Healing Shakti

Yesterday I was taking care of one of my regular chiropractic patients, an elderly man who is totally deaf without his hearing aid. His wife always stays close by to be of help. I knew how much of a challenge it always was to have him follow directions and to answer questions, so shortly after beginning my routine I said to his wife, “I’m going to do things differently today.” Because I am intimately aware of how healing energy works, I decided that I would let my intentions do the work.

I invoked the Reiki energy, and I asked it to guide my hands. My educated diagnostic criteria then became secondary as I followed the direction of the Shakti running through me. When I was finished, and after my patient stood up and walked, we were all pleased to see how much more stable his gait was, finally free of the chronic pains that kept him from walking very far. That is when I decided that it was time to take my practice to the next level. This is the approach that needs to be taken with each and every patient from now on, not just in special cases as I had with this patient.

The power to make such changes is in one’s intention. I intended for my patient to be well, and I called upon the “higher” power to do this. The other component of this healing approach is surrender. The meaning of “surrender” is not to be confused with giving up or becoming insignificant. It means to let go and let God. Once you intend on something to happen, you have to let it happen, on God’s terms, without your own expectations (ego) getting in the way.

In the previous paragraph, I referred to the “higher” power and not becoming insignificant. As the healing practitioner, it’s not that there is a “higher” power; it is the power that exists everywhere equally that is flowing. There is no “higher” or “lower”. The divine energy that heals, the power of God, is never high or low, weak or strong. It knows no degrees, no limitations, no gradients. It just is. The other thing is that you, the healing practitioner, are very significant indeed in the entire process. You are the channel of God’s peace, the instrument through which this energy flows. Because you are the Light of God, you are blessed with the ability to be of service to people in this way.

There is yet a third component of this approach. In addition to intention and surrender, there is the vehicle of delivery. The conduit through which healing energy is delivered is not only through touch. It is also through communication, whether it be the written word, our spoken words, or our actions. When I have a patient on my table, especially one who is sensitive or has deeply-rooted issues, I always share words of strength and encouragement with them. It’s not that I want to merely sound like I care. People tend to respond more to the spoken word. When the word is divinely inspired, healing is imminent.

The power of the spoken word is known as matrikashakti. Since God can speak only love, the power of the words spoken with intention and without ego is immense to a person’s healing journey. For words to have affect, the person needs to identify with them. When there is a patient on my table, the words I speak are intended to bring the person from a state of darkness to a state of light. I first acknowledge the darkness, the illness, the pain. Then I speak words of direction on how to find the light. The words are never from a self-help script. They are very specific to the individual’s situation. In this way, the person identifies completely and finds nuggets of gold in what is being said.

The key is this: the invoking of the divine Reiki energy, the Shakti that flows from the Guru, the blessings that come from God. To say that you are the “healer” is ego. To surrender is paramount. And there is yet another point to be made, which I recently shared with a reluctant group of self-proclaimed New Age healers, “Structure and discipline are mandatory.” Formal training in a healing art is required. The practice of healing is never a whimsical hodgepodge. I want to see certificates and know your methods. If you say you are “gifted”, I will ask, “What healing discipline gives structure to your gift?” This is something that every person should ask of their prospective healing practitioner.

There is always room for learning, no matter what healing arts you practice or how long you’ve been practicing. With intention, surrender, and with a vehicle through which the Divine can be expressed, you will be presented at the right time and in the right way with what you need to know to become a powerful instrument of God’s work. St. Francis of Assisi prayed, “Lord, make me a channel of your peace.” A channel, the conduit through which the divine power of God flows. This we can all be for each other.

 

Discovering The Light

One of the greatest misconceptions that many people have about people who live in spiritual awareness is that their life is easy. Now and then someone will ask me, “If you have a Guru, why is your life so hard?” In reality, if you have a Guru, a true Guru, your life may indeed be a lot tougher. Before gold is transformed into its highest state of value it has to be purified in fire. A lot of dross needs to be burned away. So too it is with the human individual. Before the light of God can shine forth at its most brilliant gleam, the Guru, the Spiritual Master, needs to burn off the paradigms and expectations that we build our lives around and the karma that we created for ourselves in order to produce a masterpiece. I had been through a lot in my life well before meeting my Guru in 1998. Many hardships have been experienced since then, and I’ve been grateful for every one of them.

Over the past fourteen years I’ve asked for clarity about my life purpose. My prayer in the past couple years had been, “If I’m not meant to be a healing practitioner, then please show me what it is I was meant to do.” Still, the answer is always the same. I saw inklings of this calling when I was a young child. Incidents and encounters throughout my life propelled me down this road even if I didn’t put much thought into it. It was as if I was being carried down this road by the “powers that be”. It also seems that my nearly-ten-year professional struggle in Minnesota had its purpose. It helped me to focus more on why I am supposed to be a healer, and it helped me to develop a coherent method of how to go about doing just that. Now that I am living in Yuma, Arizona as of just four months ago, the southernmost U.S. city that sits directly on top of my Jupiter line of influence, I feel that the flood gates are about to open. It is here that I was meant to flourish, to blossom, to excel as a healing practitioner.

A true healer cannot wholeheartedly be of help to others unless he knows, firsthand, about the concerns his patients have. I will not rehash my life story of health struggles here, but I will say that I feel that there was a “purpose to this porpoise”, a method to this madness, a happy ending to the story of pain and suffering, a divine order to all that I had experienced and all that I will experience from this point on. Now when somebody tells me, “I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and most days I need to drag myself everywhere,” I know exactly what they mean. As many of you know, I suffered with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for fourteen years. I know precisely what to say to them, how to say it, and what I need to do for them as a physician. There is a lot of truth to the way of life of the Wounded Healer (as long as the Wounded Healer is doing his/her work sans ego).

When the Guru hands you a hardship, you bow with reverence and say “thank you”. It’s the only way true spiritual awakening is possible. It is the only way you can become introspective and discover God’s light within yourself. Once you discover it, you can’t help but share it. When the discovery is made by wading through a sea of frustration, it is all the more appreciated and revered. It’s not a matter of “no pain, no gain”. It is a matter of being able to find the needle in the haystack that you thought would never be found. If it was easy, it would just be something else taken for granted. There would be no value placed on it. When you ask God to reveal her light to you, you better be prepared for what you find. Light needs to push its way through darkness before you can see it.

I had encountered people who would come once to the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center, never to return again. The reason was not so much that it wasn’t their thing. It was because while in meditation there were too many memories of past traumas and hardship that surfaced. I celebrate the fact that this happens to people because it means that if they stick it out they will certainly make astounding breakthroughs in their lives. If they stick it out, they will go on to become brilliant beacons of light in this world. Some people cannot take pain very well. But pain can be conquered only by pushing through it. Presenting it to us is the job of the true Spiritual Master. There really is a nugget of gold on the other side of it all.

My own challenges with pain due to illness, pain from being so “different” due to having autism, and enduring the tapas, the spiritual challenges, that the Guru has handed me these years, have all led to one result: spiritual vibrance. I am sensitive, and most everyone with an Autism Spectrum Disorder has profound sensitivities. This is probably why the Guru had been working so hard on me these years. When I received Shaktipat, spiritual awakening, on October 3, 1998, the encounter was so great that its effect has never waned, and it never will. But even before this, intuition would come to me through my sensing of the unseen forces around me. So much greater has this been since being blessed by my Guru that when my patients open up to me about their concerns, their energy reaches out to me so strongly that they need not speak many words before I am able to find and correct the sources of their pain. God gifted me in this way, and she knew that because of my sensitivity I would be able to carry on and through such a purification process, thusly sharing the beaming results with others.

Yes, it is a PROCESS. The blessings of God do not suddenly make your life easier. The blessings of God help you to discover the light within. And here’s the best discovery of all: once you discover the light, you realize that you are and always have been the light. There is no separation between the “light of God” and you. It is all one and the same. Enjoy the process. It will be your testimony to others as you help them to discover their own light within.