Three Key Ingredients of Healing

 

 

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This article discusses three ingredients of healing which I have come to believe are essential if we are to realise true health. 

 

Empathy

 

The first ingredient I have come to believe is so very important is empathy.  A friend recently observed to me that she had no conceptual understanding whatsoever of the word “empathy”.  After doing lots of healing work over the last few months, she has realised just how many of her thoughts about herself are very unkind judgements, and she is struggling with whether that can ever change.  I have recently read Marshall B. Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” and I remembered reading a simple but powerful idea about empathy in it, so I went back to the book and read:

 

"The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing."

 

This led me to reflect on changes I’ve seen in my own life recently, primarily as a result of learning Domain Focusing.  In the past, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with yoga.  I’ve long known that it is really good for me, and over the years I’ve regularly started doing yoga, and thrown myself into it with enthusiasm, only to see myself finding more and more excuses why I don’t have time, and seeing my practice dwindle to a halt.  This time, it’s been totally different.  I’ve not only been doing yoga 6 days a week for the last 6 weeks, but I’ve been finding myself enjoying it, and looking forward to my daily sessions.

 

During one particular yoga session a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly realised what accounted for the difference.  As I leaned into a pose, and felt enormous resistance in my body to going any further, I found myself bringing humour to the situation, and gently coaxing myself to relax into the pose.  All of a sudden I had a flash of how I used to be with myself in situations like this, and quite frankly it wasn’t pretty.  If I had a yoga teacher who was impatient with me, who ridiculed my inability to get my body into certain configurations, and who provided a running commentary about how hopeless I was at yoga, it is extremely unlikely that I would go to more than one class with that teacher.  And yet I realised that day, that’s what I had been doing to myself all through the years, in my solo yoga sessions.

 

What had changed?  I was now able to be present to what was happening in my mind and my body while in the pose.  As Marshall wrote in his book, I was able to be wholly present to myself and what I was experiencing.  Gone the running commentary in my mind, the constant judgements, replaced by a gentle awareness of where I was and what I was feeling.

 

Following on from this awareness, I’ve been able to see that my lack of self-empathy ran rampant throughout so many areas of my life, and while it’s still a work in progress and I’ve got some ways to go until I am completely free of my old judgemental habits, it’s been so liberating to see the changes.  I’ve realised, for example, that if I had been with the folks I assist with EFT in the same way I was being with myself in my healing sessions, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would have scheduled a second appointment, let alone a third or fourth!  Who would want an EFT practitioner who was impatient, judgemental, and lacked the ability to really listen?  I sure wouldn’t.  And yet that’s the sort of EFT practitioner I was being for myself for quite some time, without even realising it.  I can now see that it accounted for my early frustrations with learning Focusing too, in fact learning Focusing is what has helped me to start to turn around this lifelong habit of mine of judging myself.

 

In the process of learning and practicing Domain Focusing, I have finally learnt how to be with myself in an empathic way.  Part of Domain Focusing is some really simple questions, called “shift questions”, that you can ask yourself whenever you are stuck in the Focusing process, or feeling that you need to bring empathy to yourself.  In working with the process, and gently asking these questions, I have finally taken empathy from a vague intellectual concept, to something that I am able to bring to myself on a daily basis.  I’ve been able to see that in Focusing sessions where I don’t feel the forward movement that I usually do, it’s because I wasn’t with myself in an empathic way.  And I’ve seen the same thing in other areas of my life, from the yoga mat to how I am with myself when there is something I think I “should” do but I don’t want to.  I have discovered that empathy really can move mountains.

 

Forgiveness

 

Forgiveness is another key ingredient in healing.  So much has been written and talked about with forgiveness, and yet so many of us still have a concept of forgiveness that makes it very hard for us to bring it into action in our healing and lives. 

 

In working as an EFT practitioner, I have learnt that “forgiveness” is a really loaded word for a lot of people, and something that is very difficult for some people to embrace.  Some feel that to forgive means to forget and behave as if the thing that hurt them never happened.  Others feel that it would be letting the person who hurt them off the hook too easily.  And others still are adamant that they have already forgiven, and yet continue to use judgemental language about themselves or the person they claim to have forgiven, and express hurts around the situations involved, which indicates that while they may have intellectually made the decision to forgive, emotionally they have not forgiven at all.

 

Our culture is very blame oriented, you only have to turn on the news for a few minutes (a practice I don’t recommend!), to see that blame runs deep.  It’s much easier to point the finger at someone else, than to accept responsibility for our part in something, and choose to let it go.  Something interesting that was pointed out to me years ago is that if you point your finger at someone and look at your fingers (try it now), you’ll find that you have one finger pointing at them, and three pointing back at you!

 

I believe that forgiveness means choosing to let go of something that has happened, and choosing to no longer give it power over you.  It does not erase what happened, or in any way condone it or say that what you or the other person did was OK.  You will still remember what happened and be able to learn from the situation.  It’s simply an intention that you are no longer going to give this situation power over you, or the opportunity to live rent free in your body and your mind.

 

While this definition is simple, in practice forgiveness is not always so easy.  One of the main reasons I’ve found for people having difficulty forgiving is that there are feelings and trauma that have not yet been resolved.  When we clear all the trauma associated with something that has happened, forgiveness tends to occur naturally.  We no longer choose to hold onto the resentment, guilt or anger surrounding a circumstance, and instead let go of it from our mind and our body.  If we are having difficulty forgiving, it is often a sign that there are still some feelings locked inside us that need to be heard or felt, in order for us to truly let go.

 

If you have done a lot of healing around an issue and are still finding it difficult to let go, try spending some time feeling deep inside to see if you can get in touch with sadness, regret, anger or other emotions that may need to be released.  Learning Focusing is a great way to be able to learn to do this.  If you don’t know Focusing, you can still sit down, close your eyes, and go within your body and think about the situation that is still causing you pain, and observe what happens in your body.  If, for instance, your stomach feels tight, gently place your hand over the tight area, and ask the area how it is feeling.  This is a good time to practice bringing empathy to yourself, sitting patiently waiting, as you would if you were trying to find out what had really upset a child.  As with the child, impatience is not useful here.  If you find yourself being impatient, try and simply sit with the impatience – it may reveal what the issue is for you.

 

If after doing this you are still having difficulty forgiving, here’s an analogy I once read that has been able to help me to let go of situations that I no longer want to carry around with me.

 

Imagine that life is like a play, and you are but one of the characters in the play.  While it might be tempting to think of yourself as director and producer, in reality we are each simply a character in a play, interacting with other characters in the play.  See if you can see the situation that is still troubling you as a play.  You are the main character from your point of view, and you interact with other characters (who are the main character from their point of view!).  If you can see this from the angle of the people who hurt you simply being characters in the play, acting out the role that is in their script, it may be easier for you to forgive.  None of us know why we have the circumstances we do in our lives, but one thing is for sure, as much as we like to think we are the director, life has a habit of proving otherwise.  If we can see others as simply characters acting out their parts, it may be easier to loosen our judgements of them, and forgive them for the role they are playing in our lives.

 

Intention

 

A third element that I consider to be a key ingredient of healing is intention.  I’ve recently been listening to Lynne McTaggart’s podcasts on intention, and have found them to be very interesting.  Lynne talks about how intention is not just a matter of setting the “big wish” and sitting back and waiting for it to arrive in our lives, but instead that intention is about what we do on a daily basis to support the thoughts we intentionally send out into the universe about what we want. 

 

Our healing is a good example of this.  If we intend to heal a big issue in our life, but we just spend an hour or two a week with a practitioner, our intention to heal is not as strong as it would be if we instead see the practitioner we are working with as a coach, and endeavour to spend time on our own continuing the healing that we do with them, in between sessions.  Each time we sit down to do EFT or TAT or Focusing, we are backing up our intention to heal.  I firmly believe that when we have a strong, focussed intention, the universe readily rearranges itself to help us to bring about what we want in our life.  But if our intention is lukewarm, and we don’t take actions to support it regularly, it’s little incentive for the universe to rearrange!  I like to think of this with an amusing analogy:

 

Imagine that you have a team of angels assigned to help you in your life.  The “head” angel in your team is responsible for keeping track of what you want and communicating it to the team, and co-ordinating them to make sure that you get what you want.

 

One day, you decide you want something in particular.  You send out a big intention to the universe, and the head angel calls out to the team, “OK folks, let’s get started, this is what we are doing.”  Moments later you have a thought that what you want isn’t possible, or perhaps this other thing would be better, and the head angel calls “Hang on team, might have a change of plans here, just wait a moment.”  Then you have another thought, or take an action that is contrary to your original intention….before long the head angel is totally confused and suggests the team take the afternoon off while you try to sort out what it is you really want!

 

One way I consciously use the power of intention with my healing is that every time I sit down to do any healing – whether with EFT or Reiki or Focusing etc – I set an intention of the style that I learnt from Tapas Flemming’s TAT.  I do this whether I’m working on my own issues, or sitting tapping with another person, and I have found that since I’ve started doing this, there has been a noticeable difference in the rate at which I’m healing my issues.  If I’m working on my own, I set an intention along the lines of:

 

I intend for this healing I’m about to do to heal this and all associated issues at the deepest level possible, on all levels, in accordance with my highest good.  I intend for the healing to ripple out to help anyone else affected by these issues, in accordance with their highest good, as is appropriate for them.  I give thanks for being guided in my healing and being able to let go of anything that is no longer of use to me in my life.

 

When I’m about to do a session assisting someone else with EFT, I set a similar intention for them, and I include myself in the “anyone else” part of the intention. I believe that when we sit down with another person with the intention of them and/or us healing, we create a powerful triangle of intention with the universe.  Lynne McTaggart talks about this on her podcasts – the intention experiments she has been conducting with a team of volunteers and scientists have been showing the incredible power of group intention, and I like to tap into this with any healing sessions I am a part of.

 

Summary

I truly believe that if we can see empathy, forgiveness and intention as three legs of a healing stool, we can bring about powerful healing in our lives.  While any one of these is powerful, a combination of all threes is virtually unstoppable!  Bringing empathy to ourselves and others enables us to forgive past hurts and move on.  The daily actions we take that support our intention to heal lead to us being able to learn to be with ourselves and others with empathy, and to forgive ourselves and those people who we perceive have caused us pain.