Healing Happens

Peggy Fallon

UU Church of Loudoun, Feb 20, 2005

Last July, my guy Bill & I went fly-fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains—one of our favorite things in the world. Well, actually, when Bill & I go fly-fishing, Bill does all the fly-fishing (which actually seems like a lot of work to me), while I sit happily on a rock or a log beside a rushing trout stream, blissfully enjoying the vibrating, rushing life-force that fills my senses as I sit there. I sit and read, meditate, think deep thoughts (and shallow thoughts), and enjoy having nothing to else to do and nowhere I’d rather be. Last July, I was slowly reading and absorbing a book that has been life-altering for me, Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss.

Caroline Myss is a medical intuitive, meaning she can diagnose people’s physical health using some kind of miraculous channeled intuition. That experience has led her to an understanding of how the spirit, mind and body interact. She takes the basic principles and sacraments of Christianity, Judaism (the Sefirot of the Kabbalah) and some Hindu & Buddhist beliefs, and distills out certain common truths, which she describes as being affiliated with specific chakras: she calls this our ‘spiritual anatomy’. The chakras (from Hinduism) are experienced as the point where our physical bodies and spirit bodies interact. If the idea that we have a ‘spirit body’ is hard for you, think instead of it as our energy field – I think we can all agree that we have a measurable energy field.

The first chakra (the lowest part of our physical body) is our most ancient tribal spirit, relating to the sacred truth that All is One. The remaining chakras (there are seven in all) are related to additional sacred truths, moving from chakra 1 at the most basic level to the 7^th chakra, at the top of the head (related to transcendence/higher love). The first chakra is at the bottom : I’ve seen it pictured different ways: if you are standing, it’s down at your feet, where your energy field meets the earth. If you’re sitting, it’s right here (indicate) – it is the place where you sit on the earth – it grounds us. (count up chakras stop at heart) The 4^th chakra is right here (indicate), and is understood to be the heart chakra – you can guess why. The sacred truth that connects through that chakra is “Love is Divine Power”.

On this particular day in July, I was sitting on a rock, beside a rushing mountain stream, watching the sunlight dapple through the deep woods and sparkle on the water. I was feeling particularly blissful, and was ruminating on what I had just read. Caroline Myss illustrates her points with stories of the people she’s diagnosed and how over the years of their lives, their physical health had been harmed by living out of harmony with the basic truths of these great religions. The stories are compellingly vivid and believable. Myss is not claiming miracle cures based on these principles: in some cases, there were amazing recoveries, but in other cases, a person diagnosed with a terminal disease was ‘healed’ only in the sense that they came to terms with their illness and found peace with it. I read these stories, and I sat there, surrounded by the vibrant pulsing aliveness of the mountain stream. These stories that Myss tells of medical intuition, linking our emotional histories to our medical present, seem true to me; they resonate with what I feel and have learned about healing in my life. Healing Happens.

I thought, “So, this means that it’s all true – that there IS a god (or goddess); there IS a divine ordering power; there IS a life force which exists beyond the physical body that we perceive; there IS a purpose.” I felt happy and serene, contemplating this idea. Then, I thought of you all, you (in this church) who are on this spiritual journey with me, and wondered if I could convey to you my new certainty that there is a divine Force of some kind. Some of you are pretty skeptical – skeptical humanists, I sometimes think. Is this strong enough evidence to convince the most skeptical of you that there is a god?

Suddenly, it hit me: it doesn’t matter if there is a god or not. What matters is that we must live as if God exists: we must live in accordance with basic moral principals: all is one, love one other and don’t hurt each other, seek only the truth, honor ourselves and honor each other. If we live ‘rightly’, following the golden rule, having faith that everything will ultimately work out (and that faith is important, by the way), we will be healthier, happier humans. We humans are programmed to be this way—we evolved to be this way. Humans sometimes behave badly because we think it doesn’t matter—we lie and cheat and exploit the planet because some of us believe that ‘whoever dies with the most toys wins’—I’m sure you’ve seen that bumper sticker. When we live that way, our bodies suffer; we eat, drink & smoke too much, and we make self-destructive attempts to deny our spiritual suffering because we don’t believe in spiritual suffering—if you don’t believe in the spirit, you can’t understand it when you suffer spiritually.

Caroline Myss teaches that ‘Biography becomes biology”, that our spirits record every moment, every trauma, every relationship and emotion that we have – and how we respond to those traumas. If we are fearful or hopeful, positive or negative in our responses, that is recorded in our energy field. Every second of our lives—and every mental, emotional, creative, physical and even resting activity is somehow known and recorded. Every judgment we make is noted. Every attitude we hold is a source of positive or negative power for which we are accountable. Biography becomes Biology. Biography becomes Biology.

When I consider my own biography, the emotional traumas of my childhood, growing up with mental illness & turmoil in my family: my father was bi-polar and hospitalized throughout my adolescence, one of my two sisters was severely schizophrenic and died later in a mental hospital, and my wonderful strong mother developed alcoholism as she struggled to deal with the situation in which she found herself. When I think about the negativity & depression that I used to struggle with, the number of times that fears both small and large have gripped me: I think, wow, if it’s true that those traumas are all imprinted in my energy body somehow, I definitely want to make sure that I’ve healed from all that. If biography becomes biology, this explains why talk therapy works sometimes. It also explains faith healing and other semi-miraculous cures, and it explains why people with positive attitudes are more likely to survive some dreaded diseases like cancer than those with negative attitudes.

Here’s another revelation to me, who grew up with no religion: Ritual Works. Caroline Myss takes the Christian sacraments of Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, Marriage, Confession, Ordination & Extreme Unction (last rites), and describes how each one has a purpose in our spiritual development. At the most basic level (down at Chakra One), the ritual of Baptism represents our family’s commitment to us and to our spiritual health & growth—in turn, we, who are baptized by our tribe/family, are empowered to ultimately recognize that we are connected by divine blessing with everything around us. Baptism represents the sacred truth, “All in One”. We are interconnected with all of life and to one another. Each of us must learn to honor this truth. The ritual of baptism (or as UUs call it ‘dedication ceremony’) uses sacred symbolism to remind each of us that we are responsible for the well-being (especially the spiritual well-being) of all of the children of our ‘tribe’. The longer I am here in this church, the more I see your children/our children as they grow, and as they get up and light candles and learn to speak in front of us about what is good and bad in their lives. I see that this ritual of ours is a wonderful one. Ritual Works: rituals teach us, they allow us to mark what is important to us, they remind us of what is important to us, they may even help us to make note of and gain understanding of the fact that there is something going on in a non-physical, spiritual plane. Whether that spiritual plane was created by a divine being back at the beginning of time—metaphorically, that Jehovah who talked to Adam--or whether it is instead the product of the simple interaction of the electrons in our electro-magnetic field, we will be healthier and happier if we acknowledge that the something ethereal, whether we call it ‘Spirit’ or “energy field’ exists.

All my life I’ve been interested in natural healing. I’ve been involved in organizing conferences on natural healing. I’ve studied massage, several kinds of yoga, kinesiology, homeopathics, herbal healing and healing with mind power. Some of it worked – sometimes I even felt that I actually was able to heal myself or someone close to me just by focusing white light with my mind or touching with my hands. But, it wasn’t reliable and that unreliability was frustrating. As I passed the age of 50 three years ago, and had to face middle age, I have had a host of minor health problems, gastric reflux and fatigue, that I am still struggling to solve, not to mention the extra pounds creeping on, inexorably. I have felt some success in using a symbolic understanding of the chakras to heal myself. But it’s not until recently that I realized that my spiritual quest and my quest for healing had become one and the same quest. I am beginning to fully understand that I can’t heal my body without healing my spirit. Healing Happens.

Some people dismiss natural healing as the placebo effect—they say that illnesses that can be cured by non-conventional methods must have been psychosomatic all along. But, that begs the question of how the placebo effect works. Some people get better just because they believe they are going to. When spontaneous healing occurs, it is not necessary to decide whether the disease was psychosomatic to begin with or whether that belief that one would heal (the placebo) caused actual, measurable ‘medical’ healing—the fact remains that healing takes place. All illness has psychological components. Healing Happens.

Last August, the time had come to scatter my parents ashes, which had been stored in my attic since my father passed away in 2000 and my mother’s death in September 2003. My siblings and I had decided to scatter them at Mary’s Rock, a spectacular rock outcropping in the Shenandoahs, based on a remark my mother had made decades before. My niece Marie, took the lead, researching the easiest trail to the summit, selecting a date, arranging to travel to Virginia from Jersey City, and making sure the necessary permits were obtained. The plan was for me to bring the ashes and meet my sister and my niece (who would be driving in from the west from my sister’s cabin at Bryce Mountain) at the entrance to Skyline Drive at 11 am on the selected date.

However, when I awoke that morning and tried to get out of bed, I could barely walk. I had some kind of intense pain in my right hip, and couldn’t put any weight on it. I limped painfully to the bathroom and struggled back to my bed. Maybe it was a muscle cramp deep within my hip, but I never had a cramp there, before or since. For a moment I panicked—what am I going to do? I didn’t even feel that I could drive, much less hike up a mountain trail—but, the plan was already in process; it was too late to call it off—and I had the ashes, so my sister and niece couldn’t do this without me. Calm down, I told myself, I can figure this out. I lay back down, took some deep breaths, and ordered my body to relax. Why is this happening? What is the symbolic meaning of this sudden, inexplicable and crippling pain in my hip, what is my body trying to tell me? As soon as I asked that question: as soon as I asked, “ what is the symbolic meaning of this?”, the answer was perfectly clear. I didn’t want to let go of my parents, especially my mom. This was the last step of my grieving—and I didn’t want to take it. I gave myself a little lecture—we have to let go of the ones we love, we have no choice. People grow old and die, we must all face this fact. This trip to the mountaintop was my duty to my parents (and the rest of my family), symbolically, my last duty as a daughter. The pain in my hip eased. I breathed some more, and spoke aloud to the cosmos and to my mother, speaking/praying of how she had taught me to love, and how the duty before me was an act of love, appropriate to honor her. I said aloud, I can let go of my mother’s ashes because she will always be here (point), in my heart. I got up again, gingerly, and the pain was completely gone. I was able to drive, and hike up Mary’s Rock with a box of ashes, some flowers and a picnic lunch on my back, and we scattered the ashes. Healing happens.

Healing my spirit became easier when I realized that the template for spiritual health is right in front of me—right there, where all major religions have always said it is.

Whether or not the prophets, mystics, disciples and enlightened prophets of organized religions got the details right whether the details are right; no matter what form the divine ordering force of the universe takes, no matter whether or not there is an afterlife, what matters is that we live according to the principles that all religions share, the principles that we were born into. We must live morally, honorably, respectfully: we must love each other & ourselves, we must know the difference between right and wrong, we must act from faith instead of fear and we must act as if it matters that we live that way. Not because of some heavenly reward, not because of karma and reincarnation, not because some old holy book says so, but because, in this moment/ in this lifetime we will be healthier and happier humans if we live as if there is a Divine power. Life has meaning if we live as if it does.