The question of healing came up recently when someone wrote to Mark about one of his meditations and how it had helped them heal back pain. I started thinking a lot about healing, and why meditation and focused thought can create such dramatic shifts in our experience.
I’ve experienced some strange healing over the course of my lifetime. When I was first attuned to Reiki quite a few years ago (I’m actually a master trainer of Reiki), I experienced quite a dramatic healing. I was sick for about a week prior to my Reiki attunement, but afterward I was healed.
Since then, I’ve experienced quite a few healings that seemingly came from nowhere. And after learning about ho’oponopono from Mark, I have come to a deeper understanding of what heals. Healing is the release from everything that we aren’t. Illness and pain (whether physical or emotional) are not our natural state.
So what is? As so many religions and spiritual traditions teach us, love is all that is. God is love. Spirit is love. We are all love. So, I believe that love is our natural state.
Yet, it is one of those things that no one really wants to talk about.
What is love?
(Oh dear. I hope I didn’t get that Haddaway song in your head.)
I remember when I thought love was getting men to like me. I probably read way too many issues of Cosmopolitan magazine as a teenager and in college. After having a few altered experiences, and after a number of ill-fated and failed relationships, I know that love is a lot more than that.
With all of this life experience loving, there is one thing I can say for certain: relationships and the games we play in them aren’t love.
Love is much simpler than that… it is all that we are. It is our attention and appreciation without agendas or games. It is rather simple in experience, yet it moves mountains and heals pretty much everything.
Love is our natural state — underneath all of the beliefs, thoughts, emotions and patterns we think define us.
That’s right, love is not an emotion. It’s not a belief or a thought. It’s not a pattern. Emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and patterns are all transient experiences that come into us for a short time, trash the place, and then move on. We are not our emotions or thoughts, and learning to meditate and separate from our emotions and patterns is highly valuable in the exploration of the self.
Love is a force that exists within us that we can’t be taught about in school, at work, or even in relationships. It’s something we have to explore on our own. I can’t even tell you much about it; it is something you have to experience for yourself.
If we want to be loved, we have to love. We have to feel love for ourselves and others before we can really understand what love is. We have to discover the love that resides within us before we can understand someone else’s love. And honestly, the love we feel from others is a reflection of the love we feel for ourselves.
Why we never learn how to love ourselves
Ever notice how many broken people are walking around on the face of the earth? I see them sometimes, and I study their energetic patterns and find so much sadness. There is no self love or appreciation, only patterns of hurt and protection surrounding a broken heart. There has been so much hurt and heartache in life, and it can take a lifetime to heal from it all. We’re all zombies at times, walking around with these patterns that don’t serve us and just create more pain.
So many broken people seem to perpetuate more broken people. Parents want well-behaved children, and it’s usually the loud, vibrant, and passionate children who are more full of love. Schools want us to sit, listen, and learn. Work wants us to produce and follow rules. Even shopping has its rules that we’re not supposed to break.
Where in life do we learn how to love? Where do we learn how to sing, dance, and feel passion? Where do we learn how to find out what makes us happy? Why isn’t that a part of how we teach our children?
The reason we never learn how to love ourselves — or others — is that there is no real motivation for anyone out there to teach us how to really love ourselves or others. And that’s a darn shame. We’ve got all of these people running around poking each other with their broken pieces, creating more hurt and sadness, and no one really taking our hands and fully loving.
I am guilty of a lot of this, too. It’s not that I have it all figured out, but I am getting more and more glimpses of how I would rather be.
How to discover true love
The only way we really figure out love — no matter if our goal is to find more passion in life, a better relationship, or just better experiences with the people in our lives — is to explore the love that we are. It is all inside of us, waiting to be discovered. It really is our natural state outside of our beliefs, thoughts, patterns and emotions. We really are, no matter our age, those passionate happy children who just want to have fun all day with whatever makes us happy.
Be as little children… and discover the happiness, passion, and love that resides within us. It is our birthright, and it is our natural state.
But how…
I recorded a short exercise to help with that experience. So many of us are disconnected from our heart center that we aren’t aware that the love we seek resides inside of us. The exercise is rather simple and easy, and with most meditative exercises, it is simply the focus of attention. Have a listen, and start exploring the love that you are.
