The healer within

As was mentioned somewhere before, the author of this post was an ardent atheist at one stage and was not even into his teens then. This lasted for some years. It was my belief that every thing in the world should have a rational explanation. It was a period of blissful ignorance. I might have thought like Max Bonn “philosophy is over in next six months”. But as years passed my once unshakable belief in the predictability of the world and its events underwent a slow change. Not that I became a believer in the sense it is used in the west, no, even now I do not strictly believe in an entity called the God. But I became aware that there are other options, there are other avenues of inquiry even without the help of god. There are systems in which you can even deny the existence of god and then make use of his help too! This statement might appear obscure or absurd to some of you, for there are really only two accepted world views in philosophy, the materialism and the Idealism. There is also a thing called the dualism, well there is that in everything. I know that there could be dozens of branches to these broad streams of thought, but for the purpose of this article these would suffice. You are either a materialist or an idealist. You either believed in god or you did not.
To tell you frankly, even in India where these things are a part of life such abstruse philosophy is not understood generally. You need to do some hard thinking and unlearn what you have learned up to then to get an inkling of what the truth is. This requires patience and some hard mental labor. Anyway the point is that there are grey area’s where different thought streams meet and is understood as one. This is important in what I am going to put down in the next few lines. All the basics can not be explained in a few lines of writing, so I would not be attempting that. Instead I shall try to out- line the methods of healing as is understood by those who wanted to help humanity to over come their sufferings. In this effort I shall consciously try to avoid any mention of the divine and the miraculous for they have become taboo in some sectors.
This world is full of suffering and if any one or anything can bring relief we should not care through what channel it comes. But we do care do we not? Even with ever broadening horizons of human awareness we tend to label some events as mysterious and impossible. Yet when we have nothing to loose and everything to gain by making use of some technique to make us well we should do so, or that is what I believe.
Some of you might have heard of spiritual healing, to me it is nothing but a wise application of your own potentialities to cure yourself and others. We are an inseparable part of the universe; all the potentialities visible in it are contained in a germinal form in us too. If man is the microcosm the universe is the macrocosm. This fact was implicitly believed in by all those who attempted to heal themselves and others. In old Tantric texts these dual concepts are termed as the Unda (egg) and Pinda (mass). They took both as the same. In a more subtle sense there is not two at all, there is only one. This is philosophy and is abstruse, but the modern science has also begun to realize this, quantum mechanics has opened up new areas of understanding and now science is not sure whether what we perceive is real or not. Even the belief in the continuity of matter has been discarded, and our conceptual frame work has been considered as inept to understand reality in the sub-atomic level.
In such an age of confusion it would be a steadying influence to consider the older concepts of humanity, not those that either adamantly deny or credulously approve god, but those that have helped mankind in lessening the suffering. In the texts of Yoga mind is taken as the creator and preserver of the world. More explicitly the mind is the world. It is what we see as the ‘different’ and the ‘one’. In the sphere of the mind there is nothing unreachable and distant. In fact there is no distance between you and the stars; all is contained within the same thing. But the mind is not god. It is in fact a servant, a servant of the intellect or more precisely the servant of your consciousness. This fact has to be grasped before you can heal any of your afflictions. There is an important difference in the western and eastern concepts of mind. In the west mind is still understood as a part of consciousness and is thus considered as alive. But in the east it is taken as Jada (inanimate). Hence it can be treated as any other objects in the world. You can even order it about. But to do that you need to do a bit of work. Yoga attempts to teach you how to do this.
As the mind is subservient to the intellect it can be controlled with your thoughts. Hatha Yoga teaches you a technique to do it. It is the technique of Pranayama. All changes in our moods affect our respiratory process. This is a well known fact to discuss it any further. Pranayama tries to reverse the process. The attempt is to control the mind by controlling your respiratory process. By filling your lungs to the full and holding the air in you relieve the lungs and the heart temporarily from the constant toil that they are engaged in. This releases a form of usable energy. This energy could be directed to any body parts you wish by imagination and will power. Let me tell you that there is more to it than this but those practices require proper training and supervision. Yet any man or woman willing to learn proper breathing techniques can be a healer. The only thing needed is to breathe properly. Breathe in deep and keep on doing it. The mere increase in the level of oxygen in your body will quicken your natural healing process. If you can couple it with a conscious process of directing the excess energy to those parts of the body which are ill, it would bring about a marvelous change.
As you go on practicing the deep breathing technique all through your waking hours (you should not tire yourself by filling the lungs to the bursting point every time-Just breath deep that would be enough for the purpose.) you will notice the changes yourself. Also new ways of using the energy would become revealed to you, not by any one else but by your own understanding. You might even become able to send it out of you to others to relieve them of their pains. But even if you become capable of doing this you should exercise extreme caution in doing it. By holding your breath in and visualizing that the energy is being sent out to others and to any of their body parts you can accomplish a cure sometimes. But our energy always are colored by our personality and unless we are fully sure that our thought structure, character, beliefs, moods and everything is healthy and clean we should never attempt to do such cures. With the energy that we are transmitting these other aspects of our personality would be transmitted. This could harm the other person and might even stall their psychological evolution.
In a nut shell by controlling the respiratory process you control prana the life force and would have a supply of this life force to cure your ailments. It is easy as hell once you set your mind to it, or rather your thought to it. Practice till perfect and good luck with it.