Do You Heal With Energy or Consciousness?

   I’ve been thinking recently (see the smoke coming out of my ears?) about Pathwork Guide Lecture 119: Movement, Consciousness, Experience: Pleasure, The Essence of Life. That’s quite a mouthful of a title, isn’t it? The part of the lecture I’m thinking about are the two ways we process our issues—with our consciousness and with the energy of our bodies (called movement in this lecture). I can see how each can be used as a defense and how each can be a part of our divine essence.

     Consciousness people learn and begin to experience healing via the mind. We think and sort, reason and categorize. I myself feel safe if I can understand what is going on. There is a place in me that feels secure when all the pieces connect, when they seem to fit together well. Perhaps it’s a result of the chaos I grew up in where I never knew what I would find when opened the front door at home. I could only count on there being something different and unexpected. I learned early to rely on myself for everything. So when all the puzzle pieces fit together, it feels good to me.

    Energy people learn and begin to experience healing via the body. There is movement within us that makes the world seem safe, and we find where we fit in that world. The energy moves us through life. I didn’t find my connection to energy until I had been working with Pathwork for a few years. I wanted to learn to open to the way energy moves everything, just like the scientists told us. It’s a way to bypass the thinking and go straight to the heart of the issue.

     In the United States (and probably in many other parts of the world) we tend to be thinkers and many have developed their reasoning abilities while the emotional and energetic parts of us have been neglected. How could we have done differently considering our history? We came from the Bible belt in the South or the Puritans in the North, Midwesterners were concentrating on growing crops and staying alive, and out West the cowboys were focused on keeping up with and rounding up the herds or trapping in the northwest. I could digress into a history lesson, but you know it as well as I do. We learned to obey and turn off the parts of us that we couldn’t see, the parts that were in touch with nature and the moving energy that is inside all beings including plants, animals, and the very Earth itself. The native peoples across the globe knew how to stay in tune with the Earth. Why did we get so scared of it?

     As I now tune into the energy moving through and around me, I am in touch with a knowing, a deep intelligence that is in Mother Earth. I feel my responsibility to tend to the property where I live, to keep this little piece of land as sacred.

     How did I get off on that topic? I was feeling into the two ways we process our issues, through consciousness and through energy. I’ve found  techniques that move the energy through our bodies that can bypass all that thinking. It’s such a waste of time when we use thinking/reasoning/sorting as a defense. It doesn’t make us safe; it only makes us RIGHT! (As if to say: “Nobody can tell me I’m wrong…I have my proof all lined up!”)

     I’ve just returned from teaching in the third year of the Pathwork Transformation Program at our Sevenoaks Retreat Center. (Year 3 is about relationship) I’m amazed and in awe all over again at the absolute miracles that can occur when we surrender to the deepest self, the self that knows what is truth, the self that knows what is next for us, and the self that can risk going for what we want.

     And when I open to that energy, I find amazing healing that enters. Can you feel your potential? What a wonderful opportunity to expand! Come join me in an amazing journey into our own energies.