Love is the perfect medicine

Disease leads to ultimate healing

Everywhere, in almost every magazine, there are a wide range of articles and remedies for dealing with stress and illness. While there’s something useful and informative in each, there seems to be an underlying cause for stress which may be the precursor to all illnesses. Both may be symptomatic of a more fundamental spiritual malady. Perhaps they are the physical and spiritual consequences, manifestations, of living loud techno high speed digital lives out of touch with the soft sweet inner voice of the heart.

Even if the subtle inner voice of the spirit is not heard, it will speak nonetheless; it will insist on being heard until it speaks as stress and illness. If we cannot hear its message in the stress, it will speak through illness.

In holistic terms, the body is the tool and voice of the spirit. The body’s state of health and wellness often reveals the state of the spirit. It can be the voice of the spirit. Carolyn Myss (Anatomy of the Spirit), suggests that illness may even point specifically to what to look for in spiritual terms through specific chakra points in the body. For example, a heart attack occurring in the heart chakra may point to relationship problems as the source of its illness. Each of the seven chakras represent a spiritual / emotional center. Health or illness in those centers may indicate a need to make changes in our lives to bring enlightenment and healing to our total being. So, I suggest that, in fact, stress is not real at all, only the voice of the spirit calling for more attention, more light, more self love. It is the cry of the heart to listen, to hear her drowning in the confusion of an unbalanced life. It is symptomatic of our detachment from our true selves, our blindness to our extraordinary nature as divine beings as well as earthen creatures. It is the sound of the heart crying out, weeping for us to return to our natural selves, to listen to the spirit who so dearly wants to lead in this dance of life.

In quantum terms it may be the end result of responding to false or errant thinking. So, in a sense, there really is no such thing as stress. There is only true thinking and false thinking. There is only being controlled / trapped and powerlessness by false thinking and being autonomous / free and empowered by true thinking. And, perhaps, right thinking is reconnecting to our own heart song, allowing ourselves to feel our essential nature, born in freedom and personal power. Perhaps that is the pearl of great price, buried deep within our hearts and lives. What wouldn’t we pay for it, for real life itself? And, yet we go to such trouble and expense to stifle its deep seated, almost imperceptible, cries for help, for breath, for life.

Our hearts want to sing, and to sing our own songs, dance our own dance, be our own self. If we are in bondage, like any wild thing in captivity, we lose the innate freedom we need to be alive. Oxygen is cut off from our soul and we slowly die inwardly.

When we are free, we are in control of our own soul flight, our own decisions and outcomes. We take risks and suffer or rejoice in the consequences. We do what we want and we say “no” to what we don't want and we value and uphold at all times the personal option to say “no.” We are unlimited and unbounded because we are confident in our right to personal freedom and our ability, based on that right, to say no to what we don't want and yes to what we do want. When we are not controlled by another person or set of circumstances or anything to which we give authority and power to dominate us, we are charged with an exhilarating sense of autonomy, empowerment and purpose. In that unbridled freedom, we are empowered and free to joyfully roam the universe, slip through worm holes and energy vortexes, explore and experience all our minds can imagine. We are alive.

Then, our creativity flows like a ranging river filling us with life, abundant life. We are electrical and magnetic in this state. We reach to heaven and heaven reaches back filling us with joy, power, love and so much peace. Nothing seems to be able to deter this incredible joy and peace. Even our skin takes on a healthy glow; our bodies feel strong and vibrant. We grow in self acceptance, self love, and reach out to everyone with that same energetic love and engagement. We want to dance. We want to sing. We want to love and make love.

We are also super--charged creatively to write, paint, dream, imagine, think, plan, strategize, build hospitals and schools, missions and sand castles with boundless creativity and intentionality. It is as if every atom in our being is electrically charged with power. We expand, we lift up, we ascend, we reach and experience our own divinity because the divine is no longer repressed and squelched by fear and domination by another person or set of circumstances to which we have ascribed power and dominion over us. It is raised up in us, lifting us with its divine power, into life itself. It is unstoppable, unleashing the power of love around us, greening the dead and barren land, flowering the long bare branches of our lives, filling our lives, families, communities and entire world with life, abundant life.

Illness is a call to us to retrieve our power, even our very lives, which we had unwittingly given away, squandered to false beliefs, false power paradigms, little idols, graven images of the real, demons which we had mistaken for God, all these pseudo gods, which they have become. When we retrieve our power by no longer ascribing obedience and authority to other people, institutions, or even thought systems outside ourselves, by forgiving our foolishness, our shallow, empty longing which we filled with nothingness, blind obedience, death’s darkness, we embark on the first leg of the journey to the center of our cosmos.

All that we see around us is perishing except Who is within us. When we have chosen to turn around and retrieve our power from an external person, place or thing, we begin to face inward to our own feelings, ideas, dreams and loves. We begin to honor the call to return to ourselves and incredibly in that call to follow that sweet inner song, we begin to head home to God. As we make a 180 degree turn around, facing inward, away from the world by listening to our bodies’ stresses and illnesses, we will hear our own heart weeping, and in that weeping, we hear God weeping for us to return. As we quiet the noise, turn off the booming, spirit deafening noise of our world, we can hear where we allowed ourselves to be seduced away from ourselves by our fast-paced audio and visual marketplace luring our lives away from us. We then must retrieve our minds from false beliefs and return them to God who waits lovingly and patiently within us to greet us with open arms like the prodigal father.

When we have finally heeded our hearts and spirits and returned to our divine nature and God’s kingdom within us, we have embarked on the right track, “the Way,” as the earliest church called the journey back to God after turning around and away from the world’s deafening death knells. When we focus on God within us, we will never again allow anyone else ever to direct our life. Only God directs our lives and His voice is buried within, even merged with, our own. If we make a mistake, he forgives. But, the greatest and worse mistake we could ever make would be to give over our decision-making to one outside of us, to knowingly enter into bondage. Only fear, based on a wrong thinking pattern, would let us do that. And, that, I am sure is the source of most disease and stress.

All our despair, anxiety, stress and inner pain stems from giving our power away to false beliefs, and too often the belief for men and women is that a mate is the answer to our pain, our loneliness, our lost sense of self identity. We must never hitch our wagon to a another to complete us; neither he nor she is a star, only an idol, a symbol of what we are really searching for, but not the genuine article. The genuine article is ourselves and in ourselves we will find God’s love, incredible passionate embrace unlike any lover’s. However, if you find a mate who knows his or her inner self, and has also turned around and is face to face with God, then you can journey together on the “way” to God within each other and share your life together. That, and only that, would be a true definition of marriage.

I once heard on a Christian radio program that the best definition of marriage is two people standing side by side, facing God together, rather than facing each other. If God in you is the same God within me, and would be since there is only one God, then if you are both facing God, you are indeed facing each other through a truly loving, imperishable lens. A dead end marriage would be one in which only one, or even none, are intentionally conscious of the direction to which they are facing and to whom they are connected. The energy in the spirit is often the measurement. The energy and joy, pouring out of unselfish love, is an indicator. Look for these, not the clothes, the job, the car or the charming gifts and words. Look for the fruits of the spirit. They won’t deceive you. If someone loves you, they love so much more around them also. Look for the love, not the flattery.

Fear-based thinking, instilled in us by an external authority to whom we've been taught to honor and obey, is really only an imaginary state where we are trapped into doing that which we don't want to do. Because of our fear of possible retribution, we are controlled by the belief that we lack something, that we're not enough, incomplete, bad and deserving of punishment and ultimately death. We aren't aware that God within us is what makes us complete. We need nothing else.

God and me and God and you is all there is. Because God in me is the same God in you. So, if I were to fear you, I would be suggesting that God is not within me. If I were to love you, I would be rejoicing in the love shared between God within me and God within you. The former misdirected fear-based thought reveals our belief in God’s love as either something for which to be earned or negotiated and is most certainly conditional. That is a lie. It suggests that we are somehow separate from God. It creates more fear and hiding and fuels unbelief, whereas faith fuels love. By consciously entering into that state of fear, we trade away our birthright - our divine autonomy and authority. We will have denied our own inner light and ascribed more authority to someone else’s light. One with true light would never allow someone to do this and one with true light would never do this. Without our own light to steer us, we grow dim. Slowly we shrink unaware that we are losing the inner power we need to constructively and creatively do those things that give us life and purpose (because we've given it away - or it’s been seduced away from us through insidious manipulation while we were unaware). That state of tension between our longing to live creative lives, full of our own choices, and pleasing others to whom we think we're honoring by giving them our power is the birth place of stress, the road to physical and spiritual weakness and collapse.

If we choose to do what we honestly believe is right for us based on our own internal decision-making, we live in power. We act with kindness and generosity. In this expanded state of consciousness we act on our own principles and what honors us best. And, when we trust ourselves to honor ourselves, we walk tall strengthened by the confidence that we can face any situation, any person, with dignity and nobility and resolve almost any conflict with peace. I truly believe if everyone honored themselves this way and did not give others their power; the world would be a magnificent place full of loving, creative, joyful, powerful people working together in love, rather than in fear. It wouldn't be a world where everyone sabotaged everyone else to steal their power because they themselves felt they lacked power because of this old fear-based thinking.

Personal power rests in that naked awareness that all we need is God. We need NOTHING and NO ONE else. Out of that personal power we are able to love another person because we have a whole self - full of God's love - to offer them. Only free people can love - only people who are not attached to anything outside themselves. That is not to say that we cannot enjoy the fruits of our labors. We don't have to live in cardboard boxes on the street, but our love would spin out into the streets and we would never want another person to live in a cardboard box either. We would reach out to the world in love as we love and honor our own selves.

There is a constant almost neurotic anxiety when we are trapped. In the wild, animals that are trapped will actually bite off a leg to get out of a leg hold trap. Animals will become lethargic and depressed when they're in captivity, picking at their skin. They will either wither or die or they will grow obese with boredom.

I think on a psychological / spiritual level, we become depressed when we have lost our autonomy, become trapped. Freedom brings life and captivity would be its opposite, leading us into a decline. Our little light begins to dim, the stress occurs, and biologically our internal cells begin to struggle for energy. We grow tired, weak, listless, unable to reach into that place within ourselves where we create and live and love in power and joy. We become stunted and certainly that sluggish spirit would result in a sluggish metabolism. But even more insidious, it would launch us on a self destructive journey to dull the pain, dull the boredom and reductionist life experience, to rev our engines which are dying for good reason.

In that spiritual impoverishment, we may reach for those things that help us forget our nightmarish plight. We drink or do drugs. In the intoxicating oblivion we delude ourselves, feeling like kings of our own kingdom, powerful and masterful. But, eventually the mood of powerlessness crawls over us, turns down the inner light, and puts us back in prison where we languish. We live in denial, pursuing the antidote to our powerlessness in even weaker, more addictive, vessels. We have sold ourselves to the devil, giving over more and more power to empty idols, things we worship more than our own inner voice, our own inner sweet song.

Captivity would reduce our physical “vibration” weakening us, making us more vulnerable to even further illness? Slowed, we would decline until we didn’t want to do anything. Even our brains are too tired to think, unmotivated, apathetic. Metaphorically we seem to be asleep at the door when the fox slips in to steal our treasure. We sleep, we lay around, and we reach for things outside ourselves under the misguided idea that we need someone else to direct our lives because we had long ago relinquished our own power and self determination. Only, we didn’t know we did that. So, we go to the doctor for medicine to alleviate the symptoms. Unless the doctor is a shaman or medicine man, he or she won’t have the medicine. Only a freed heart, strung with angelic strings, soaring creatively as high as it can reach would be the right medicine. Set the bird free and it will live, imprison it in the cage and it will dim and die.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says softly, "don't do what you hate." He says, "Be passersby," don’t get too attached to the nightmare some call life. Do not give other people, those others trapped here in this delusional situation, your precious personal power. "Do not throw your pearls before swine." When we really take up our bed, so to speak, and take back our minds, rescue our inner power from anything or anyone outside of us to whom we’ve given authority, healing, joy, hope, life begins to accelerate and expand within us which has obvious external results. Love happens inside and life happens outside. Our very lives are set on fire with joy and life when we embrace His simple wisdom? Do what you love, remain free, and don't be afraid to be true to yourself. You are a pearl of great price. You contain the essence of God, the very source of all wisdom, love, power and creativity. That is who we really are.

When we embrace this knowledge, hitch our hearts to its truth, we will live with the power with which we were designed by God to live, healthy, free, powerful and creative. When we hold on dearly to this right thinking, vigilantly in a state of constant mindfulness, with our lamps lit as the virgins in the scripture’s parable waited for the bride groom, protecting our new mindset like a newborn baby, we are saved from the pit of despair that would steal our joy by enslaving us to false gods around us. It isn't that anyone intentionally tries to steal our joy, or our power, rather people do it unconsciously, blindly, since many are unaware of their puppet lives on the world’s stage. Those who look to their lives in the external world are blind and spiritually not alive. They live their lives by the half light of the shadow and fail to see the brilliance of what their lives could be when lit by God’s heaven within. In the Gnostic gospels, Jesus calls those people corpses, dead men walking. We cannot take their counsel.

We have a greater counselor, a great lover, a bright light and while it only seems to be dim, when we open our inner door, when we set our intention to experience real life by full surrender to God, even admitting all the while that we don’t really understand any of this, but we know that the old way simply doesn’t work and that this new way just may be the way to truth, when we try, simply try and remember to remember, things will change, small maybe, but they will change. We may begin to change our diets, simplify our lives, smile more, say a kind word to a stranger, give a tip at the coffee counter, little things, and then, like a slow burning log on the fire, suddenly the fire returns to our souls, and we are ignited and alive. No sickness, no depression, nothing short of joy and life can live in that blaze of glory.

“You are the Sky, not the Clouds” *

As we spin and toil in our lives, responding to each and every squeaky wheel that enters our days, months and years, sometimes we forget that our existence is so much more than these small challenges or even the big ones. Our souls are eternal, as eternal as the sky, and these cares and concerns, worries over the illnesses that bring us here, or the tragedies, even, that enter our lives, are like clouds passing through. If we can remember that we are not alone – not alone in that endless sky – that there is a God who loves us and that somehow, in some incomprehensible way, our lives are part of that larger schema of existence.

I sat with a Muslim woman earlier this week whose unborn baby had died.

She said to me, “I don’t dare question God as to why this is happening, but I’m very sad over it anyway.” I just marveled at her faith and her courage to admit her grief and yet accept that God’s ways are not our ways, to enter into that challenging place of not knowing why something is happening and yet accept it at the same time. In that acceptance, even her struggle for acceptance, was her faith and her connection to God in the midst of her suffering.

Together, she and I considered Job’s affirmation: “The lord giveth, the lord taketh away. Praise be to God.”

Sometimes soft billowy, angel-like clouds dance through our lives and sometimes rain clouds turn into monstrous storms that pull down powerlines, blow off roofs, flood valleys, drowning some of us and in the midst of those storms, we forget that we are so much more than the things that happen to us. What are we to make of that? I don’t know exactly, but I do know that Eckhart Tolle is right, we are the sky, not the clouds and we need to somehow draw strength from that awareness and not lose ourselves in the storm clouds.

The challenge for so many of us is to not be so distracted by the storms that rage through our lives so that we can’t hear the soft whisper of God. It is remembering that our real lives are in God and that all that happens to us, even the very tragic things are under God’s control. Since we know that God loves us, somehow we can accept these clouds knowing that eventually the sun will come out to dry up all our tears.

* quote from Eckhart Tolle