Reflections
Help to heal
Abstract
Are we really helpless before an illness or can we also do something about it? The needle of opinion seems to be shifting in the direction of patient empowerment where we have a clear role to play. The article explores some of these options and ways with which we can deal with illnesses.
There is an old saying: ‘The doctor gives the medicine, God cures.’
To this, we can add: ‘Man can help in his own healing.’
The doctor prescribes. The patient assists. Nature heals.
God cures.
We have a role to play in our own healing.
But first we must answer these two questions:
• Do I want to get well?
• Do I believe I can get well?
The first means I have the ‘Will’.
The second means I have the ‘Faith’.
Power of faith: apply your faith for healing
• Trust the physician who is treating you. Avoid doctor-shopping. At the most take one second opinion.
• You can always change your doctor if you have lost confidence in him. But so long as you are with your physician, listen to his advice and follow his instructions. He means well and is doing his best.
• Talk to your physician. Make a list of your doubts before you meet him. Clarify your doubts with him. Doubts are like drops of poison that spoil the body’s ability to heal itself.
• When you are given a prescription and a proscription (advices on do’s and don’ts) then follow them completely. If you have heard contrary suggestions, then ask your physician freely and frankly.
• Trust your body’s and mind’s capacity to heal you.
• Nature has placed within your body enormous healing resources and reserves. But to activate these reserves and resources to their full capacity you need to fill your body with faith rather than fear. Doubt confuses your body and fear completely paralyses its capacities.
• Your ‘will’ (will to recover) and ‘faith’ are like switches that send the right signals to the body to heal itself.
• Direct the body’s healing resources to the desired/affected spot with the help of thought and imagination. These are great tools for recovery, being applied all over the world to hasten the healing process.
• Above all, trust the Divine and His Wisdom, Love and Grace.
• God works in ways that baffle human intelligence. If He were to act exactly like us or the way we think He should then He would not be God but a ‘human being’ with inflated powers! We may not be able to understand His ways but we can fully trust Him. It helps His work immensely.
• Do not expect unrealistic and instantaneous miracles. That may happen but it is foolish to expect it all the time and in every case. Each person and case is different and miracles too follow a process. So be patient and go on quietly calling for God’s help and Grace, even if there are no immediate results or the results are even contrary to your expectations. The divine force sometimes works like ‘homoeopathy’; it raises certain deep-rooted maladies and then eliminates them. You have to be patient and full of trust till this process is complete.
• Even while the physician and the medicines are acting, entrust your body and your destiny in God’s safe hands. He is the All-wise healer.
Power of will: apply your will for healing
• The seat of will is in the heart, in the centre of the chest, deep within.
• If you are forced to rest due to the illness, use this moment, or else specially take out a few movements, to go deep within your heart every day. Try to feel what your central will is — life and complete recovery, or, death and complete change. Remember, illness itself is a cry for change. True and total recovery comes through an inner change even while you are living. The more complete the change, the more complete is the recovery.
• Apply your will steadily and sincerely to find the ‘dark spots’ within you. These are movements, attitudes, rationales, feelings, willings that love suffering and resist change. These are spots where the consciousness is arrested in certain negative formations of the past. These are moments when you have wished to die, moments when you have been harsh and cruel towards yourself and to others. These are painful psychological ‘knots’ where the energy for progress given to all of us is locked around a little ‘I’. These are the dark states of our being, part of our totality that is attached to small pleasures and surface thrills. Find these knots and gradually offer them up to the ‘Light’ with a prayer that they may be dissolved for good. Apply ‘Light’ and ‘Love’ to these parts and ask them to heal and mend.
• Apply your will steadily towards the desired change, — change of lifestyle, change of attitudes, change of thought-patterns, feeling-patterns that are unhealthy. Pray to God to give you strength for the desired change.
• Supplement the ‘will’ with ‘faith’.
At times the will may revolt or feel like giving up, it may simply feel tired, especially, if little or no result is coming through.
In such moments bring in faith to help your will. Remind yourself that your journey is not your journey alone. It is the journey of the Divine in us. And if we can trust and offer our efforts to Him the little efforts get multiplied. Even if no result seems to come today, it may yet come tomorrow.
Even if it does not come at all, still it is not a waste. Our will is strengthened for the future and the impression it is creating on your cells will prepare other similar cells on the planet.
Power of thoughts and feelings
Observe closely your thoughts and feelings when an illness grips you.
The same vibration that brings disorder in the body also brings disorder in the thoughts.
Very often in the face of an illness, our thoughts become dark and negative; our hearts become full of gloom and despair. We are invaded not only with germs but also with fear. We are invaded not only by chemicals that obstruct the smooth functioning of our body but also by adverse suggestions, wrong thoughts and wrong feelings.
Acting thus through the mental substance the forces of illness depress our consciousness, make it heavy, colour it with gloom and thereby shut the doors to Light and Grace and the healing power of Love.
It is important therefore to keep our mind clear, to keep the doors open, to prevent the illness from taking hold of our mindscape and mental space.
A few things which help:
• Detachment of the mind from the physical disorder. This will cut off the ‘suffering’ that accompanies physical pain or illness. This in turn greatly reduces the work of clearing an illness from the system.
Imagine doing some serious intricate work, while all around you there are disturbing voices suggesting failure.
Well, that is how the healing energies of nature feel when the mind is constantly throwing negative suggestions.
By detaching the mental component in an illness, by stepping back from the whirlpool of anxieties and worries, we help the process of healing.
Direct your thoughts away from the illness. Simply read an interesting book or watch a favourite show, or, better still, relax in quietude and peace.
• Fill your thoughts with positive energy.
Stay in the company of those people, those books, and those images that give hope and exude cheerfulness.
Avoid gloomy and fearful people as one would avoid harmful food.
• Direct your positive thoughts towards the part that is unwell. Ask it to relax and open to Light, Peace and the healing energies of the cosmos.
Thought is simply a vehicle; you can let it be driven by a rash, bad-willed, despondent driver or by a more enlightened, calm one who is full of trust and goodwill.
Give healthy suggestions to your body and the sick part, such as:
‘I want you to be healthy.’
’You are healthy.’
‘Quiet, quiet, peace.’
‘Relax, open to the Light.’
Give your own healthy suggestions, not as a mechanical device but filled with the will and conviction from your heart; a command of love and gentle persuasion, not a forced, arbitrary imposition of a wish beneath which lies expectations of a sudden miracle burdened with fear of failure.
Remember there is a process to everything, even to a miracle.
Give it time.
Have faith in the power of suggestion.
Be patient.
Remember, Nature does not heal as doctors do. Physicians focus on one part and its rapid symptom relief. But Nature takes care of the whole.
Power of imagination
The power of imagination is a gift from the Divine to man. Unfortunately, man seldom uses this gift and instead lends it to the devil to use it freely.
Imagination works like a magic key that opens the door we wish to enter.
If we imagine dark and fearful things, we will always be surrounded by them.
If we imagine bright and beautiful things then we will enter a state of luminous joy.
If we imagine peace and wideness, we will feel peace and wideness; we will feel peace and wideness enter the very cells of our body. As is our imagination so is our condition.
Remember, the body does not differentiate between what the mind imagines and what the mind perceives through the senses.
Imagination forms things in the mental world just as the senses form things in the physical.
Therefore imagine beautifully.
Imagine you are cured and your body will start creating that for you…
Imagine you are getting healed and your body is throwing away the illness, and your body
will start throwing away the illness.
The higher forces of healing
Healing is not done by material processes and material energy alone.
It seems so only because our perceptions are limited to the material domain and our sense of self confined to the physical body alone.
But a deeper sight sees that the physical body and material processes are only vehicles, the last end-point of a complex play of forces that drive the human body.
What are these forces and how do they act?
• Beyond the physical, there is the domain of vital energy where much of internal battles take place. The vital energy can be of many kinds, some dark like ‘coal’, some better and brighter like ‘steam’, others subtle and with less waste, like ‘electricity’.
When our body’s vehicle has been driven by dark vital energies such as fear and anger, lust and greed, small sentiments and petty desires, then much harmful smoke is generated as a by-product. This ‘smoke’ blocks the free flow of vital energy through the subtle nerves that often overlay the gross nervous system. The cells slowly wilt and wither away.
But when we let our body be driven by forces of harmony, peace, kindness, truth, charity, love, then the current of life flows smoothly and the cells function with a sense of ease, smoothness, trust and security.
An illness comes to teach us humility. In that humility, we can develop in us qualities of kindness, care and generosity…
…above all we must learn how to call in peace.
This Peace is there above us, within us, behind all things covered by the noise and clutter of life.
We are too much into the zone of noise and the worst of these is the noise of our thoughts and suggestions pulling us in so many directions.
Instead of getting caught up in this web of noise, we must go past it or else step within to contact the silence behind life.
Peace is a healing power. Peace helps the body to re-establish the balance.
Peace heals from within.
Let us invoke the power of peace putting ourselves in the hands of the Divine Grace.
Let us chant the mantra of Peace…
Om Śānti, Śānti, Śānti.
Om Peace, Peace, Peace!
Dr. Alok Pandey, an editor of NAMAH and member of SAIIIHR, is a doctor practising at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
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