Relational Energy Healing uses reflexive personal process as an additional tool to add to the personal process work done in many forms of psychotherapy, including those forms of energy healing that have incorporated psychotherapeutic methods into their healing model. While psychotherapy is a vital tool on our journey towards healing and evolution it does have drawbacks and significant restrictions when integrated with spiritual or energy healing. Some forms of psychotherapy can unknowingly stimulate or re-wound any early personal issue held in the body-mind. Cognitive insight into personal struggles can be extremely helpful, to be sure, and the building of new inner resources is essential, but the professional energy healer is also concerned with the overall energy consciousness of the client. An additional tool we can use alongside psychotherapy is what I have termed reflexive (cause and effect) personal process.
Many of the events in life that stress or shock us also offer an opportunity for us to grow as individuals. Psychotherapy is at its best when working with those clients who have undergone significant trauma and have difficulty with a reflexive personal process: resolving a shock or an invasion into the consciousness system. But, for those ready and able to take a more advanced step forward, stressing or shocking events can be actively used to grow many useful parts of ourselves, and to help evolve our personal development. Shocks or challenges to the self, experienced as a part of everyday living and our relationships, are rarely comfortable lessons. The impact of many life issues causes tremors in the chakras and their cord system, but methods that help integrate a small crisis (such as the reflexive personal process) can transform these shocks into life-affirming occurences.
Significant trauma is best healed with psychotherapy and with body-centered modalities; mild shock and non-debilitating trauma can utilize the reflexive personal process, but it pressumes that an individual can:
* Feel – and experience – the full impact of the challenging event upon his body, mind and emotions
* Choose to open the heart chakra, to forgive, and even to give what has been take away as a gift to the perpetrator, effectively ending the relationship of victim/perpetrator, and closing down the chakra cord connection
* Take back into the heart chakra, and the self, the cause-and-effect life lesson that lead towards any enhancement of consciousness; that which fill the cells of the body with restorative life force. This self-anchoring event brings the self back into itself via chakra self-cords, resulting in an enhanced experience of individuated self.
An easy way to do reflexive personal process is to begin by initiating a therapeutic dialog to uncover what happened, how it felt to you, and what this event could potentially teach you about yourself, about others, or about the process of living. Then, you move directly towards energizing the solution, rather than sifting through the many details (or explore the varieties of repetitions) of the problem.
Finally, you can use your breath, and the intentional focus of your mind, to actively release the energetic hold that the trauma (or shock) has on your body. Energy work can help tremendously to boost the effectiveness of this process. Also, breathe into Anahata, the heart chakra, while freely giving away that which was “stolen”, and knowing that the lesson you have gained will lead you towards a renewal experience. Whatever is taken from you usually can be replaced, and perhaps even return greatly enhanced. Any symbolic “death” – the resistance to inevitable change – does not have to be the end; it can lead to a rebirth, and to an enlivened experience of the living in the body.
If a client is unable to feel the impact of the lesson in the body-mind they will need remedial psychotherapy work to address the trauma and associated restrictions before they are able to move into such reflexive personal process work. If I cannot feel my emotional identity, if I have lost my basic trust, then I may be unable to open the heart, or to give away that which has been “stolen” from me. Only the generous and kind heart can do this. If my heart is emotionally damaged I may be unable to move into universal love: the healing energy that washes everything clean.
And, finally, if I am angry, or stubbornly identified with being a victim, then I may not be able to take any solution into my heart as a lesson, because it leads inevitably towards the letting go of the unconscious energetic connections with my abuser. If I am still angry, we – victim and perpetrator – will remain attached together, even if the offender has been long absent in our lives, until I choose to embrace a new solution to my problem: to let go, to forgive myself and the other, and thereby to be released, and re-birthed into a new life.
Reflexive personal development also dissolves illusory polar opposites into life-enriching choices, helping us overcome the compulsion to choose only one of two options. We are all partly good and bad, partly right and wrong, partly male and female, and so on. Identifying with one polarity against the other maintains any struggle and, by association, the traumatic relationship. By developing the individuated self, by opening the heart, by choosing to give away (or surrender) what was stolen, and ultimately by taking into the heart the lesson thus revealed, we can bring enhanced life force into our lives. And, when we have this, when we are reborn, we can then return to the life journey that was interrupted by the trauma. We can resume our journey forward, into a future co-created by ourselves and by life, rather than a life organized around the reaction to growth-stunting trauma.
© 2013 by Dean Ramsden. All rights reserved.
