Energy Healing and Meditation Fit Together like Hand and Glove
The following is exactly where and how energy healing can facilitate meditation practice and accelerate the spiritual journey. Using energy healing to assist through life’s rough spots makes skillful use of both energy healing and meditation. It both deepens and accelerates our personal journey. Sitting meditation is unmatched for assisting us in waking up but energy healing is unmatched in its ability to help us through life’s stuck spots and growing up. We need both in order to truly both wake up and grow up. Together they fit together like the proverbial hand and glove. ReNae Monette
The InBetween State Pema Chodron
It takes some training to accept we’re not in control. This may lead to a “don’t know what to do” kind of feeling, a sense of being caught in between. On the one hand, we’re completely fed up with finding comfort from what we can eat, drink, smoke, or couple with. We’re also fed up with beliefs, ideas, and “isms” of all kinds. But on the other hand we wish it were true that outer comfort could bring lasting happiness.
This inbetween state is where the warrior spends a lot of time growing up. We’d give anything to have the comfort we used to get from eating a pizza or watching a video. However, even though those things can be pleasurable, we’ve seen that eating a pizza or watching a video is a feeble match for our suffering. We notice this especially when things are falling apart. If we’ve just learned that we have cancer, eating a pizza doesn’t do much to cheer us up. If someone we love has just died or walked out, the outer places we go for comfort feel feeble and ephemeral.
We are told about the pain of chasing after pleasure and the futility of running from pain. We hear also about the joy of awakening, of realizing our interconnectedness, of trusting the openness of our hearts and minds. But we aren’t told all that much about this state of being in between, no longer able to get our old comfort from the outside but not yet dwelling in a sense of equanimity and warmth.
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what’s happening, we begin to access our inner strength.
Yet it seems reasonable to want some kind of relief. If we can make the situation right or wrong, if we can pin it down in any way, then we are on familiar ground. But something has shaken up our habitual patterns and frequently they no longer work. Staying with volatile energy gradually becomes more comfortable than acting it out or repressing it. Staying with it is what heals. It allows us to let go of our self importance. It’s how the warrior learns to love.
This is exactly how we’re training every time we sit in meditation. We see what comes up, and acknowledge that with kindness. Thoughts and emotions rise and fall. Some are more convincing than others. Habitually, we are so uncomfortable with that churned up feeling that we’d do anything to make it go away. Instead we kindly encourage ourselves to stay with our agitated energy by returning to the breath.
This is the basic training in loving kindness that we need to just keep going forward, to just keep opening our heart.
