A Discussion on the Nature and Science of Healing

It is becoming clear to me that there is a notable ‘shift’ going on in our collective consciousness. Just a few decades ago when I was first looking into energy medicine and healing practices there was not a lot of information out there and not a lot of people practising it. Crystals were the preserve of the Glastonbury set and children of the 60s and 70s - a bit ‘hippy’, a bit ‘far out’, a bit ‘silly’. Images of women in floaty long flowery dresses and men with big beards and long hair always came to mind, together with the waft of incense and marijuana.

Oh how things have changed in recent years! Slowly, slowly, after an era of rapid technological and scientific advancement, we are wearying of a consumer driven way of life. Conspicuous consumption is no longer cool. Eco-living is now high on the world agenda as we suffer the worrying realities of climate change, waste management and our over-reliance on plastics. Taking responsibility for our decisions both as individuals and as a global society is suddenly the smart thing to do, understanding how our choices can drive positive change. We are learning to appreciate once more the wisdom of our forefathers, their immersion in and connection to the world they lived in - our world, which we are trying so hard to trash. We are learning that being glued to screens all day is not good for your health and wellbeing, that working absurdly long hours cooped up in an office and spending hours of our lives on commuter trains and in cars is neither healthy for us or for the planet. We are learning that stress is not something to boast about - that it can actually kill us by triggering dis-ease within our bodies which then manifests itself in physical symptoms of ill-health from cancer to strokes, to diabetes and heart attacks, to auto-immune diseases and chronic depression. We are learning that we can no longer continue with the arrogant and misguided belief that we are ‘separate’ and ‘above’ the other creatures on the planet - that from the tiniest microbe to the largest mammal we are all part of the same ecosystem, and that our arrogance will be our downfall, our humility our saviour. 

If you take a universal perspective on this, a cosmic overview shall we say, it is easy to get the right perspective on things. As a planet, as a humanity, we are a blink in the eye of the life of the Universe. Until we learn that lesson of humility and perspective I fear we will continue to bury our heads in the sands of our little individual lives worrying about nothing but our own individual needs. 

However, from the macro perspective, to the micro - because as with everything in life and the universe everything has its equal opposite. While we may seem a meaningless dot in the big picture, it requires a lot of small dots to create that big picture. We are like a pixel on your television screen - without millions of tiny pixels you have no picture! So to that extent, each of our individual lives is valid. We all have meaning and we all contribute to the big picture. And how do you want that picture to look? Would you like it to be beautifully balanced in colour, tone and quality? Or would you like it to be off-balance and blurry and hard to see what’s going on? I think I know the answer…

With that analogy in mind, do you start to see how we all have validity just by existing, but that we need to make that existence the best it can be - be the best person we can be, be the best contributor to the bigger picture that we can be? There will be some of us who will make big strides in this department and will become famous for them - Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Plato, Isaac Newton, Homer, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart to name a few! And there will be some of us who simply focus on being kind, generous, loving and giving to those around us or performing key roles in society like teachers, doctors, nurses and waste collectors - the ‘key workers’ of these Covid times. The point is, we all have our part to play, however big or small, in the overall ‘health’ of society and the planet we all call ‘home’. We all know how living in a messy, mucky, unloved home can impact your mood and your health (the basis of Feng-shui) - so surely this is the same for Planet Home? The Earth is not a happy place at the moment because for too long now we have not been loving it properly, caring for it properly or respecting it properly. We have used and abused it, neglected its hierarchy of needs and forced it into a dysfunctional state of imbalance and disharmony. Just as we each need to take responsibility for our own health and home, so we need to take responsibility for the mess we are making on Planet Earth and the planetary ill-health which has ensued. 

And so I come to the trickiest bit: universal Life Force energy. Through my research as well as my own experiences, I have come to understand this as part Pure Unconditional ‘Divine’ Love, part Universal Wisdom. Pure Unconditional Love is the highest vibrational form of energy that exists. This is the gift of the Universe and we ignore it at our peril. It is this, combined with Universal Wisdom (in the Quantum world this relates to the Zero Point Field, but more on that another time), that I regard as the universal life-force energy which Reiki (pronounced Ray-key) taps into for energetic healing. Rei is translated as the wisdom and knowledge of all the Universe, the Higher Intelligence that guides the creation and functioning of the Universe and Ki is the life-force energy which flows through every living thing - plants, animals and people - and is also present in some form in rocks, crystals and inanimate objects as their matter is all held together by energy bonds. If you tune into this energy and direct it with respect, humility and pure unconditional love in your heart and mind, it has the extraordinary ability to heal all things - or at least to trigger the necessary shifts to start the healing process. And so we come full circle to personal responsibility - you have to want to heal, you have to want to allow the healing energy in to allow the healing process to begin. As conscious humans this can be difficult - the logical, sceptical modern scientific mind wants to block such things. Our forefathers had less difficulty being humble in the face of the universe and the world in which they lived as they were more a part of it rather than being separated from it as we have become in the modern world. From the Celts to the Native Indians and beyond, they were all tuned into healing practices using this life-force energy, this connection to Nature and the Universe. This is why Reiki works so well on animals - they do not have that human mind which blocks such things. They are already connected and can allow that healing energy in. 

But to end where I began this post: from my observations of books, the media, consumer habits and general talking points, it is clear that we are beginning to re-connect with Nature and the Universe once more and have a renewed appreciation of our place in it. The key difference between the modern world and the ancient world is that this time around science, through studies in Quantum Mechanics and all its associated fields, is starting to prove and therefore aid our understanding of how energy healing has not just a metaphysical aspect to it, but also a physical, science-supported one. There is much more to learn, of course, but we’ve made an excellent start.