The Three Levels of Healing

The desire to heal ourselves is not something that comes to us out of the blue. It’s usually a response to pain. We want a certain discomfort to go away. We want to mend a broken bone. Or a broken heart. We want to feel better. And we hope that while we heal, we may also learn a way to avoid pain in the future.

Seen this way, any problem that pushed us to try a healing modality can be seen as a blessing. A nudge in the right direction. That’s because the true gift of healing is that we often end up healing much more than what we initially intended.

You may set out to heal a persistent back pain and you end up healing an ancestral issue that manifests this back pain in every generation in your family line. Or you heal a broken bone only to discover and heal a pattern of addiction and self-sabotage that lies buried underneath. You start by focusing on one issue but then you find out that invariably the issue is not the issue. And the deeper you are prepared to go, the more lasting and profound the healing you receive.

But what exactly is healing and how does it work? It works at different levels. Let’s explore the main ones:

The body

Many – if not most - of the healing journeys start with something that affects our bodies. A disease, an accident or maybe simply a lack of vitality. Something is affecting our body, and because we have been trained to regard our body as the most real thing there is, we pay attention. We check the problem out and we take measures to remedy it. We book that surgery; we take that pill. We might even check out the space for alternative therapies – homoeopathy, acupuncture or the 3000-year-old science of ayurveda in India, amongst many others. We detox, take supplements, adjust our level of exercise and sleep, and eat healthier. All these are ways to look after our physical body and when the disease has touched our body, we need to address it at the body level.

But healing the body is not enough, because the source of that dis-ease is often not addressed. We end up breaking another bone after healing the first one or breaking our hearts again in another unsuitable relationship. We correct our eating sleeping or exercise routines only to find out that we succumb to the old ways after a while when the pain has gone away. We cure a disease, but the dis-ease comes back in a different way. And if we don’t take steps to go further than the body level, we are condemned to play an endless game of addressing one symptom after the other.

But there’s a way out. If we are ready, we can take the next step and go beyond the body. We visit the realm of the mind.

The mind

Mens sana in corpore sano the Romans used to say. They had already discovered that you need a healthy mind, not only a healthy body. This phrase is usually interpreted that we need physical exercise to have a healthy mind. But the reverse is also true. If you want to have a healthy body, have a healthy mind first. 

That’s because mental patterns -  the way we think and the way we process or don’t process emotions - affect the state of our body. For instance, a pattern of addiction or self-harm will end up destroying the body. A non-addressed trauma will find ways to show itself in the physical realm whether by an apparently chance encounter with the same traumatic environment or by creating a physical symptom of dis-ease that is meant to nudge the person into addressing – and healing – the original trauma.

Whatever we don’t address and push away from our conscious mind will find a way to come back up and most of the time it’s not in a nice way. We can’t escape the mind no matter how much we try to trick or ignore it.

So what can you do? Address it! Work with mind-related therapies whether conventional as in various talking therapies or less conventional, things like psychodrama, constellations, mindfulness techniques meditations, affirmations, and many other modalities. Whatever helps you investigate your mind and form new neuronal connections, new pathways, ends up helping your overall level of health. In short, heal you mind, and you will heal your body.

Some of the therapies that work primarily with the mind will end up taking you one step further. You will realise that you have inherited certain thought patterns and that you carry them for people who are long ago gone. You might also realise that while trying to discipline and understand your mind you have accidentally stepped beyond it into a world of enormous beauty and grace. Welcome to the word of energy, your next healing station.

The energy

Energy is everything. It’s us, what we are ultimately made of. It’s what everything around us is ultimately made of. It’s the essence of all things. Whether it’s called vibration, flow or simply energy it’s the next level you need to reach to achieve true healing.

You have mended the broken bone. You have addressed the mental patterns that pushed you to break the bone in the first place. Now it’s time to remove the energy imprint that you carry and that might manifest as another broken bone in the future.

This is the territory of ancient shamanic healing practices, of spiritual healing of various modern energy healing modalities of bio-resonance machines, reiki, sound healing and a million more modalities. They all have one thing in common: they work at the level of your energy body and that’s beyond the physical body or the mind.

These therapies are usually incredibly effective because they address the cause of the problem directly. However, as many New Age hippies are starting to realise, they are not enough. You might address and correct the energy root cause of an issue. But if the issue has touched the body you need to address it at the body level too. If that issue has touched the mind and created thought patterns you need to address it at the level of the mind too with proper modern therapy tools so that new neuronal pathways are created. Too many people go for energy healing feeling that they have found the shortcut that allows them to ignore their body and their mind. Meanwhile, they continue to poison their bodies with drugs and unhealthy patterns and continue to indulge in unhealthy mental attitudes. And then they wonder why nothing changes.

Energy healing can indeed perform miracles. But it’s not a shortcut and it does not absolve us from the responsibility of healing our bodies and our minds. Only when we address all these three levels we can fully heal.

If this resonates with you, join our new community: The Healing Journey. Here you will find healing resources, therapies, advice and much more. Come and talk to us and we’ll help you find your way!

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