A Short Healing Meditation

You are re-connected to your true nature.

You are re-aligned with your life’s purpose.

You are re-grounded in the ground of all being.

And in so being,

You are healed,

Made whole, and

Set free.

Commentary

Shortly after completing a PhD that was the culmination of 8 years of an excellent, analytical, Western European education (I completed a dissertation on Shakespeare and Milton), I began studying psychic and spiritual healing as a way of encountering other worldviews, developing different personal skills, and getting in touch with other dimensions of being. My training had been good but intensely focused, and I wanted to explore what lay beyond it.

This meditation is based on one I learned from a group called “Teachings of the Inner Christ,” one of many such groups that flourished during the 1970s in California. Over the years, I have simplified the original, removed its superstructure of esoteric beliefs, and distilled it to what I find to be its core meaning.

Its creators used the original meditation as a way of healing disembodied spirits who were unhappily bothering the living, struggling to find their way in the great unknown. As I worked with the meditation, it came to mean something more general — a kind of healing thought that might be applied to everyone, everywhere, at any time.

I never adopted the metaphysics of the original. But, as is so often the case, beneath the complexities and hierarchies of the “Inner Christ” worldview, I found something simpler and more human.

I offer that to you — with a tentative commentary on what I understand this meditation to mean.

You are re-connected to your true nature.

One key cause of human difficulty can be described as separation from our true selves.

This thought requires you to consider — or at least imagine — that you have a true self. And that implies that you have more than one self, with one such self larger, more central, more human than the others.

Perhaps we each have one true soul. Or perhaps we have, as Jung seems to have thought, not a defined soul or a fixed self, but a “self-function” within us — an active function that seeks to unify us, to take all the conflicting parts of our experience and integrate them into a single whole.

To many, this Self is something eternal and unchanging that we are born with, and it travels through time — moving from time to eternity, perhaps migrating into other incarnations along the way.

It seems more likely to me that the Self is something that grows and changes as we live, something that becomes more complex and more complete as our lives progress. In this sense, the Self is something that happens partly outside our control, influencing us, influenced by us, something we value and nourish and cultivate, and are nourished by.

I suspect that the Self, our true nature, is something we partly discover and partly create. We find it; yet we also help to make it. It is inside us. Yet, in a surprising sense, we are inside it.

I have come to glimpse this Self at times as something that I live inside of. What I know of myself from day to day, year to year, seems to exist inside a vast, kind, wise, creative being that, from time to time, takes my smaller selves in hand and shows us how to live better.

Like all inner guidance, using it requires humility, reverence, and caution. It is not always easy to distinguish between the voice that urges your spirit to fly and the voice that urges your body to leap off a cliff.

You are re-aligned to your life’s purpose.

Like me, you may not have often felt that your life had one single purpose — yet this line in the meditation has real power. It helps focus you on what really matters.

We are surrounded by options, especially in the lavish choices of a consumer society. Everywhere we look, something calls out to us: Do this! Buy this! Think about this! Read this! Become outraged over this!

And we don’t have to look: Options aggressively seek us out, as advertisements, news, opinions, belief systems, worldviews, companions, or our own spontaneous impulses.

Some of these options are more truly yours than others are. Some things, when you do them or feel them or believe them, make you more whole. Some bring a deeper, richer life than others do.

Those lead you toward your life’s purpose, or purposes, or path. And your life’s purpose is not an option among many, not a choice from a menu, not a product in a catalog, but rather something you create, and are created by.

Whatever form it takes, your life’s purpose includes creating. And what you create always includes, and is founded upon, creating yourself, your Self. For it is in action, creating, moving through the world, that we express our life’s purposes and gain the experiences from which our Self miraculously begins to assemble a wholeness that, never complete, is never exactly incomplete either.

We may not succeed fully in our life’s purposes, but in working to create them, we have a chance of making the world a better place, and we gain the kind of lived experience needed to grow a Self.

You are re-grounded in the ground of all being.

This is a powerful line. As you celebrate the true nature of your emerging Self and support yourself in reaching into this confusing world, you find that you are connected still more deeply and widely that you can imagine.

There is a mystery larger than ourselves, larger than our Self, from which we derive our being. It is helpful, even practical to think that all things derive their being from this source. Perhaps the ground of being is a luminous thing, perhaps it is God. But perhaps it is a vast sea of process, a universe of change and interrelationship and transformation.

Perhaps one shining part of us travels back to this source for an eternity. Perhaps it returns only to return again, as yourself in another form.

Perhaps our smaller selves and even our wiser Self all dissolve and lose their identities, all return to processes so vast we humans can only think of them as eternal and infinite. If all that we are reverts to the molecules and atoms our bodies are made of, those continue to transform into other forms of being.

I used to think it mattered whether my identity survived death, but now that seems less important. For in this ground of being everything arises, and to it everything returns, like space that is at once empty yet filled with the energy of potential being.

From one perspective, it is a scary prospect to lose your identity, even to lose the larger identity your Self has created out of your conscious and unconscious life.

But in another sense, it is not so scary, for what is there to fear? Who is being lost? What can be lost, when you move back into the dance of which everything is a part? If that is our music, let us sing it with joy.

The beauty of this meditation is that it celebrates the ground of being, and our relationship to it, as a positive, a healing, a creative thing.

And in so being,

You are healed,

Made whole,

And set free.

Here, reconnected to your true nature, affirming the value of your actions in the world, celebrating the vast song that sings us all into being, you seek whatever healing is available to you on this earth.

You seek healing by making peace with the pieces of yourself, the pieces of your life. It is the wholeness that comes from accepting all that you are, all that you have done, all that you can do, and accepting that it adds up.

It adds up to you.

You have not failed to be somebody else. You have succeeded in being uniquely who you are.

You have not failed to do what you should have done. You have succeeded in doing what you did.

Accepting yourself so kindly and forgivingly does not excuse anything. And it does not blame anything. And it does not authorize you to continue with any action that goes against your true nature. Rather, you can accept yourself because, no matter how much or how little time is left to you, you are re-aligned with your life’s purpose, which includes cultivating that inner garden where the Self can grow. And from which you can act — constructively, creatively, with others, in the world. If only for one single luminous moment.

And set free.

One thing that makes us un-free is the mass of complications that arise when we are not connected to our true natures, not aligned with our life’s purposes.

In this reactive state, we struggle with ourselves. We struggle with the world. We project upon the world all our unfinished selves and fight with ourselves in the form of other people, other things that we project our inner conflict onto.

Freedom comes in turning away from reactivity to return to activity. Reactivity bounces off others, off the world, and immerses us in a dream-world of struggle or false glory.

Activity is what we do when we are aligned, when we are connected, when we draw from our true natures, advance our life’s purposes. You are free. You are free because you are not entangled with your own imaginings, enmeshed in reactive relationships, but acting as best you can from the wholeness of your being.

Can everything be healed? — I do not know. For a healing meditation to have even a small effect, you probably need to believe that it can have far greater effect. No one can walk a short distance on a straight line without imagining that line extending far beyond where you are. Though we do not sail to them, we navigate our little boats by the stars.

This meditation is for spiritual healing. How much it heals the body or the world no one can say. It guides you toward a shift in perspective, toward a place where you no longer struggle with (and perpetuate) problems you may have co-created. Toward a place from which you might act anew, freshly, creatively, expressing in some way your true nature, your life’s purposes, the greater wholeness of which you are a part.

Toward a place where you might feel more connected, re-aligned, re-grounded, whole, healed, and free.

You are re-connected to your true nature.

You are re-aligned with your life’s purpose.

You are re-grounded in the ground of all being.

And in so being,

You are healed,

Made whole, and

Set free.

Gerald Grow is a retired professor of journalism. More at www.longleaf.net. Abstract photograph, “Advent,” by the author.