Introduction to Spiritual Healing
Spiritual Healing is about working with illness, dis-ease, and dis-harmony from multiple angles.
When using spiritual healing to address illness, we focus on bringing harmony back to reinforce a person’s whole body-heart-mind health.
Healing vs. Curing
In modern society, we expect quick fixes. Western medicine focuses on curing people through surgery, pharmaceuticals and other medical interventions. If you have a bacterial infection, western medicine provides the cure, antibacterial medicine.
Many treatments exist in western medicine. Treatments focus on curing symptoms. For example, medications are used to treat symptoms of depression and pain. Treatments can be beneficial in acute situations. However, long-term reliance on only treatment can inhibit healing, create a dependence on the treatment and even create additional illness and disease. For example, antibacterial medications often create an imbalance in the gut.
Healing goes beyond medical treatment. It includes spiritual growth, intellectual expansion, physical cures and other interventions. Healing requires digging deeper into why you got a bacterial infection in the first place and why you have depression and pain.
What is Spiritual Healing
Healing is usually a mixture of interventions – physical medical and non-medical, energetic interventions and mental interventions. When we transform the cause of illness/disease and grow beyond the problem, we are then focused on healing. Healing is a whole package deal. Addressing only one element of an illness rarely leads to healing.
In spiritual healing, we create a medicine story for ourselves that includes both a curing process and a healing destination. We create a spiritual prescription for the body, heart, and mind and then embark upon a healing journey.Spiritual healing is a path of transformation, a journey that connects the body, heart and mind to free the soul.
The Spiritual Healing Journey
A spiritual healing journey addresses physical, emotional, mental and spiritual toxins. In this way, we eliminate toxins that undercut the soul. We then release motion that splits a person away from themselves. Doing both allows a person to heal and become whole.
Healing the soul is the combined healing interventions for the body, heart, and mind. Many of us think of one action and then act upon another. For example, I may think I want to write today and then physically go to the beach instead. Or, we feel strongly about one need and yet physically move in a different direction. It happens all of the time, every day, for most of us.
One of my teachers, Gabrielle Roth, says it this way in her book Maps to Ecstasy,
“We need to do right by our body, purify our relationships, use our mind for creative freedom and not enslavement, free the soul from the ego, and undertake the spiritual journey.”