Holistic Healing

The Women's Organisation of the Malankara Orthodox Church - 'Marthamariam Samajam' invited me for a talk on Holistic Healing in their Global conference held at Pothanpuram(Pampady) Kottayam, Kerala from27-29 April 2016. This blog is a reflection on the experience of this talk.

Around one thousand and five hundred women had gathered in the hall. They were all gathered in the name of Holy Mary m/o Jesus to a spend time in study , meditation and empower themselves. Health and healing is central to the Church's mission.

The listeners wanted an experiential session on Holistic Healing. I started off with a brief description and thrust areas of Holistic Healing practices.

Spiritual awareness, personal reflection and forgiveness practice, mental relaxation and awareness of Body - mind connection are central to Holistic healing. These together maybe understood as practice of Love. We learned about Love as defined by Dr. Scott Peck
Love has been defined by Dr. Scott Peck in his book 'Road Less Travelled'  as "the willingness to grow and let others grow". This in other words is 'Discipline'.The four elements of this kind of love in discipline are
1. Learning to delay gratification 2. Taking responsibility 3. Learning to be truthful to oneself and 4. Achieving balance in all of the above.

Personal reflection was practiced based on this understanding to become aware of any lovelessness in our hearts. The participants practiced making a note of this awareness and decided to discard it from their lives. Symbolically it was practiced by writing it on paper and destroying the same.

Awareness of the Positive energy of the Holy Spirit was practiced by reflecting on the positive qualities in others and placing the positive thoughts in the space of the discarded negative thoughts.

This was followed by two minutes relaxation of the body and aligning the relaxed body to the mind.
The session was concluded with a reaffirmation that these practices can be initiated by each one and practiced again and again for long standing benefits and experience of 'Abundant Living' .

I enjoyed going through this experiential process. many of the participants met me personally outside the session to inform me that it was a great experience and new learning!

Practicing the Preach - The spiritual level of living

Human beings function as physical, mental and spiritual beings. Sometimes the three are integrated . At other times the three dimensions of existence are disintegrated. The physical body and concrete physical experiences are considered very real (the Only reality) by large majority of people. Experiences of the mind and life with good intellectual functioning is practiced by a much lesser number of persons. An even lesser no of persons experience a rich spiritual life.

For those persons whom the physical experience is the only reality, life is centered around the sensations and what it gives. They seem to be concerned with material comforts and means to achieve and maintain those comforts. This often is a never ending process. So they are perennially dissatisfied and always in search of comfort. Those using their intellectual capacity explores the meaning of the thoughts and emotions and find meaning of many physical problems at the level of the mind. They verbalise their thoughts and communicates them with other persons around. They are often interested to get across their experience to those whom they think are not functioning in their level. This communication is a cognitive understanding of many phenomenon in life. It is their satisfaction in knowing these facts that they are trying to share. This may include psychological explanations of many physical maladies and ways to overcome or prevent them. This may be considered the 'Preach'.

The spiritual group transcends these two levels and are at peace with nature and life.  They may be considered the most integrated. They seldom preach. They live their lives fully and in tune with nature and the 'present'. They seem to be aware of human limitations and let others 'be'. They do not actively strive to communicate their ideas to others or change others. They communicate without many words. Their being and living are their communication.Their peace flows to those who are in their presence. This may be understood as 'practicing the preach'.

I think it is worthwhile to reflect where am I? Is it the goal for humanity to evolve to the integrated living? What are the ways it may happen? Why isn't everyone able to live integrated living? Where in lies the means for that? Are life experiences helping one to go through these stages?If so how can that be expedited or facilitated? Does it need any facilitation at all??

Open Mind and Abundant Living

At SHALOM the training is for experiencing 'Abundant Living' with Self Help and Open Mind.
The word open stands for free movement in and out. An open mind is where thoughts come and go, ideas are taken and given! In other words open mind is about  being receptive to new ideas as well as willingness to share own ideas. So it happens it is a forum for persons with similar interests and needs to share what they think and also receive ideas and inputs they need. The forum at SHALOM is facilitated by me guided by the TA principles of 'open honest transactions and contractual methods'

We at SHALOM are open to the concerns shared by members. It is done contractually so that everyone is responsible for what s/he shares! We listen to ourselves or work on our personal awareness consistently. We use the Self Awareness tools and practices for this. This deepens our knowledge about our motivations. We remain open to the deeper understanding of ourselves. It helps us to exclude communications with double meaning(Ulterior transactions in TA language). So it happens that open mind is about being truthful to oneself. The more open we are to ourselves the more we are open to others also. This contractual opening up facilitated and structured with TA theory helps to experience time, place and persons uniquely! This is abundance! Every acquaintance, every person, every experience  is unique and rich. Being open to them helps us experience this abundance in life.

The practice of openness  by counsellors and therapists accelerate the self esteem of clients and facilitate healing to wholeness in them. Openness in educators facilitates learning of his/her students  to  the maximum. Practice of openness or being truthful by parents  will make facilitate full fledged development of their children! Training programs at SHALOM is to help teachers, counselors, parents,  therapists and all service professionals to be better professionals through this practice, who in turn can facilitate openness in their clients and thus a growing cycle of openness and abundance!!

How we do it and more about Self Help and Abundant Living with an Open Mind later.