A Response to Responses
Several folks have responded to my I’ve Cured Cancer post with a variation of: “I’m just a channel of universal energy that…”
One of the reasons I don’t subscribe to that aspect of teaching is because it intentionally limits the relationships between the practitioner and client, practitioner and their responsibility, as well as the recognition of their own power, and, equally important-in my opinion-the relationship between human & cosmic energies and the relationship to one’s ownfineself.
Unless we’re willing to consider that our plumber, electrician, landscaper, artist, architect, professor, parking lot attendant, washing machine repair man, and physicians are all ‘merely channeling universal energy’, I’m not one to use that as an explanation.
That there is a separate and singular ‘universal’ energy or super/supra/consciousness that merely moves through us healer types discounts any notion that, at the very heart of it all, is that healing doesn’t happen without engaging and nurturing a relationship between human heart and human heart. If it didn’t we’d be superfluous.
There is a reason why, in many indigenous cultures, a healer spends decades learning both from a teacher, within community and in solitary connection to things universal. It is to study how to be responsible for the development of the relationships with human, plant, spirit, elemental and other universal energies, as well as, a key element forgotten in our attempt to commercialize this kind of work, the relationship with elements of the self.
Do we work in partnership with everything around us? If we’re doing it openly, yes. Absolutely yes. Our role, though, is not as a channel for something else to do the work. We do the work.
The first dog with osteosarcoma I worked on was this galoot of a mutt. I had to visit with him three times. The second time I was there, I’m not quite sure what came over me. The need to impress his owner, my own fear of failure. Whatever it was led me to start asking for St. Francis to show up, for any other umpteen whoevers I’d read about to show up.. The singular voice that responded said this: “Just shut up and do it.” There was no Nike-like fuzziness in the direction given. There was a demand for action.
There is a difference between what I call getting out of my own way (shutting up and doing the work) so that what occurs is a relational flow outside of thought processes and telling myself to let something else do the work. I’d have never done it for a math test or pre-sentence investigation and wouldn’t dream of doing it with a person I work with.
When I”m working, I’m often in the body of another; feeling it, listening to what it has to say. where things within it are resistant. In response to what it tells me, I noodge, pull, love on, and yank as needed. When I open myself to everything the body in front of me has to say, I feel the fear trapped in thighs that have been forced open again and again. I feel the desperate need for affection held in the liver. I feel the lineage connected to traumas that have repeated on auto-pilot for generations and release those ties that bind. I feel the sacral and solar plexuses have been locked in a trauma state for decades and can release it. I feel the guilt of self-love that has morphed into self-loathing and can guide through that. What I feel intuitively and intellectually and then do with all that information for the person or people in front of me is my responsibility, not that of the ‘universe’ as it moves through me or afterward.
However, in the same way I have the capacity to ask a human for help, I can ask other invisible energies (Kathryn Kulhman may pop in or someone’s great-grandmother may join), or I can pull in the energy of a plant that’s needed, or I can accordion out and have more than one me participate.
The evolution of the healing arts being taught as a form of channeling may have come from a well-minded instructor attempting to move students past identification with ego. Possibly, probably, but we’ll never really know. Sometimes, even now, that may be part of a teachers plan. But it has become rote in a way that wouldn’t make sense in any other profession or way of being.
Those who name it and claim it—their role, their responsibilities related to that in both the care and community—have different outcomes than those who don’t. It’s worth experimenting with yourself to find out what kind of difference that makes in your practice. It tends to broaden the awareness of all things universal, creates space for creativity, and a deeper connection to those spaces in between.
It’s been asserted on more than one occasion that healers who claim success are egotistical. Clearly some are. However because their gift itself provides not just relief but cures and more isn’t what makes them egotistic. The two are separate issues and worth reflecting upon and discussing more.
That’s my two bits.
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