Who wants to be healed anyway?

posted by Roman Hanis on November 18th, 2015

The perspective of healing has been distorted over the ages. In our modern society most people believe healing is an erroneous part of life best left to the realm of narrow specialists. In the ancient times the purpose of healing was to empower the individual to heal themselves. In finding a solution for dis-ease today, we come to a crossroads: choose to slumber in the sickness of victim consumerism, or awaken into the conscious empowerment of a meaningful life.

Life once presented me with a terminal illness that I struggled with it for over ten years. The conventional medical realm only allowed me a meaningless and miserable existence of external causes unrelated to my inner existence. Only when the real possibility of truly facing myself emerged in my life was I able to start healing at the root. While the modern medicine is not wrong, it made a huge difference to know there are other options that can be mutually inclusive.

In the ancestral holistic approaches one cultivates a more meaningful existence through receptivity in order to find a greater balance and alignment between one’s life and the rest of the universe. The dis-balance itself is not bad either; it is merely an opportunity to learn how to come into deeper service and harmonic balance with the web of life. The healing journey involves a process of learning how to listen to, express, and channel the life energies of the organism creatively instead of capriciously distorting these energies to fit the sense perversions of conditioned indulgence. Lack of receptivity, curiosity and appreciation of nature, both within and outside of ourselves, contributes to the destructive egocentric existence that causes the dis-ease.

The modern view of healing seems to be that disease and sickness are not a natural part of life, but something that keeps us from living and enjoying our lives the way they are supposed to be lived. Therefore, sickness has to be eliminated at all cost, even if it means potentially taking the life of the patient. The very popular motto “War on Cancer” really expresses this modern infatuation with fearful aggression and aversion towards illness.

This is not to say that modern medicine is obsolete. In many cases it can be very useful and effective such as emergency and trauma care as well as precise physical diagnostics among different applications. However, to see it as an all-knowing, absolute authority is not very wise. Integrative medicine is a more meaningful approach to healing. It works to unify the benefits of conventional and alternative healing modalities across the board. Understanding the differences and complementary points can truly empower the healing to its maximum potential.

One of those differences which can be bridged into the integrative healing approach is the recognition that there exists a higher evolutionary purpose to any disease. In my own experience, worse than any pain I experienced in my illness was an inability to see any meaning or purpose in that condition. As soon as the evolutionary meaning of that illness became clear to me the suffering started to rapidly diminish.

An illness does not necessarily have to involve only physical symptoms. It can be related to unresolved inner or outer conflict resulting in a lack of deeper meaning and a sustainable, joyful purpose. When these issues are ignored and suppressed for a significant period of time, the evolutionary messages of the organism become strong enough and thus apparent to the diagnostics of the empirical conventional medicine as a disease on a physical level.

In Andean and Amazonian indigenous medicine traditions, as well as most ancient cultures around the world, consciousness is seen as the main healing agent. Everything else, including herbal remedies, breathing techniques, different therapies, mental and physical exercises, etc. are considered to be supportive of this heroic evolutionary journey of consciousness returning to the infinite creative potential of the original wholeness. None of these methods can ever substitute consciousness as the source of healing. The magic pill so desperately sought after in our modern times is viewed as an illusion by wisdom keepers in many ancient traditions. This drive towards the fast fix solution, without intentional inner change, expresses the conditioning of a fear based mentality where one is no longer capable of deciding one’s own destiny.

In ancient cultures the diseases were seen to be an essential part of life – a rite of passage or initiation where people would find great strength in what was initially seen as a great weakness.

What is more empowering?…

The empirical view that disease is merely a random occurrence, which creates a helpless victim attitude that people are conditioned to assume when facing an illness.
Or: the illness can become an invitation to an existential heroic journey of evolutionary scale and universal proportion – a journey of self-realization.

Despite the widely accepted perspective that ancient cultures are primitive, there may be quite a bit of jewel wisdom hiding in the mud of that conditioning. Healing is directly related to the spark of awareness within all of us. The light of consciousness is destined to come back into all people’s lives sooner or later, or to put it differently, everyone is destined to bring their lives back into the light of consciousness. This heart centered consciousness of our shared humanity starts with me and you. A disease can then be seen as the dormant unconscious potential that supports the blossoming of the individual and our collective planetary organism into a realized state of active compassion and peaceful wholeness.

Three main points of ancient healing:

• Considering others that may be suffering even more than oneself enables the courage and determination to overcome one’s own issues for the sake of everyone. Love becomes a never-ending source of vitality when one’s own healing aims to provide a source of inspiration and support by being an example to others.
• Simultaneously with that knowing that there are others who have been able to overcome the same challenges you are facing now makes it a lot more feasible for you to do the same.
• Facing one’s own difficulties and suffering makes one much more compassionate towards others and willing to help. Sharing essential human heart qualities in this continuously turning medicine wheel is manifesting healing in its most honorable expression.

At the Paititi Institute we are deeply inspired to share the awakening of our evolutionary healing with all beings. If you are practicing healing yourself or studying how to benefit others through your own experience, we invite you to join us. Our next immersion into the collective healing described above is a Cultural Healing Exchange voyage in the Andean mountains of Peru. Healers are invited to receive the Ando-Amazonian ancestral healing wisdom while also sharing the natural healing modalities from around the world with the indigenous Quechua people of the region. Each time we undergo this process it is a profound opportunity to witness just how much we all heal through each other.

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