Healing is Spiritual in Nature
Healing is a spiritual process and not a clinical one.
Trauma disrupts the flow of life force and disconnects us from our true essence. Every part of us is cycling around the wheel of life and trauma traps dead energy, blocking the new and transformed parts waiting to be born within us. Every cycle of every part must complete its cyclical process.
Everything must be observed.
Whether it is anxiety or depression, as examples, our woes are a fear of life. We are afraid of fully living because that means to fully feel. To fully feel is to be with the full spectrum of the human experience. And most of us were not given all the resources we needed early in life to have the resilience for that wild spectrum and/or we had experiences that overwhelmed our system in the moment.
Healing is the process of feeling; of opening up fully to life. To heal does not mean life is good all the time. To heal means that you are able to maintain an open heart and an open mind.
Healing is feeling because feeling is to be with our inner experience; it’s being. To be and feel with your inner experience is what presence and mindfulness actually are. These are deeply spiritual practices from the loving presence of the Christian Mystics to the mindfulness of Theravada Buddhism, any many, many more.
By being with our inner experience and feeling it fully, we must tap into this sense of loving presence or compassionate presence. It’s the only way we are able to be present because otherwise the feelings are messy, deep, painful, or scary. The antidote to trauma, which is the inability to be in the here and now, is this loving or compassionate presence. Love or its manifestation of compassion (and humor!) is how we get through the feelings and sensations; it’s how we be; it’s the will to be. This loving presence is what it means to find God. God is the loving presence transcendent beyond the experiences of space and time (the term God is not important, and God has no attributes so choose the word that you resonate with the most).
To heal is to find God or said differently, to heal is to connect to all things.
The deeper we tap into this, the more we become present (a true presence, not the corporate wellness kind…), and the more we get closer to God. God is not specific to any one religion or culture. It is the love that all cultures and religions speak of.
To find God is to tap into the authentic heart or spiritual heart. This is the heart of your true self and contains an infinite reservoir of love and will. It is the essence that brought you from nothing to something; it’s the reason you are here and thus all the will you need to heal and to be resilient.
Healing is about removing the layers over our heart, peeling back until we tap into our core and our true essence.
This is grounded into our very being and into our bodies because it is the reason we are here in the first place. This is why any spirituality that is escapist is a mere delusion. Spirituality is about connecting to the reason you are here which is aligning your ego heart with the spiritual heart that made you.
Mysticism has been teaching these practices and the art of presence, resilience, surrender, and expanded consciousness to self-heal long before the modern accepted approaches. Every therapeutic approach or neuroscience finding of meaning today has earlier roots in mysticism or contemplative self-healing: the art of peeling back the layers over the spiritual heart to align with the loving presence at its core.
Whether it is EMDR, Somatics, Brainspotting, or the like, it is all about learning to be with your inner experience to fully feel. Once something is felt, it moves through on its own as, again, everything is cyclical in nature.
Therapists have to unlearn what they’ve been taught to understand these more recent advancements in trauma healing. The mystics, however, from the Christian Desert Fathers & Mothers to the Sufis to the Alchemists to the Tantric Vajrayoginis are validated. Better late than never.
The healing temples of Asclepius in Ancient Greece & Rome to the transpersonal healing traditions of indigenous traditions around the world are all about the power of inner insight from transpersonal experiences. This is the insight we tap into from our own minds and our own inner worlds, from the connection to the deeper layers of who you are beyond the material. Transpersonal insight helps us get out of our ego, the layers of the heart, and expand our mind, awareness, and consciousness beyond to limits we didn’t even consider beforehand. This is why psychedelics can be so transformative for so many.
With deeper contemplative practice though comes the ability to access these states naturally as the layers of defense, compensation, identity, and fear over the heart shed. This is what it means to be a mystic. Mysticism is not about pick-a-card tarot readings on YouTube. Mysticism is about having direct experiences with God through the art of contemplation. Mysticism is stepping into the unknowing to align with the present.
With transpersonal in mind, this leads me to astrology next. The zodiac is the wheel of life. It's the seed pattern of subjective awareness. Astrology shows us our patterns; what needs to be transformed. It shows us where we’ve been and where we’re going. When used right, astrology is a tool to coherently navigate the cyclical patterning of our minds and emotional bodies, for self-discovery, and to connect to a larger cosmic whole. Astrology today has lost its way, almost more than than modern psychology and therapy.
Compulsiveness, future fixing, and overly simplistic understandings of self are the antithesis of healing, spirituality, and what a true understanding of astrology reveals, as well as a true connection to mysticism: the unknowing.
Next we have the realization of mental illness as a disharmony of the inner world. Internal Family Systems (IFS Therapy) did not invent the concept of inner parts and the benefit of synthesizing them for greater coherence and wholeness. This is another deeply spiritual and mystical understanding. We have three parts because we are three dimensional. We have our past, our present, and our future. We have our lower consciousness, our middle consciousness, and our future consciousness. All things come in three dimensions in our world. From these three dimensions, we are underlying sub-personalities or parts but they are not fixed to any one of those three dimensions but are instead fluid. They changes as our consciousness changes.
The past and conditioned experiences imprint on our mind, body, and soul/psyche, leaving us spinning around a wheel losing parts of us along the way, lost to moments of time, but through heart-mind coherence, compassionate presence, and wisdom, we can reclaim our soulfulness and self-unfold whole, with a lightness of being and heaviness of purpose.
For everything & always,
The Cyclical Seed
