Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72103
relationship, and the birth of a baby are examples of this. A longtime student of mine dates her spiritual awakening back to a head-on collision in which she could easily have lost her life. When the timing is right, our deep psyche will use just about anything as tinder to ignite change. These experiences can be both exhilarating and upsetting. If you are a practitioner, bear in mind that under the influence of an energy treatment, your client's body and symptoms often serve as a doorway into his or her deep inner world. Next time you give a healing treatment, keep in mind that the person you are working on might be experiencing, to one degree or another, elements of dream, memory, emotion, or insight. They might be nursing an inner wound, or piecing together a broken sense of humanity. A healing session with you can help them slip a bit more gracefully into a new world of experience. Spiritual process may or may not be obvious at first, but as you awaken to your own spiritual process, you will, with increasing frequency, find yourself encountering a pilgrim, or spiritual traveler in others. When it comes to pilgrims, it typically takes one to know one. Becoming intimately and courageously aware of the spiritual process active in you is what prepares you to discern spiritual process in others and work purposefully with it. Your personal growth and development is therefore crucially important if you want to use the tools of energy healing responsibly with others. Once you get an eye for spiritual process and a feel for its shapes and patterns, it is not uncommon to witness the drama and beauty of spiritual initiation right there on your massage table or in your therapy room. Your challenge is to catch on to where your client is in the arc of her inner pilgrimage. She might be moving along quite well on her spiritual quest, and coming to you as something of a "pit stop." Or she might be in one or the other of the predicaments that spiritual travelers get into. She may arrive in a state of disarray as she comes to realize she is being led out onto a dimly-lit path, away from the world she has known and the company she has heretofore kept. She might be lost, sick, injured, in a trance or a state of suspended animation, buried deep in stone or ice, or incubating in a deep wintry slumber, awaiting what poet Denise Low called "the searing call of one hot star." The pilgrim on your massage table, or the one in your own body, might come in need of refuge; she could be making the first rustlings of awakening from a long sleep, needing nourishment, or demanding breathing room. She might be ready to take wing into realms of discovery in the worlds of the spirit. Or she might find herself on a path of return to the everyday world after a time of absorption in the spiritual realms. Other pilgrims might be facing some life-altering task or ordeal, or even death, in the form of life's inevitable losses, the death of a former worldview, or even literal death. The upshot is that, in the early stages of this inner pilgrimage, she might not be conscious of any of this. All she might know at the time she comes to you is that something hurts. If you are a practitioner, this does not mean you are abandoning your treatment of the client's aches and pains in favor of going for spiritual process. On the contrary, the aches and pains are probably the very things that brought her to you in the first place and you are using your skills to alleviate unnecessary suffering, while at the same time recognizing that symptoms are part of something larger. On most days, you are a companion, hopefully, a wise and compassionate one, having swum the waters and hiked the inner terrains of your own soul. On occasion, you play the role of spiritual midwife. earn CE hours at your convenience: abmp's online education center, www.abmp.com 53