already know, but perhaps what you have suspected or conjectured. For example, many people have not realized that expressing emotions in sound could possibly be healing or a good thing; after all, won’t we just create more of the same if we do that? Or could it be, like a pressure cooker being relieved of pent-up steam, that the dynamic, evolutionary creations we are become more functional and balanced if we hold less emotional charge?
This book is written in the hopes that it will help people think, feel and act upon changing and releasing old habits. It is divided into four parts across what I consider to be the four layers of the self: our “bottom line”, the physical body; our inner feminine, the emotional body; our “halfway house” the mental body, and our eternal, timeless light of consciousness, the spiritual body, all of which comprise the Self as a whole. I include a fifth section which follows the first four, “The Relational Body: Love, Family, Friends and Others”, for it is in this realm of life that the four bodies of our Self touch and interact with another’s four.
Though the text is divided neatly into these five discrete sections, there is an emphasis and focus throughout on the issues of the emotional body and how to effectively deal with emotional triggers. I focus on the emotional body because this part of self seems to be in direst need, collectively speaking, of more evolved understanding. It has become abundantly clear to me that a deep inquiry into one’s emotional backlog is not everybody’s journey. But it is the work of some, and the beauty of finding out if you or someone you love are among the some is that, ultimately, healing is do-it-yourself work and has a self-selecting quality to it. That is, you try it and it works and you feel good about the process having an encouraging effect, or you ditch it if it seems or feels wrong for you. Or, you do not even try it because it does not draw you. Hopefully discarding such an inquiry is not rooted in a belief that might read, “I believe it works but it is just too hard and painful so I am going to give up and try a mental technique because it seems easier”.
There are many suggestions for “healing and dealing” offered in this book. It may be tempting to believe a possible guilt message that if you don’t apply all or most of the tips, healing and dealing is not for you, you have failed, or you are not a ‘good’ healer. Guilt, however, is not a truth teller. I encourage you to pick and choose what resonates for you to try on, and ditch the rest. Not every suggestion is meant for every person.
In addition, everyone has different pacing with their self-healing as unique individuals with unique right times, and cannot be compared lovingly to anyone else’s healing path or arc of healing. Comparison energy is not in service to balancing and healing ourselves.
I have subtitled this book, “Essays on Becoming Wholed”, because a dear friend said to me that, more than healing wounds, the impetus we all have towards “maximizing our potential” and recovering from what we have endured in all of our painful history is to become whole people again, to have access to all of our power, all of that great potential becoming actualized or well on its way, so that life becomes an exciting adventure again, in every single nook and cranny of our existence.
Healing is a process, and the process molds us, happens to us, takes us over in the best way possible, becomes us. Adding the ‘d’ onto the word ‘whole’ somehow indicates to me a progression; motion. Motion generated via the increasing energy of rising vibration, which happens when we express emotions and receive resultant understandings. Some people think of emotion, or e-motion, as shorthand for “energy in motion”. All this considered, it feels right to coin the term “wholed” to more specifically reflect the ultimate outcome of the healing process.
I was not trying to reach every person with my columns, nor am I with this book. The kind of people I am hoping my words of encouragement might help are not those who have no apparent problems or ongoing issues in their lives. The kind of people I am trying to reach and perhaps help are the ones who are often having reversals in their fortunes, who “cannot win”, who have seething cauldrons of old emotions in them that they are not sure how to deal with, or who may be having physical problems and wanting to reach for new ways of responding to them.
I feel it is important for people who read my words to know which category they fall into, by and large, so they know if the content is applicable to them or not. If it doesn’t resonate, it simply means the material, or that part of the material, is not right for you. It may help to carry an awareness that different people on different paths need different help.
In describing examples or anecdotal illustrations of various healing scenarios, I often use the “third person feminine” convention of ‘her’, for several reasons. Firstly, it is too cumbersome to always use “him or her”, secondly, third person masculine has gotten most of the airtime over the millennia and it is time for a balancing, and thirdly, especially when it comes to describing scenarios involving the emotional body, the feminine principle is what I most closely associate with emotionality.
At some point in the healing process many of us reach a point where we would like to have some sort of group or peer support. There are people all around us doing vulnerable, deep healing work. There are people doing this work that one can meet through the web, through various workshop communities, and through friends of friends. Intending to find them and staying open for opportunities to be with them will undoubtedly lead anyone who wants help from individuals and/or groups, to begin to develop the roots of a support system.
The words “healing and dealing” are sprinkled throughout the book. This phrase indicates the work that we do to clear ourselves of backed-up emotional charge and old habits of thought (“healing”), which in turn manifests an outward flow of action toward people and situations in our lives (“dealing”) that reflect the dynamic balance we achieve, bit by bit, through consciously engaging in the process.
Healing and dealing is a reiterative process, like the fish that flops onto land only to slide back into the water twenty times before she grows legs and walks out for good. We make the same mistakes over and over again until we grow the legs of true depth of understanding and walk out of the sea of confusion and pattern. This is accomplished via the evolutionary process of the Wholing Selves We Are.
I wish you all good and strong healing and dealing. In so doing, may we reclaim ourselves in all our fullness and power, and bring balance back to life on Earth.