What is Healing?
The unwinding of karma and time
Each year, the Jaya Kula community works with a theme. This year, our theme is healing. We’ll be exploring healing in our practice, our retreats, and other special gatherings.
The Euro-American medical complex
Healing is not well understood by the Euro-American medical complex. More and more, modern medical practices are based on the extreme separation of systems and organs into specialties. Treatments address symptoms rather than root causes, or they violently suppress the body’s reaction to imbalance. A cost-benefit analysis has become the norm with regard to the ever-widening range of “acceptable” side effects that attend pharmaceutical interventions.
The atomization of medicine into specialities that do not communicate with each other is mirrored in approaches to health care that willfully ignore the environments in which our bodies and lives are immersed. Euro-American systems of diagnosis rarely consider systemic or chronic environmental pressures on human health. The economic and political stakes are just too high.
Learning about healing
I started learning about more holistic modes of healing at the age of 15 when I began working with subtle energy under the tutelage of a mystic psychotherapist. My connection to this kind of practice was direct, intuitive, and immediately useful.
In my mid-twenties, I began working with more traditional yogic versions of the human energy body and using acupuncture. Ayurveda became part of my life at the age of 40, and I eventually apprenticed in an Ayurveda clinic. Through these studies and others, mantra, divination, and Jyotish were added to my healing “toolbox.”
I’ve also been extremely lucky to have received care from shamans and other healers with the ability to directly intervene in disease in the most fundamental ways. A few times in my life, healings have come in dreams and as the result of spiritual boons.
I’ve learned some things about the nature of healing through all of these experiences. First and foremost, I’ve learned that true healing, as opposed to fixing or suppressing, involves working with time.
Healing and time
Both spiritual practice and healing involve the dissolution or unwinding of the patterns we call “karma.” Karma means bound activity. Karma is activity that has momentum and is compelled to repeat itself in linear time.
When we heal, rather than just fix or suppress, the patterns that cause a disease dissolve. So, for instance, if I had cancer and undertook a conventional course of pharmaceuticals and radiation, this might cause symptoms to disappear. But I could, of course, experience a recurrance as the root cause of the symptoms has not been addressed.
But if I undo the root causes of the symptoms by correcting inherent imbalances with Ayurveda, or by removing the root provocation for the disease by making life changes or by more mystical means, I might be able to help my body and mind return to a time before the disease ever happened, before that karma ever arose.
When speaking of this sort of thorough healing, I don’t mean that if we heal a disease all scars or physical changes related to the disease will utterly disappear. I do mean that our bodies can no longer produce this disease as if the capacity to produce it had never existed at all.
A hallmark of this return or reversal of time is that all emotional content related to disease disappears when a real healing has taken place.
I once had a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. After fifteen years of illness, it was healed because of a spiritual boon. There may be some residual scarring in my intestines. I actually have no idea. But once the healing took place, I never had a single symptom or hint of a possible recurrence.
More importantly, I could no longer access or relive any of the pain and suffering I experienced during those fifteen years. I could describe them in words, but there was no longer any emotional charge or emotional memory. It felt completed or done in an unusual way.
Not entirely our call
We live in an infinite mandala of call and response governed by a vast intelligence that enjoys total freedom. As both Abhinavagupta and Anandamayi Ma have said: This reality can make the impossible possible and also the possible impossible. It is utterly free.
We cannot, on our own, force true healing to happen. But we can collaborate with the vast intelligence, and if it desires what we desire in our more limited way, healing will occur.
Please understand, though, that true healing is a rare and magical occurrance. In relation to my health, I have only experienced it twice. When true healing is not in the cards for us, practices such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda must be used repeatedly to stay ahead of constitutional imbalances and incursions from unhealthy behaviors and environmental factors.
We must also learn more appropriate lifeways and build new habits of daily self-care. Political activism to dismantle systems that are creating ill health and creating socio-cultural shifts toward community support for health must be considered as aspects of holistic health care.
And despite what I said at the beginning of this message, sometimes simple fixing is appropriate or is our only choice. Many people choose to use both conventional Euro-American medicine and other more holistic modalities simultaneously. In my life, though, I have used Euro-American modern medicine in a limited way.
Anandamayi Ma gets the last word
Anandamayi Ma was often asked to effect healings. Sometimes she complied, and at other times she refused because she saw the bigger picture. She could discern the intelligence and purpose that might be operating in the continuance of illness rather than its cessation.
She advises us to seek out the very best doctors and healers we can afford or have access to. If they cannot help us, we should relax our efforts, and let the wisdom of our circumstances reveal itself over time.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?
Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter on Substack to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.
Beautifully articulated. Thank you !