Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72103
ENERGY HEALING AND THE SPIRITUAL PROCESS That experience is often not communicable except in the language of human transformation associated with spiritual traditions, so it is given names like enlightenment, illumination, transcendental experience, self- realization, and others. These are life-changing events when they occur in one's inner life and the processes surrounding these experiences— let's refer to them collectively as spiritual process—are among the perennial themes of energy work. Though it has applications in every sphere of life and healing, energy work is a decidedly psycho-spiritual undertaking. Whether it takes the form of personal meditative practices or treatments with another person, it can bring long-forgotten and repressed material from our personal subconscious to the surface of our awareness, but it goes further than that. The practices of energy work contain within them the seeds of spiritual practice. They are the not-so-distant cousins of the classic disciplines of the inner life: prayer, meditation, and contemplation. These are all practices that invite experiences into our consciousness from what is beyond our individual spheres of awareness and personal biographies, from what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, and beyond, into ecstatic dimensions of pure consciousness and revelation. This is not to say that each energy work session results in enlightenment, any more than every prayer is met immediately by an intelligible answer from God. Still, it behooves anyone who makes use of energetic practices to develop an appreciation for the patterns of spiritual process. WHAT IS ENERGY WORK? All of this might sound a trifle strange if you have been involved with energy healing mainly in the context of therapeutic bodywork and are accustomed to thinking in terms The practices of energy work contain within them the seeds of spiritual practice. of therapeutic outcomes, symptom management, and basic health care. To grasp the connection between energy work and spiritual process, it is important to gain an understanding of what energy work is at its most essential level. Begin by taking an inventory of the subtle energetic practices you are involved with already—maybe without even thinking of them as energy work—either as part of your healing work or in your efforts to become a more conscious individual. In your subtle energy practice inventory, include all hands-on and hands-off energy work modalities like Therapeutic Touch, reiki, and polarity therapy; subtle energy therapies like acupressure and homeopathy; spiritually oriented practices like meditation, prayer, chakra exercises, toning, breathing exercises, chanting, and singing spiritual hymns; practices that slow down and intensify your perception of the energy movement in your body and around it, such as yoga, t'ai chi, and qi gong; all forms of spiritual ritual you might be involved with, such as sweat lodges, vision quests, ritual movement, and sacred dance and walk; and massage, which often helps you shift into deep relaxation, essentially an altered state of consciousness. What all of these practices have in common—and the reason they stimulate spiritual process—is that each of them steps up the interaction between your energy field and your body, and enlivens the interplay between your conscious and non- conscious processes.1 If there are differences among energy work practices in their usefulness as holistic healing tools, those differences lie mainly in the conscious awareness, beliefs, orientation, and intention of the one using them. There is a difference, for example, between a bodywork session in which the practitioner is consciously aware of, and intentionally working with, the energy field of his client while doing the session, and a session in which he might be doing the same set of physical maneuvers, but without that awareness, presence, and set of intentions. It could be said that some practices are more explicitly geared toward facilitating psycho- spiritual processes than others. In reality, though, each healing modality and each meditative style is potentially a holistic, energy-active form of healing work with the potential to activate what psychologist Robert Johnson calls the "source of our evolving character," and "the process whereby we bring the total self together." GLIMPSES OF THE INNER PILGRIM Many people come to an energy healer because of an emerging spiritual process, though they probably don't call it that. They run into something discontinuous with their usual consciousness. Spiritual process can emerge spontaneously. It can be small, quiet, and simple. I remember my brother telling me that once, while riding on the train, he looked out the window and realized that everything was perfect, and a profound peace arose within him. Other times, spiritual process is jarred into action. Sudden loss of a job, illness, the breakup of a 52 massage & bodywork may/june 2011