DAVID’S DESK # 81
David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the
spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions
and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person
in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with
others, please feel free to do so; however the material is ©2014 by David
Spangler. www.lorian.org.
In
the summer of 1959 when I was fourteen years old, my Dad and Mom left me for
two months with my grandmother in Monterey, California, while they went to
Phoenix, Arizona. Dad, who had been unemployed for several months, had just
been hired as a business consultant by an Arizona firm, and while it was only
a temporary job, it had the prospects of turning into a permanent one. My
folks felt I might be bored hanging out in Phoenix where I knew no one.
Monterey, however, was home not only to Grandma, whom I loved, but also to an
aunt and uncle and a couple of cousins.
It
was an idyllic couple of months; the days passed quickly until it was time
for my parents to pick me up for the trip back home to Old Deerfield,
Massachusetts (Dad’s temporary job, by the way, did turn into a permanent
one, which resulted in us moving to Phoenix in December of that year, a move
that in turn led me onto the path which ultimately resulted in my doing what
it is I do now….but that’s another story and one I tell in my book, Apprenticed
to Spirit). As the time of their arrival in Monterey got closer, I became
more excited until when they arrived, they found me in the midst of a full-on
asthmatic attack.
I’ve had chronic asthma since I was a baby. While it can slow me down now and
again, I’ve been fortunate in that major attacks have been relatively rare.
But this one was frightening, so my parents immediately rushed me off to the
nearest doctor. He turned out to be a middle-aged man who took me into his
office and began to talk with me. In those long-ago days, doctors actually
had time to spend with their patients, so there was nothing rushed about our
conversation. He asked me about my summer, about Deerfield Academy where I
went to school, about the things I enjoyed doing, and so on. He didn’t
prescribe anything; he only sat there talking in a calm, friendly way as if
we were the best of buddies. In twenty minutes, my asthma was entirely gone
and my breathing was unrestricted, something that was unprecedented in my
experience. His entire treatment was based on conversation and friendship. Of
course, he knew that many asthmatic attacks are triggered by emotion and
stress, as mine had been through the excitement of seeing my parents after
two months of separation (the longest we had ever been apart up until then).
All he did was “talk me down” and give me his presence, but it was enough.
A
man I’m proud to call a friend is a Sufi teacher named Himayat Inayati. For
years he was the head of a Sufi healing order, and as part of his work, he
would annually host a conference on healing to which he invited healers of
all kinds from all over the world. Although I am not a healer, he often did
me the honor of having me as a speaker as well. This was the case when he
hosted the last of these conferences nearly twenty years ago or so now.
What I remember vividly from that event was a walk Himayat and I took in
which he reflected on his experiences over the years of running this annual
conference. He said, “David, I’ve known a great many healers and I’ve seen
them present a wide array of healing techniques and methodologies. Often,
what one healer has to say contradicts what another presents, and their
approaches couldn’t be more different. You’d think one would be right and the
other wrong. But what I’ve seen is that at one time or another, they all
work!”
This is a powerful statement, and the corollary is that at one time or
another, all healing approaches fail. So whatever the power of healing is, as
Himayat also observed, it goes beyond technique or methodology.
Some years ago I was out for a walk. Walking is a form of meditation for me,
a chance to let the rhythm of my body draw my mind into a quiet rhythm of its
own. It’s often during my walks that I have my best contacts with my
non-physical colleagues. Sometimes this is deliberate and sometimes they just
show up. This is what happened on this occasion. I had been thinking about
healing and the nature of the power to heal. This is exactly how I was
considering it: as a healing power, a mysterious ability that we could
develop. I tended to think of this power as a subtle energy of some kind that
flowed from healer to patient, correcting whatever was wrong; but what
exactly was the nature of this energy?
As
I walked along thinking these thoughts, I became aware that someone else had
appeared and was moving along next to me. Without preamble and as if we were
continuing a conversation we were having on some other level, which we may
well have been without my conscious knowledge of it, this presence said,
“There is no healing power. There are only healing relationships.”
This stopped me in my tracks, literally. I stood there on the sidewalk, a
large field filled with blackberry bushes on one side of me and a road on the
other with cars going by, and just thought about what this being had said and
its implications. Right away I realized that, for me at least, this
perspective changed everything. Thinking of healing as a “power” turned it
into a commodity, something you either had or didn’t have. It might be
something you could gain, but how did you gain it? This question was like
asking how one gained money if one didn’t have any.
But
a relationship was different. Anyone can form a relationship. We form
relationships all the time, everyday, with people, things, places, creatures.
We might not always be good at doing so, but there’s nothing esoteric or
mystical about it.
Thinking about this there on the sidewalk, the memory returned of my
asthmatic attack when I was fourteen and of the doctor who did nothing more
than establish a relationship with me by talking to me. And I thought of
Himayat’s comment that every healer or healing technique that he knew of, no
matter how much they might contradict each other, had worked at least some of
the time. If the healing were not due to the methodology, might it not be due
to the relationship which the healer was able to form with a patient (and
vice versa) in those circumstances in which a healing did take place?
After this experience, I had a series of dreams over a matter of years.
Although the dreams were very different, they also had in common the fact
that in the dream someone was injured or ill. The person who healed them in
the dream (which sometimes was me, though not always) always did so by
forming connections with the environment that surrounded them. I remember one
dream in particular in which I, as the healer, was in a forest. A friend had
fallen out of a tree and was badly injured. I looked up to the trees around
us and opened myself to them in love and appreciation. Immediately from all
the nearby trees, energy began to pour into me that then flowed into the
person who was injured, healing her. I had done nothing but enter into a
loving relationship with the trees.
I’ve thought a lot about this over the years. The question for me has changed
from “what is a healing power” to “what is the healing relationship in a
given situation?” If I’m with someone who is ill or hurting, I don’t
immediately think “how can I heal them? How can I help?” Now I think, “How
can I relate to them in a healing way? How can I relate to the environment
around us in loving ways that enhance the potentialities for healing?”
This
is not so much a methodology or technique as it is an awareness and an
attitude. In drawing healing out of a situation that needs or desires it, I
don’t see myself as trying to exert some magical inner power of healing.
Instead, I see myself as being part of a process of forming the connections
that allow wholeness—and thus healing—to emerge as a natural outcome of those
connections.
Sometimes what constitutes a healing relationship is just what you would
expect. It’s an act of forming a loving, compassionate, caring, energizing
relationship with someone or with a situation. But sometimes it’s something
else as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of reaching out to feel connected to
what is already healthy in a situation or an environment. We tend to think in
terms of binaries: something is good or it is bad, it’s black or it’s white.
But life is far more complex, far more “ecological” and filled with
interconnections and patterns that don’t fall neatly into one thing or
another. Thus, when I was ill, parts of me weren’t functioning as they
should, but other parts of me were doing just what they were designed to do
and doing it reasonably well. I wasn’t “all sick” or “all healthy.” I was a
combination. I learned that I could help the “sick” parts of me by seeing the
“well” parts of me as allies and drawing on their wellness to bless the whole
of my body.
Likewise, when I’m with a sick person now, I want to be as fully in
relationship to them in the moment as I can be, but I also cast about for
what is healthy in the environment to which I can connect. My objective is
not to “draw healthy energies” to channel them to the sick person. My
objective is to participate in a circuit—maybe “circulation” is a better
word—that allows the life of the whole system to flow without obstruction,
drawing out an innate wholeness. Part of my interpretation of what it means
to form a healing relationship is to simultaneously connect lovingly to what
is working as well as to what is not and to see both as part of a larger
system.
Does it work? Sometimes. Not all the time. I’m still exploring, still
learning. I’m thinking that healing means learning how to become
a participant in a wholeness, a dynamic system of connectedness, that already
exists, rather than simply learning how to “make wholeness happen” in some
specific and often isolated part of that system.
What I do know, though, is that the comment that healing is a
relationship rather than a power itself carries a healing potential. It means
that healing is an ecological phenomenon, that is to say, a phenomenon based
on interconnections, integration, coherency, and wholeness. This, I think, is
an important idea to grasp.
The
challenge that we as a species—and all too often, we as individuals as
well—face is that we are obsessed with power, usually interpreted as the
power over something or the power to control something. We want to make
things happen according to our will. But what we need is to instead pay
attention to relationship and connection, partnership and collaboration, and
to what might be called the “emergent will” of the world system as a whole.
We really don’t have power over nature, and we delude ourselves if we think
we do. An event like Hurricane Sandy or the current onslaught of arctic
temperatures afflicting much of the United States, or the droughts and floods
affecting millions of people around the world all give testimony to how
little power we have.
But
we can learn to live ecologically, which is to say, in integrated, coherent,
balanced, and yes, loving relationships with the rest of the natural world.
If we do so, I daresay we could heal our world. We would certainly take a
huge step in healing ourselves. And that would be powerful
indeed!
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