Whenever an individual, who has taken a healing therapy session, reports that old feelings and symptoms are returning and causing agony simply means the person has not been true to the practice. In addition, the individual has not maintained restraint either.
This is true for meditative efforts as well.
Any form of meditation, healing or therapy requires your investment; your emotional presence and practice. You can’t outsource your health or feelings to whip out a result you want. For a satisfactory meditative experience, for a healing/therapy to work, you have to in-source, meaning, extract it out of you. This means engaging your mind, body and spirit into a consistent and prolonged practice.
This prolonged practice ought to be without break and with the conviction that it is productive (shortcuts will have short term results). This may sound more difficult than popping a pill for lifetime but know that consistent practice is the path of holistic well-being.
This nature of follow-up on health puts an individual toward self-accountability which is unpalatable to many.
What are you practicing?
Individuals practice every day: “I am not feeling well”, “My boss is mean”, “I am fat”, “I hate studies”, “I hate this person,” etc. You see, this is also practice, albeit of a negative character, whether you do it unconsciously or knowingly. Constant repetition of a thought, any thought, is a practice of it. Overtime, this gets deeply entrenched in your psyche. Misery begins. So, next time you see your boss, you associate him/her with meanness, or, associate a thing/feeling with hatred or guilt. Anatomically and physiologically, this disturbs your natural body function, secondly, you start putting boundaries around you; avoiding boss, studies, food. More misery. In all of this, you get affected, not the other person.
The only way to break the negative thought practice is to switch to positive. This takes practice too. For example, “I feel great today”, “Life is enjoyable without smoking also” or “I am capable of changing.”
In the initial days, positive build-up requires conscious effort. Conscious effort comprises perseverance, sincerity, dedication and respect towards the goal. All practice impresses upon psyche, including the positive ones.
In some cases, one may find hitting a brick wall that is, not being able to reach the goal. This implies your investment is still not complete; the missing piece could be lack of restrain.
The art of restraint
Practice and restraint go hand in hand. While the former propels you towards your positive goal, the latter (that is, restraint), ensures you are not going in the wrong direction. The beauty of both working together is this: when your energy is not engaged in the wrong direction, it is getting rotated back into the practice.
When you reach out for things and thoughts you know is not good for your mental, physical, emotional health, it screams an absence of restrain. It is easy to let horses (the mind) run loose. Restraining requires greater strength than letting go. If one has gastritis, restraining from alcohol, fried food or coffee is saving the horses from plunging downhill. This means getting closer to your goal.
Know that restraint doesn’t happen by default. This too calls for practice. One can ask: how to practice restraint? It is all a mind matter. Restraint is exercised through detachment. Detachment can be understood as an emotional distance from the object of enjoyment.
When the energy is rotated in this manner — practice and restraint — then in-sourcing gains strength. And with this, attaining goal is easy. However, this is not the end. When the goal is reached, say of, quitting smoking or losing weight or practicing meditation every morning, then the real work begins, which is to sustain the state/practice. How can one sustain? The road leads back again to practice: prolonged, without break and to be done with faith. For how long? The idea is to keep up and enjoy the positives of the journey. The answer is: till the positive state becomes the nature, that is, till you start living what you have been practicing.
Liberation from the aforesaid agony is a by-product of discipline, practice and faith. In other words, this is your healing.
— Disclaimer: Urmila Rao is a chakra balancing meditation coach, Theta Healer and a sound therapist. All the ideas expressed herein are her own and not professional advice or medical prescription. She can be reached at: milarao2018@gmail.com
