Namasthe! Dear All,

Sharing this forward in love. Only Love prevails and thanks.

menon.

Death and Healing, Stephen Levine

Some seem to take on illness as a means of purification, or as a
friend put it, "Cancer is the gift for the person who has
everything." It may be that for some beings illness does not arise
out of disharmony but is a "cleaning of the slate", a finishing of
old business.

Healing is the title we give to the phenomenon of the mind and heart
coming back into balance. When this harmony is restored we say that
someone is healed. But often we have a preconception about what
healing is. Our attachment to ideas of healthiness obstructs a
deeper perspective on what illness and healing may be all about. The
deepest healing seems to take us beyond identification with that
which causes and experiences sickness.

When the healer's priority becomes that each individual directly
experiences their original nature, healing becomes a lens that
focuses the potentialities of the moment. But if the priority is to
change people, to 'heal them', to take something away from them,
then perhaps the most that can be expected is that the body may
become somewhat stronger, but the weakness in the mind, the clinging
that has always obscured the heart, is not affected or encouraged to
dissolve.

As long as we are thinking of healing as opposed to dying, there
will be confusion. As long as we separate life from death, we
separate the mind from the heart and we will always have something
to protect, something more to be, another cause fro inharmony and
illness. When the attitude towards healing is in balance, the
attitude towards death is as well.

As my friend said after she discovered the thirty new tumours after
a group healing session, "The healing worked. Now I see that for me
the perfect healing is to open to whatever happens next with love
and awareness. There is nothing for me to do but listen, open, and
be."

Sharing with various healers - nurses, doctors, herbalists,
acupuncturists, psychics, polarity therapists, body workers, aura
balancers, etc. I have sensed at times a tendency, a slight or
grandiose, that they believed they were doing the healing. It is
perhaps that state of pride and separateness that most obstructs the
conduit for the healing powers always available in the universe. But
the greater the sense of separateness, of 'someone doing something',
the more attachment to results. They are not allowing healing, they
are clamouring for it.

But the heart closes in the presence of such personal force, and
harmony becomes less likely. It is by surrendering into the
underlying suchness that one seems to be able to make available the
essential harmony of being to another. Anything that reinforces the
feeling of the 'healed' as a separate entity removed from the
universe intensifies the separation of heart and mind while it
magnifies the fear of death and the disharmony that amplifies
disease.

The true healer is invisible. He or she only allows the potential of
the moment to come to fruition. Ramana Maharshi, the Indian saint
and teacher, was known as a great healer. Thousands had come to him
and gone away in balance. There is a story that one day a doctor
from the northern part of India came to visit him and asked, "I
understand you are a great healer; I would like to know more about
how you do it." But Ramana replied with an honesty and
pureness, "No, I am not a healer, I don't heal anyone." The visitor
said, "I've hard you have healed thousands." Ramana seemed sort of
bewildered and said, "No, I don't heal."

At that point one of Ramana's devotees turned to him and
said, "Bhagwan, what I think the doctor means is that the healing
comes through you." "Oh yes! The healing comes through." He wasn't
playing a confrontation Zen game, he was just being who he was. He
wasn't doing anything but allowing those energies which flourish in
the universe to compassionately focus on any being who came near.

It is not unlike the story of the Tibetan lama Kalu Rinpoche, a much
revered meditation master and teacher of incredible tenderness and
fierce wisdom, who was visiting the home of a friend one day. He was
approached by a number of people who were interested in the occult
and various yogic powers that were rumoured possible by those who
had undergone the initiations of his particular lineage. They asked
him, "Can you fly?" "No," he said. "I don't fly." "Can you read the
future and the past?" "No, I don't read the future and the past."
The group was becoming perturbed and one of them turned to him and
said, "Well just what is it that you do?" And he said softly, "I
simply practise compassion for all sentient beings."

When you are in just that kind of space you are not forcing
anything. You are not pushing away life or death. You are in reality
not even attacking diseae. You are just allowing balance to occur by
being in balance yourself. Many healers said to me, "I know God is
doing the healing, I am just His stand-in." That is the space out of
which healing can manifest.

Love is the optimum condition for healing. The healer uses whatever
he intuits will be of the greatest aid, but his energy cannot come
from the mind. His power comes from the openness of his heart. He
sense something greater than the body's predicament. He goes to the
source out of which all healing occurs, not attempting to disturb or
obstruct that which may allow the next perfect step. He does not
second guess the universe.

Indeed, in many healers, it is the attachment to someone getting
well, the attachment to results that limits the depth and potential
of the healing. Death is not the enemy. The 'enemy' is ignorance and
lovelessness. Identitfying with the contents of the mind we seldom
trust the spaciousness of the heart. Indeed, it may be that much
illness is a result of our distruct of our greater nature: the
disharmony that results when we pull back from the truth.

For many it may be illness that for the first time causes them to
look within. For some it might be the only experience that would get
them to pay attention, to being exploring the mind/body, to develop
a sense of wholeness. For many it could be said that sickness is
grace, for it brings them into contact with themselves in a way that
none of the stumblings of a lifetime's attempt to maintain self-
image have accomplished. It causes an examination of that which
attempts to protect us from life.






I am a bold and a Pagan soul
A-ramblin' through this land
I judge the world by my own lights
And I come by my own hand
And if you ask me where I learned
To live so recklessly
My skin, my bones, my Heretic Heart
Are my authority

Catherine Madsen: "Heretic Heart"