"If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." — William Blake
Healing and Shamanism Healing is a shamanistic art form that likely dates back to
the era of cave paintings. However, blinded by the brief
300-year flash of European Enlightenment and intoxicated by the
view from the Babel towers of test-tube science and the
pharmaceutical industry, we often have nothing but a knowing
smile left for the shamans' aeonically accumulated knowledge.
Yet within the emerging interdisciplinary sciences, there is a
growing respect and renewed interest in shamanic traditions.
Healing and Meditation Healing and Meditation are like God’s two hands. The more
healing dissolves blockages in the body's internal energy
channels, the more Meditation transforms from a practice, an
exercise, into a spontaneous process. Healing transforms you
from someone who meditates into someone who is meditated upon.
To be in a state of Meditation, as William Blake insightfully
points out, is to see everything as part of the infinite.
Heal Yourself by Healing Others Healing is a simultaneous process that happens in both the
healer and the one receiving healing. Healing another person is,
therefore, one of the best ways to heal yourself.
Attention and Touch The greatest gift you can give another person is your full
attention. That in itself may be the purest form of healing.
Healing is active love. Often, healing can occur simply by
attentively listening with your heart to another person’s
sorrows. However, the body doesn’t always understand language.
Language is just a narrow bandwidth within the rainbow of human
consciousness. The body understands touch far better.
Communication through touch reaches back deep into our
evolutionary past. Any touch given with the right intention
will, in a split second, stimulate and activate the life force
and immune system of the one receiving it. Such is the simple
yet powerful force behind healing.
If this touch is accompanied by a meditatively enhanced
awareness in both the giver and receiver, the healing effect
will be exponentially greater. For example, if you have a minor
infection in your finger, the number of white blood cells
attacking the bacteria increases when you focus your attention
on the finger.
The Healing Hands From
the shamans to the healing miracles of Jesus, the laying on of
hands has always been central.
Our hands, which gave us a
significant evolutionary advantage as tools for work, also
possess a profound communicative power. Hand gestures were
crucial in the development of language, and even in our verbal
world today, hands still convey potent messages. This ability is
ritualized in many cultures, from tribal communities to
organized gangs. However, the open, outstretched hand depicted
in the illustration—whether in a Christian context or
not—reaches beyond tribe and culture. This universally
understood symbol conveys peace: an empty hand means no threat.
Our hands, anatomically unique in their capabilities, are among
our greatest helpers. An outstretched hand from another person
represents an amplification of the power already within us—a
fundamental gesture of healing.
Hands as Antennae Beyond
their physical functions, hands also act as powerful antennae
for receiving and transmitting energy. In ancient Chinese Taoist
culture, this life force was called Chi. While Chi has not yet
been scientifically verified, its existence and effects are
extensively discussed in sections on sensory meditation.
The video below showcases the incredible abilities of a Javanese
chi healer—abilities that you too can cultivate through
meditation. The film also highlights why it is often so
challenging for science to measure and quantify these phenomena.
Charging the Hands with Chi
Energy Instead of waiting for science to validate the existence of
Chi, I suggest a simple meditation exercise that can help you
understand the energetic and healing qualities of your hands.
Here’s a quick inner experiment:
● Sit comfortably with your eyes
closed and feel your inner body. Breathe deeply a few times,
then let the breath flow naturally.
● After a few minutes, shift your attention to your hands. Feel
the energy in your palms with your inner awareness.
● Shake your hands as if you're trying to remove a piece of gum
stuck to your fingers. Do this mindfully, one hand at a time,
with open eyes.
● With your eyes closed again, bring your hands up about 20 cm
in front of your chest, palms facing you. When your hands find a
comfortable position, lock them there and feel the energy for
about 2 minutes.
● Slowly open your eyes halfway, letting your hands come into
your visual field. See them with a defocused gaze, allowing your
awareness to go both inward and outward simultaneously.
● Remain in this state of full awareness for as long as it feels
right.
Biofeedback and Awareness-Driven Healing This exercise highlights
the importance of attention in amplifying Chi energy within the
body. The human nervous system operates as a biofeedback
mechanism that responds to focused consciousness. When you
direct your full attention to a part of your body, you
numerically amplify the signals in that area.
To demonstrate this, try this simple experiment:
Take a bite of chocolate while distracted (e.g., reading a
newspaper).
Then take another bite, this time focusing all your awareness on
the sensory experience in your mouth.
Which bite tasted better? Likely, the second one did.
Point of No Return in Healing If the sensory feedback follows a 'normal' progression, it
will gradually fade, as illustrated below. Once the sensory
impression fades, attention moves on—like a monkey jumping from
branch to branch—seeking something new to latch onto. In today's
world, the conscious cultivation of inner attention has
diminished so much that deep focus, or rather 'immersion,' in a
single thing has been replaced by a restless zapping culture.
This constant shifting depletes our energy reserves,
specifically the chi-energy, which in another context might be
referred to as soma-, serotonin-, or dopamine-energy.
In meditation, there comes a point
of no return—a moment where the energy amplifies itself rather
than fading. The closer this energy gets to that point, the more
potent the healing potential becomes. This self-reinforcing
energy can sometimes feel as though your hands are burning,
charged to the limit with Chi.
The Burning Niom In the healing practices of the Ju|'hoansi people, a
detailed body of knowledge has been developed on how to manage
this burning heat, which they refer to as Niom.
Taken from the book Healing Makes Our Heart Happy, a must-read
for anyone involved in healing!
The young man in the center of the
image is a San healer from the Ju|'hoansi people. He is in
training, struggling to control the intense heat known as Niom,
supported and massaged by his assistants. In the Indian
tradition, this kind of fiery energy is most often described in
relation to Kundalini energy. In the illustration below, you can
see three individuals who are "radiating" this Kundalini fire.
Cultivating the Skill of Focused Attention All forms of meditation radically cultivate the ability to
focus attention. So, my advice is simple: turn your entire life
into a long string of meditative moments. It’s worked for me,
and it will work for you too.
A Chinese Qigong healer at work
Moreover, it’s important to note
that attention diminishes where life is ruled by habits and
routines. If your life is dominated by what Kierkegaard cursed
as "the eternal repetition," try shifting your focus to the
small variations in your routines. For example, brush your teeth
with your left hand if you're right-handed, or incorporate tiny,
quirky, unpredictable dance steps into your walk down life’s
path.
Also, never let your comparative mind stop you from burning the
flame of your attention at full intensity in every single
moment. The mind might tell you that the situation you're in
right now or the person you’re with is not as important as what
will come tomorrow. Thus, your mind can get you used to being in
a constant state of inattention, always waiting for that ideal
future moment when you’ll unleash your full attention. So,
whether it's your boss, your partner, a pet, or a stranger, make
it a habit to give your full, undivided attention to everyone
and everything.
Blockages in the Body's Energy Flow In Taoist philosophy, advanced frameworks were developed to
understand how chi energy moves within the body. Whether these
energy flows are purely through the scientifically documented
nervous system or along the Chinese meridian pathways remains
uncertain.
However, anyone involved in meditation or healing can attest to
the presence of various energy flows within the body. The more
these energies are blocked, the less life force a person has.
Often, it’s the ego’s excessive control mechanisms that create
these blockages. These blockages not only hinder one’s overall
vitality but can also contribute to physical illness.
This process of dissolving blockages can be understood through
the Tibetan notion of the 'Water Body' and the 'Ice Body,' where
rigid, stagnant energies ('Ice Body') are transformed into
fluid, free-flowing life energies ('Water Body'). The melting of
the 'Ice Body' represents the release of these blockages,
allowing life energies to flow freely once more.
In Tibetan meditation practices, the goal is to "melt" the Ice
Body through various techniques like visualization, breath
control, and mantra meditation, allowing the individual to
return to the fluid, dynamic nature of the Water Body. This
transformation reflects a deeper spiritual awakening, where the
mind and body move from states of rigidity and suffering toward
fluidity and liberation.
Muscles: Frozen Between Instinct and Reason A unique form of energy blockage occurs in our muscles. As a
young teacher, I once observed a new headmaster giving a speech.
His body performed a strange dance as he approached the podium,
with his head peeking just over the edge, speaking calmly, while
his body jerked instinctively, causing his feet to step backward
off the podium’s small steps. The body was trying to flee, yet
the head bravely held its ground, compensating for each backward
jerk by inching further forward.
When our ancient animal brain senses danger, as in the case of
this poor headmaster, it sends signals to our muscles to prepare
for fight or flight. However, in today’s complex, stressful
scenarios, neither fight nor flight is usually appropriate. The
adrenaline-driven muscle signals are thus overwritten by our
reason-based neocortex.
The result is that our muscles often remain in a state of
permanent tension, which is never released. These tense muscle
groups block the free movement of energy, alienating us from our
own life force.
Emotional Scars in the Body's Inner Memory Library The body’s inner world is like a library that is rarely
visited. The brain, of course, is the central archive, but other
parts of the body, especially the abdominal area, contain
millions of brain cells. In these inner cellular archives, every
moment of our lives is stored. The reason we can’t recall these
moments instantly is that we lack the "developing fluid." Each
joy and each pain can be replayed with the right trigger. Often,
painful or traumatic experiences lie in these archives like
stones in the river of life energy.
This storage mechanism can be seen as an outdated, primitive
program that, at one point in our evolutionary history, helped
us survive. You might call it the "burned child avoids fire"
program. However, this ancient form of learning is now long past
its expiration date, overtaken by the evolutionary wonder: the
human neocortex. The problem is that the old program is still
active, creating conflicts between our primitive survival
systems and our more advanced life-navigation systems. Instead
of avoiding fire entirely, we should learn new, intelligent ways
of handling it.
Fragmentation of the Core Personality These negative memory points can also be seen as emotional
infections that our spiritual immune system has encapsulated
rather than healed. Any encapsulated pain, no matter how small,
contributes to the fragmentation of our essence, our core
personality. Each negative feeling that becomes trapped steals a
small piece of our core self. The highest task of healing is to
reclaim these dormant parts of our multifaceted, rainbow essence
and reintegrate them into our conscious being.
Healing can thus be seen as a defragmentation process, melting
the parts of our personality frozen by trauma.
Healing Dissolves Blockages—Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy The connection between life energy, healing, and happiness
is beautifully expressed by the Ju|'hoansi people’s saying:
"Healing makes our hearts happy." The healing process primarily
targets these blockages, with the warmth of the healer’s hands
creating an energy flow strong enough to break down blockages,
like a dam collapsing under high water.
Healing Through Shared Attention Physical contact between the healer and the person being
healed creates a bridge that allows their attention to merge
into a far greater and more powerful shared awareness.
This amplified shared attention is also evident in group
meditation, where its healing qualities extend far beyond what
traditional science can explain. Attention, depending on its
strength and quality, possesses miraculous properties that may
only be understood through concepts borrowed from quantum
physics.
