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HEALING YOURSELF A Chapter from the Upcoming Book OPENING TO HEALING ENERGY Channeled from Michael by Shepherd Hoodwin

 

[To Specific Individuals]

(NOTE: Triple-spacing indicates a new passage.)

 

 

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT COMMITMENT

 

We suggest that you make a one hundred percent commitment, whatever course you choose, to open to your own healing power. You do not have to believe that you will be successful in eliminating your disease. You cannot know that in advance anyway, but that is not part of the commitment, which is simply to open to your healing power, and finding out what it does. Until you have the experience, it is all theory. Knowing that someone else healed himself of a so-called fatal disease does you no good unless you find out for yourself if that is possible for you.

How do you open to your healing power? Make the commitment one hundred percent, and you will be guided. There are many techniques you can use, but techniques alone do not do the job. It is your intent to heal that is central. You will not have the intent if you do not first have the commitment.

 

We are not suggesting that you try to do more than you can do and overexert yourself. There are many things you can do to support your healing, and you should do everything you can. But your commitment is not to doing, primarily, but to opening to your healing power, which you can let happen all the time. Out of that commitment you will naturally choose those techniques that will best support what your healing power is working on at any given time.

 

When you cut your finger and it heals, how does that happen? Does the bandage you put on it heal it? How about the antiseptic--does that heal it? Who heals your finger? You do. Your healing power heals your finger, although the bandage and antiseptic may support that healing. Support your healing in any way you can that feels right to you. If you listen in your heart, you will know the best way for you to do that at any given time. You can meditate, visualize, do affirmations, and pay attention to your breathing. You can improve your nutrition so that your healing power has some more raw materials. You can receive ozone therapy, acupuncture, and other holistic therapies. You can receive additional healing energy through energetic healers using techniques such as Reiki and Johrei. You can work with a therapist to explore and release your blocks. You can use crystals to cleanse your atmosphere and promote conducive vibrations. Healing your body is your full-time "job" at this time. However, you do not need to try to do everything, because it is not fundamentally a matter of techniques; it is a matter of opening to your healing energy in everything you do.

 

 

The reason your body is not healed now is that various things have distracted you from concentrating on your own healing energy--your pain, your fears, and so forth. That is understandable, but it is in your best interests to learn to concentrate on receiving your healing energy, even while you are undergoing medical treatment.

 

 

Almost everyone has a part of himself that would rather die than accept full responsibility for living.

 

 

A strong desire to live, even if it is unconscious and is somewhat interfered with by the conscious mind, can keep a person's body alive when it otherwise would not survive. A fully conscious commitment to living is all the stronger.

 

 

You cannot expect to reach a high level of spiritual attainment overnight, but you can firmly plant yourself on the path. Struggling, trying too hard, judging yourself about not being where you want to be, or "fighting your way to the top," as they say, do not aid inner attainment; on the contrary, they get in the way. However, full commitment is necessary.

 

 

Your primary responsibility is not first and foremost to do anything. It is to be, to be the healing source you are. It is easy to be. It is sometimes hard to do, especially when the doing does not spring from being.

 

 

See yourself as a person who is taking primary responsibility for healing himself, someone whose healing power is always flowing. For instance, when you feel pain in your arm, think of yourself as someone who is healing his arm. The opposite of that is feeling like a helpless victim, which, of course, detracts from healing.

 

 

THE PERFECT PATTERN

 

Think of your illness as simply an opportunity to bring forth the perfect pattern that is present with you in spirit, as opposed to a force all on its own. Instead of focusing on what it is not, develop your picture of what could be and what truly is, but is not yet in manifestation. It is rather like an artist who has in mind what he wants to create, but because he has not finished, his canvas temporarily looks like a mess. When it is finished, it will be beautiful. So create a vision, an artistic vision, of what you want your body to be, which is what it already is in spirit.

 

 

Take responsibility for being the healer you are. Ultimately, everyone is a healer because everyone is a creator. Everyone participated in creating his physical body. The body is continually recreated along the lines of the consciousness held in the body. Your essence has a consciousness of you as being healthy. If your mind tries to hold a different consciousness, it is in conflict with your essence and gets in your essence's way.

 

 

Love is the highest reality, not the state of one's body. Many people believe that their bodies are the only reality, and that sometimes causes them to become desperate and out of balance when they are seriously ill.

 

Love for yourself, for your own being, helps you open to the healing power of the love you are. Other people's love is a wonderful support, and can remind you of love, but love is really what you are. Love is the basic element of the universe, and out of that element your body was created in the first place. Love flowing freely can easily recreate your body into health. It is vital that you love your body, that you not blame it for what has been happening and all that you have been going through. It is vital that you not feel like a victim of your body, but instead take the position of the one providing the love that it needs to heal. You can easily do this.

 

THE PURPOSE OF ILLNESS

Your illness is a tool you are using to heal your consciousness, to come more fully home to yourself. If you were not capable of this healing, you probably would not have manifested the illness to begin with.

 

 

Illness can be a blessing. There are people who never get a serious illness, but they are never happy because their beliefs limit them. Your illness is not an evidence of failure. It is an indication that you were ready to change your beliefs. You could no longer live with them, so you brought forth these symptoms. What was there all along became dominant--not to punish yourself, but to be healed. You would not have known that you had these beliefs if something had not stopped you in your tracks.

 

THE NATURE OF HEALING

The integration of positive and negative is healing. Sickness is their separation. Rather than trying to supplant negative with positive, become aware of the higher reality (positive) and let that embrace and include the lower reality (negative). Feel fully the quality of the lower reality in the presence of the higher. This results in a decrease in fear and an increase in love.

 

Working with a serious illness is difficult--it can be a very frightening lower reality. If someone seriously ill is to experience a different scenario than the one that would be inevitable if the lower reality were left on its own, he must open to the higher reality, the highest of which is love. Opening fully to love is your healing. Your physical healing is your body's opening fully to love.

 

 

Healing energy is love. Your divine love for your children is healing for them, but it is also healing for you. The most loving gift you can give your children is to open to your own healing source. That is the only place you have what you want to give them. But if you do not receive it into your own body, if you try to have it somehow bypass you to get to them, you miss the point. Loving yourself is loving others, just as loving others is loving yourself.

 

 

As you open to your wholeness and experience the power of love, your body seems less significant to you; it does not dominate your consciousness. Paradoxically, it heals more easily, because love is the healer. When you focus on your body negatively, it becomes burdened and pressured.

 

 

When you generate an atmosphere of healing, what your body does step by step to heal will be what it needs to be. Some days things will look better, some days worse, but it is all part of the process.

 

 

Healing does not come from a bottle, although there are substances that are useful to support healing. Healing is a force. You are the healing force.

 

DOING THE WORK

You do not have to believe. All you need is to do the work. You will get better at doing the work as you practice. The work is easy work, the work of letting, but you do have to devote yourself to it.

 

How much time?

 

Only twenty-four hours a day! But how much conscious time? As much as you can. The more time you give to it, the better. When you are doing enough consciously, you will establish a momentum that moves your progress forward without your having to push it continually. If you notice that the ball had stopped rolling, so to speak, when you return to conscious work, you know you need to put in more time. If, while resting in bed, you invested five or ten minutes every hour in affirmations, visualization, meditation, inspirational reading and listening, and so forth, that would probably be quite helpful. Ask yourself what would be the highest healing gift you could give yourself at any given moment. You do not need to establish a rigid regimen. Make it fun and creative.

 

The more work you do, the quicker your progress will be. If you do not believe in it fully, just see it as an experiment--you have nothing to lose. If you are successful, you can even believe, in the end, that medical science cured you--it does not matter what you believe that cured you.

 

You could not be present unless there was power present. It required a great deal of power to bring your body and consciousness into form. There is power present simply because you are present. You are learning to open more fully to your positive power as a creator. It took you a while to create your present condition. It will not necessarily take a long time to create a new condition, but it will take some time. Healing always begins from where you are. If right now you are in a weak state, you start healing from there. It may take longer than if you were in a healthier state, but the point is that you start now.

 

The most important factor in your healing is changing the beliefs that caused your present condition. These include the belief that you do not deserve healing, that you must be suffering because you deserve to be, that you have to be punished, and so forth. If you notice when you are coming from those beliefs, you can begin to change them. It does not take faith to change them--they do not make any sense to begin with; they are not logical. You simply need to see them clearly and assert the truth.

 

 

Ultimately, you do not even have to trust the healing force. All you need to do is to deliberately get out of its way. Although you do not need to trust it, you need to not distrust it. You can be neutral about it. You can take the attitude that you do not know if it will work, as long as you let it be there. Distrust is active--it stops the flow. But having no opinion about whether it will work will not interfere. Likewise, a lack of belief is not a problem if you do not actively disbelieve. It is a matter of being open, not to something foreign, but to what is.

 

 

Discerning energies is not the point. As you listen for them, your discernment will grow. You are experiencing them, whether you fully recognize them or not. Lack of discernment is not a major stumbling block. You open when you simply hold the intent to open. You can only do that in the present moment. Simply affirm, "Right now, I open," and feel yourself being quiet and receiving. If nothing else, concentrate on your breathing, and just keep feeling open. This is not really difficult. Even though it requires focus, it is a natural and easy process.

 

 

The only escape is through opening. You might think that death is an escape, but it is not. You would have to deal with the same issues even if you were free of your body. True, you would not have your body's pain, but your body to some degree is reflecting your consciousness, and you carry your consciousness with you. If you do not learn to open, you will likely recreate your pain in a future lifetime. So it behooves you to learn to open, which is actually not so hard to do.

 

 

As long as you take action only in response to crises, you are supporting the belief that nothing is done until there is a crisis, which, of course, encourages crises to occur. Instead, we recommend that you take initiative to plan a program to deliberately build health. The medical approach is reactive; the holistic approach is active, taking the steps to create the reality you wish to create.

 

There are many ways to deal with issues. When you deal with them unconsciously, it is usually a slower process than facing them head-on. Sometimes people spend a lifetime dealing with issues unconsciously, occasionally while institutionalized. Their brains may not be consciously operating at all, but they are still processing their issues.

 

The lack of willingness to consciously work on one's issues is largely the reason people grow through pain instead of joy. Some people resist dealing with their issues at all, even if not dealing with their issues kills them. There has to be willingness in order to process them. Commonly, people do not learn until not learning becomes too painful. They wait to be forced into dealing with their issues because the issues have come to a head. You can avoid many problems if you deliberately open and do what you know you need to do before you reach that point.

 

 

When you are retraining yourself to live from your wellspring, at first it feels more like a discipline than something natural. In truth, you are already there, but you must "pretend" you are there until you can consciously experience it. The more you relax, trust, let go, and be in the present moment, the more you sense and align with it, until you "wake up one morning" and realize that you are there. You back into it, so to speak. You cannot move forward into it because it is not in front of you--it is within you. It is natural to experience being in your wellspring, and unnatural (although common) to experience being out of it.

 

AN EXERCISE

Bring a caressing quality of self-healing to all the parts of your body, one part at a time. It is probably not wise to start where you have pain, because it will tend to distract your concentration. When most of your body feels caressed and warm, include the parts of your body in pain. Finally, feel yourself caressing your whole body at once.

 

LEVELS OF SELF

When one part of you experiences healing, it helps the other parts of you to heal. If your body is strengthened through more appropriate diet, for instance, it can encourage healing in your emotions. One reason is that when your body is stronger, it is less of a drain on your energy. Therefore, you can more easily bring emotional issues to the fore and work on them.

 

 

When your physical body is weak or in distress, it tends to most affect your emotional body, which is closest to it. If your emotional body becomes distressed, it can affect your intellectual body, making it more difficult to keep your thoughts aligned with your true purpose. That can dissipate the energy of your spiritual, or innermost, body. Healing offered to any level of yourself can be beneficial and can help reverse this downward momentum, but working directly with your spiritual body can be especially helpful. Your spiritual body connects you with your essence. The more your spiritual body is developed, the more you can receive your essence's healing power. That can have a "trickle down" effect, helping your intellect become clearer, your emotions calmer, and your body stronger. Your spiritual body is your most general but most significant influence in your life.

 

 

If you hold clear thoughts, your emotions will be able to respond above themselves to these clear thoughts, rather than being dragged down so much by the weakness of your body. That will help you strengthen your body.

 

TRUST

If it were such an easy thing for you to fully trust your healing power, you would not be sick to begin with. So this is an important issue for you.

 

 

Letting go of your anxieties about your health can help you actually have the health you desire. However, it takes trust, not trusting something outside of you, but trusting yourself and the universe, of which you are part. When you feel that you have to control everything in your life, that it has to be thus-and-so for you to feel safe, it is because you have not yet developed trust in the universe, or what some people call trust in God. Whatever you call it, it is a knowledge that the universe is beneficent, that no matter what the temporary appearance may be, there is a basic goodness to life, and that things work according to a process you can trust. That is the trust that will allow you to stop clutching. You live in a universe full of healing power. Your task is to open to it. When you do, it brings healing.

 

When you look at your children, you can see the fundamental goodness of the universe. Children bring issues into the world with them, so they are not necessarily completely open to life, but they do not have very well developed intellects to get in their way so much, which is why they are so radiant. You can rest in the goodness of the universe. Assume that it will take care of you. That does require deliberate action on your part--it is not passive--but it does not require forcing anything. It is choosing what is natural. It is choosing to go with the flow of energy instead of against it. It is choosing to focus your attention on cause rather than on effect. The cause of healing is this universal goodness. Your symptoms are effects of your lack of trust in that.

 

Focusing on what is not there only robs you of precious time you could be using to focus on what could be there if you open to it. Those who recover from life-threatening diseases are often blessed for the rest of their lives by what they learned during the challenge. In many tribes, those who aspire to be leaders must go into the wilderness on their own and meet a challenge. They come back from that challenge capable of doing what they came on earth to do. We do not underestimate the challenge of physical pain and the thought of death--it is probably the biggest challenge a person could have. If you are able to trust in the face of this most difficult challenge, you will have the lesson of trust down pat. It will be something that can never be taken from you.

 

During this illness, you have been pulled along by effects rather than firmly coming into the place of cause. Affirmations are one way to deliberately come into a place of cause, because in an affirmation you are stating what you wish to cause. Be careful that you do not become wrapped up in what you do not want. If you are coming from fear, you will be causing from a negative place. Rather than affirming "I do not want to die," instead affirm "I choose to live." Embrace life rather than running from death. This is a very significant distinction: come not from desperation but from the knowledge of healing power.

 

LETTING GO

There are two parts of healing. One is letting go of the old, and the other is bringing in the new. You cannot bring in too much of the new until you dispose of what is in the way.

 

Ask yourself what would happen if you let go, or what the worst thing that could happen would be if you let go. Answering those questions can help you see what is in your way.

 

Sometimes people losing weight find that the last five pounds are the most difficult. Similarly, the last letting-go can be the toughest.

 

We are not suggesting that you do something, but that you simply allow what is normal to occur. When you cut your skin, for example, the natural, normal thing is for it to heal, but you have to stop cutting it. You are "cutting" yourself with some harmful beliefs. By letting go of them, you are simply getting out of your own way so that healing can occur. That takes deliberate action, but not forcing anything, trying, or struggling. It takes being mindful, noticing what you are doing, so that when what you are doing is not beneficial, you can allow yourself to be in a more natural, open way. Nothing in nature is tight or closed down. A plant never stops the flow of life force in it. It has no intellect that can choose to shut down. Human beings are blessed with the capacity to make choices. You can choose to shut down, but you can also choose to open. If you had deeply made that choice in the past, opening would be automatic, but when you are changing a choice, it takes practice and time to reinforce it.

 

 

There are some things you cannot control, but you can always control how you respond to what is happening. You can respond by opening to your source, or by shutting down. Opening to your source is very powerful--it can heal you. However, it requires letting go of the need to be in control of what is happening. Letting go is not the same as giving up. The fact is that no one can fully control everything in his life. While you are constantly making choices that help create your reality, you also have to take what comes as a result of your past choices and the choices of others.

 

Love is cause. True control comes from the power of love. You are more powerful when you open to love, less powerful when you try to control the manifestation of events. Loving changes events, but struggling to change events does not really work.

 

 

Your intent is something you always have control over. You may not always feel positive, but you can always hold a healing intent.

 

 

It is ironic that the more worried and anxious you are, the more you tend to try to control what you cannot, wasting the very energy you need for healing. Worry and anxiety can create a self-fulfilling prophesy.

 

 

Naturally, you desire to be as healthy as possible so you can provide as much as you can for those you love and who count on you. However, if you worry about that, you take energy away from building health. Therefore, what you worry about is more likely to come to pass. Your concern springs from love, but when it manifests as worry, it is mixed with fear and guilt. If you let go of worrying about things you cannot do anything about, and instead, put your energy into simply being the love that is your reality, you hasten healing. That allows you provide more for those you love.

 

 

In not holding on to anything, you have access to all things. This allows your situation to work out in the highest possible way.

 

 

The body is focused on survival, and is accustomed to using fear to protect itself. If you did not feel some fear during invasive medical procedures, that would indicate something wrong. However, what works better is yielding. It is not very easy to learn how to completely yield under such circumstances, so you do the best you can. Afterwards, you can release any fear you are still holding so that your healing can accelerate.

 

 

The more you experience and release your feelings, the more energy you have for healing. Blocked feelings withhold energy from your life. Fully feeling your feelings is different from your mind racing about your feelings.

 

 

You actually have a lot of freedom right now. In particular, you have the freedom to open, a very important freedom.

 

 

Being free is not being without fear, but being okay with it. Being free is being okay with anything as it is.

 

 

Breathing is taking in life. Most people can benefit by being reminded to breathe. Someone quite ill may not be able to breathe deeply, but he can breathe freely, instead of holding his breath.

 

 

If you were to breathe deeply and freely on a consistent basis, your healing would probably happen fifty percent faster. You cannot breathe freely and hold on in other ways at the same time.

 

YOU ALREADY HAVE THE POWER

We are not giving you anything you do not already have. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy already had the power to go home, but she did not know it until she went through all her drama; then it happened easily. You have always had the power to heal yourself, but you have not known it. Now you are starting to wake up. Rather than thinking of yourself as a victim of forces beyond your control, and putting yourself in the hands of those who cannot really heal you, you are starting to realize that you have the healing your body seeks. In fact, you are the healing your body seeks.

 

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