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The 5 Pillars of Healing
Part
1 - Recovery of Our Natural Beliefs
Part
2 - Recovery of Our Body
Part
3 - Recovery from Addictions
PART I
Recovery
of Our Natural Beliefs
What is the Self?
The Self is your relationship with what is natural. The Self is not
your career or your roles that you play. But the Self is your thoughts,
feelings, and emotions. Many cultures teach that the goal in life
is to extinguish the Self. This is the farthest thing from the truth.
Nature knows the truth and when you try to extinguish the Self you
are trying to dominate nature. Most of our problems begin with our
attempt to eliminate the Self, or conquer nature. Stress, addictions,
and pain in the body all can be traced back to the loss of our relationship
with our Self.
Evolution of Human Beings
Human beings have been around on the planet in present form for about
a million years. Much has happened as we evolved from Stone Age times
up until our present high tech revolution. But some major changes
occurred about five thousand years ago that shifted our evolution
dramatically. This was a period in which rational, left-brain thinking
began to dominate. This was the emergence of the written word. This
began the repression of everything that was not left-brain, including
emotions, creativity, and intuition. Women became subjugated to men’s
authority. Rational thought began to dominate over all other types
of intellect.
Laws of Nature
Nature knows the truth, not a speaker trying to convince some naïve
audience that he knows it all. Follow the laws of nature and you win.
Try to conquer or ignore nature and you lose. For the last five thousand
years or so we have come to believe that we are better than nature.
We have broken many natural laws when it comes to child rearing. We
are the only mammalian species on the planet that banishes its children
at night to aloneness and nighttime terror by placing them in cribs
alone. We have forgotten our need to protect our children and practice
a Child’s Bill of Rights.
False Beliefs
Our mind tries to interpret the world around us to help us resolve
our conflicts. When a loved one dies we might create a story that
we were bad and God is punishing us. We try to interpret our natural
world with myths of creation and after-life. Unfortunately our mind
creates many stories that are just not true- according to nature.
The Greeks created the Myth of Cupid shooting a golden arrow to attract
lovers. We know that there is no Cupid. We live much of the time in
the world of magical thinking and false beliefs. It is this type of
thinking that continues to draw us farther and farther away from our
natural world.
Authoritarianism and Magical Thinking
When we lose our Self we lose our ability to trust ourselves. We do
not know what to think or to feel. We look to authority figures to
validate our feelings and thoughts. In the process we give our power
away, keep ourselves in the role of victim, and give up our ability
to question. We become a slave to magical thinking. This type of thinking
is the world of the child. A piece of wood becomes a battleship floating
in the gutter. A ball of mud becomes a cookie. Most of us are still
living in the world of magical thing and authoritarianism.
Repression
When we do not follow natural law we end up repressing. Natural law
is the law of energy. Energy needs to flow. When we damn the river
the water becomes stagnant and the fish die. When we damn our sensory
and emotional experiences because our false beliefs and magical thinking
tells us to do so then we die. Many diseases begin with the repression
of the natural flow of energy and then later become a physiological
manifestation. The higher thinking brain wants to be in control. Natural
law wants us to flow with the moment. Reversing the affects of repression
is at the heart of learning how to heal.
PART TWO
Recovery of
Our Body
The Nature of Stress
Stress is a good thing. Stress keeps us alive in life-threatening
situations. A bus loses its brakes and comes roaring towards us. Through
stress we are able to react quickly to save our life. But our higher
brain has created a library of false beliefs that we believe are life-threatening.
It is these false beliefs that lead to imaginary life-threatening
situations. We are almost always deluged with stress because our brain
will not shut off. Learning to stay in control is what our higher
brain wants us to do. This does not work and only leads to more problems.
The key to health is learning how to relax.
The Physiology of Stress
It’s simple. A machine that is always on and never rests will
end up breaking down. This is also true for us. When we are hyper
alert nearly all of the time we break down. Our adrenal glands become
depleted and our immune system is weakened. We are pumping large amounts
of stress hormones into our system constantly. Stress causes us to
enter into our Fight or Flight stage. We both tighten our body and
brace for attack or we run away, either inside or on the outside.
No matter whether the threat is real or imagined, it does not matter.
Our mind cannot tell the difference and the body will respond in the
same manner.
The Long Term Affects of Stress
Day after day, year after year, stress takes its toll. When we cannot
release the energy from our body we end up storing it. Our body becomes
like a sponge, soaking up the energy that we could not release. Diseases
often happen energetically before they are a physical manifestation.
Our bodies harden and stiffen as our connective tissue binds together
and loses its elasticity. When this happens the energy flowing through
our body becomes stagnant and weakened. Our adrenal glands become
weakened because of constant arousal. We shorten and compress. We
stiffen and weaken. We get sicker more often.
Stress and Disease
Diseases do not just happen. It is estimated that 98% of all disease
is stress-related. So why don’t we begin to address this problem
of stress rather than keep creating another pill or vaccine? It is
the dominance of the left-brain that causes us to create false beliefs
and imaginary life-threatening situations that lead to our stress.
Science is the world of the left-brain. We are still trying to cure
ourselves with that which caused our problem. Disease begins as a
repression of energy. These blocks in energy cause a stagnation to
occur that begins the disease process. Stress is the plaque of our
time. Letting go of rational thought will help to remedy this, not
creating more rational thought as we are doing now.
Our Myths Become Stuck in Our Bodies
False beliefs come to dominate our lives. We have a false concept
of who we are because we have lost our relationship with what is natural-
our Self. A 12th Century Catholic monk writes about the evils of the
body. Eight hundred years later, in a Judeo- Christian based culture,
those fears about sexuality and the body are still rampant. When a
natural feeling or experience comes up we now repress the energy of
expression because our false beliefs tell us that we are bad for having
this feeling. The energy of repression gets stored in your genital
region, perhaps leading to disease, because a man some eight hundred
years ago could not control his sexuality and thus proclaimed the
body as evil.
This is just one example of how our myths get stuck in our body. The
mind will lie, (false beliefs), while the body will tell the truth.
The benefits of being a skilled body worker have enabled me to distinguish
between the lies and the truth.
PART THREE
Recovery
From Addictions
Addictions as a Relationship
In a natural world ruled by natural beliefs instead of false beliefs
after our encounters with a stressful situation we enter into a
state of relaxation. Relaxation, not control, is the natural and
ideal state in which we are supposed to be in most of the time.
But in a world ruled by false beliefs we do not enter into relaxation
after a stressful situation. We use an addiction to numb out the
pain caused by the inability to feel and release our stressful events.
Instead of grieving our losses we turn to alcohol or work addiction
in order to numb out. Addictions are the result of repression of
energy. We have addictions because we are in pain. Addictions are
not about a drug or chemical as most scientists wish us to believe.
Addictions are a relationship with a person, behavior, emotion,
thought, or object that we use to stay numb.
Addictions are the Result of Repression
Energy wants to flow. Emotion means Energy in Motion. But we keep
ourselves damned up. Our cultures, our religions, military training,
governmental policies, schools, and parenting practices all teach
us that it is better to stay in control all of the time than to
express and release. Since we are not taught how to release the
natural expression of energy we are all energetically bottled up.
We choose an addiction based on its availability and on our beliefs
that we use to not feel our pain and release this stored energy
within our body. Addictions are not genetic mutations nor do we
get them from our parents’ biology. We have addictions because
we have been taught not to feel.
Addictions Are Not About Chemicals
So far society is on the scientific path to finding an answer to
why we have addictions. Science cannot answer this dilemma because
science comes from the same source that helped to create the world
of addictions, our dominant left-brain. Science wants to blame a
drug or a chemical when the real reason that we have addictions
is because we have learned how to stay in control all of the time
and repress the natural flow of energy. We have broken natural law
over and over and are trying to blame our problem on a plant or
gene.
Many Types of Addictions
Addictions come in many shapes and sizes. There are “in control
addictions” like anorexia nervosa. There are “out of
control addictions” like alcoholism. There are internal addictions
like thought or emotional addiction. There are also external or
behavior addictions like workaholism or exercise addiction. No two
people have the same addictions. We have many addictions that we
run to throughout the day. We are seldom without our addictions.
Only when we are present with our emotions and sensory experiences
are we free from our world or addictions. This is very rare.
The Myths of Addictions
So much of what we know about addictions is myth. It is one lie
after another that does not follow natural law. Addiction is not
a disease passed down to us from past generations. There is no such
thing as an addictive personality, as many suggest. We are all prone
to addictions. Alcoholism is another myth perpetrated by the medical
community. There is no such thing as positive and negative addictions.
Each society will set up the rules for addiction. Some societies
ban alcohol but instead use hashish and other drugs as the addiction
of choice. Other cultures have the use of alcohol as an addiction
as a national pastime.
The Five Pillars of Recovery
Once again, Recovery is not about learning how to control one’s
thoughts and emotions. Recovery is about learning to dismantle your
addictions, (Pillar #1) one step at a time. We then process our
life with therapy or dialog (Pillar #2). This includes both intellectual
process and emotional process.
Understanding the story of your life is a vital step in Recovery.
Learning how to feel is equally important. Bodywork is critical
to begin to loosen up the energy stored within the body tissues,
(Pillar #3). The less pain that we are in the less addictive we
become. Learning to breathe becomes essential to our healing as
breath moves energy through our body, (Pillar #4). Movement therapy
begins to loosen up our joints and create an opening and non left-brain
experience, (Pillar #5). Together these are remarkable tools in
learning how to Recover. It takes a keen commitment to continue
on the journey of Recovery of the Self.
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