There is a trending wave of individuals stepping into their path of conscious healing on the rise. What many people fail to realize or simply try to ignore (myself included at times) is that healing is not a linear path of sunshine and rainbows. On the surface, healing is just an illusion of what is actually taking place subconsciously.
Healing is a tapas, meaning that it is a process that requires self-discipline. It is an active state of restoration. To heal is to transition into well-being. As defined (one of many) in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "heal: to make free from injury or disease". What is the disease being treated in terms of healing? In order to understand this better, we must shift from common logic of medical diagnosis and shift our focus to the basis of this term, dis-ease. Dis-ease comes in many forms, some undiagnosable. Dis-eases are the energetic imbalances within our body systems trying to make its presence(s) known to the mind and often go untreated due to the absence of mind/body awareness.
With all of the distractions that are present in our world today, many of us simply operate on auto-pilot absentmindedly until something major occurs to grab our attention. My earliest experience of this is when I was sixteen. At the time, I was taking high school classes along with an independent homeschooling program while working endlessly to not only cover the cost of my homeschooling program but to also provide documentation that I was able to sustain a living in a court process to be granted full custody of myself, also known as emancipation. My dis-ease initially presented itself with the symptoms of a common cold - runny nose and cough. Eager to meet the high demands at this point in my life, I thought nothing of it. Aside from the annoyance of constantly blowing my nose and having to cough, I felt fine.
I had an extra-curriculum class working hands-on with special education students in the middle school inconjunct with my high school. A couple of the students saw that I was unwell and actually put on their best behavior while trying to make sure I was okay. Even still, I tried to convince everyone that nothing was wrong. I most certainly had myself convinced. Either that or I was so focused on what I thought was more important than tending to my health. One day, I had become so weak, my head throbbed terribly and I could barely keep my eyes open. I had chills and it hurt to swallow. I was barely eating at this point. That day, I would have died at the young age of 16 had I not gone to ER.
I later learned that what started out as a mild sinus infection drained down into my stomach, bypassing my lungs causing pneumonia and infecting the lining of my gut. The combination of pneumonia and a stomach infection had dehydrated me severely. Ever since then, I had gotten better at recognizing these symptoms and seeking treatment right away. What I didn't understand was the root of these re-occurring symptoms in the first place. For many years, I masked this dis-ease that my body was experiencing with prescription medications.
This is a very extreme example and in no way am I sharing this to encourage anyone to stop taking prescribed medications. Nor am I trying to point out deadly symptoms of a runny nose. I share this because as I began to embark upon my own self-healing journey in my adult years these symptoms that would occur like clockwork began to dissipate. The more I focused my awareness on mind/body balance, my body naturally began to heal itself. These were things that I had noticed then but still lacked an awareness of the correlation between mind and body. My awareness grew only when I started to focus my attention on both my mind and my body through the practices of zen meditation followed by Reiki followed by yoga.
These are all very useful practices and are great tools for integrating the mind with the body! However, I am noticing that because Reiki and yoga, specifically, are trending today, many people barely scratch the surface of the actual healing to manifest and thus do not receive the full benefits of what each practice has to offer. More often than less, I see people experience either Reiki or yoga or both and feel great immediately only to turn around and return to mindless activities and find themselves back where they started.
Believe me when I say I was one of those people. So I get it. This is why I share here the importance of cultivating a healthy daily routine of mind/body awareness. This does not mean that one must live a rigid and boring life but instead become one that practices self-control as a means to maintain a wholesome awareness of self. Integrating the mind and body on a daily basis is the greatest ki (energy) to balance and wellness.
The light within me humbly bows to the light within you.
Namaste.