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ENERGY HEALING AND THE SPIRITUAL PROCESS SIGNS OF SPIRITUAL PROCESS Marilyn Ferguson, founder of the Brain/Mind Bulletin, articulated a principle from quantum theory that gets to the heart of emerging spiritual process. She says, "Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order." What this says about the constant organization, break down, and reorganization of the stuff of the universe also applies to our work with energy and consciousness and the way our inner and outer lives change and grow. Here are some hallmarks of that process: Disruption. In big and small ways, something interrupts the continuity of a person's life. In some people, it can be the breaking in of external events, such as a sudden loss, or input from other dimensions of consciousness, perhaps in the form of a profound insight, dream, or inner awakening. In other people, it's not a case of something breaking in, but rather it is the person who breaks out of the status quo. Reshuffling. This is a fluid phase, marked in many people by uncertainty, disorientation, and vulnerability. A person might feel lost and directionless without their old orientation, but these are also times of new opportunities to shape the world they live in. Reorganization. Sooner or later, new patterns crystallize out of the chaos. Remember Ferguson's statement that things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order. That new, higher level of order will, in its turn, fall apart and give rise to what comes next. That's the way things progress in nature and in us. Our spiritual process is no different. What can you do if you work with other people and detect this pattern? Work on yourself. Your inner work is what you do to tend your own fire and your own inner garden. It's what you do to become more conscious and it Your energy work practice delivers a changed person to the world and, in its small way, changes the world. can take any number of forms: daily meditations, retreats, spiritual practices, therapy, and energetic practices. Whatever the form, your inner work is an indispensable ingredient in anything you would undertake to cultivate and express your spiritual qualities. I have found that people who get involved with energy healing strictly in order to "fix" others, without working in a parallel way on their own inner growth and development, tend to hit a wall early on. Without active participation in your own pathways of spiritual growth and personal healing and development, it is easy to restrict your notions of what energy work is about. In addition, whatever your path or discipline, your inner work is how you unlock your potentials, become comfortable with processes of inner change, and gain a wider perspective on life, based on your own experience. Your inner work is the basis for compassionate work with others. INTEGRATION—LIVING ONE LIFE Your energy work practice delivers a changed person to the world and, in its small way, changes the world. The journey of energy healing has the potential to carry you out of the mass mind and your everyday world, if only for a moment at a time, into encounters with the numinous background of life. There, the pilgrim in your body might find an opening to ecstatic, ineffable states, unfiltered by anything institutional, undefined by psychology, religion, or middle- class values. At times, new perceptions come cracking through—you sit bolt upright and shout, "Eureka!" and rush out to rearrange the world. Other days, less bombastically, an internal practice might draw you with gentle magnets into deep stillness, after which you calmly re-enter your world with renewed clarity and purpose. Similarly, a client might have a profound experience under your hands and come out of a treatment transformed and inspired. Still other times, change happens in imperceptible shifts, below the radar. You go forward on faith and the occasional unnamable tingle and cultivate an eye for the unseen ways that your work in the world of energy and consciousness silently sifts into the world of everyday. Whether quietly or noisily, energy work practice promotes the renewal of the age-old experience of your most essential nature and this renewal does something to you. Sooner or later, your spiritual growth becomes as undeniable as winter's turn into spring and with it comes the need to integrate this change into your life. Much is made in spiritual circles about the best ways to transcend the body, find heaven within, and enter bliss or nirvana, but as long as we are in this life, this is only two-thirds of the path. At some point we come back into the world we inhabit—the ordinary world of washing the dishes, earning a living, visiting Uncle Harold and Aunt Gladys on Sunday, bearing the qualities of our transcendent, ecstatic moments, and the gifts we have cultivated in our soul's work and travels. No longer internally split up into spiritual and worldly domains, the pilgrim's task earn CE hours at your convenience: abmp's online education center, www.abmp.com 55