THE HEALING OF LOVE

Faith healing, associated with mostly bizarre practices, has gained momentum together with all kind of alternative healing practices.  As the aging population pushes greater numbers in the geriatric wards of hospitals, at a neck breaking cost for health insurances systems, therapeutic processes make the cover page of Times Magazine, including some hogwash on the science of meditation extolling the TM fraud, which demonstrates the Magazine?s incompetence in the subject. But faith is hard to get by and it works only when the deity, in whom we have faith, can hear our plea and has the power to heal. In short, not often.

Yet, a more health conscious public realize the huge shortcomings of allopathic and antibiotic saturated medicine.  Homeopathy depends on sensitive diagnosis, not always available.  So where do we turn for an affordable healing process?  Could the answer be so simple that we miss it? Here is just a suggestion: love is the greatest healer that relieves us of the buds of sickness before they degenerate in pathology. Do we fully realize the healing impact of a loving presence next to us?  This presence, in fact, is the deeper definition of what constitutes ?a home?.  All of us who go out in the real world come back home at the end of our day with some bruises of a kind or another: job anxieties, money worries, stress and pressures of all kinds take a toll. But living in the simple and giving love of someone close to us dissolve much of the strain! It makes it look relatively unimportant because the love we receive recharge in a very subtle but real way the energy supply that we lose in our daily skirmishes with life.  We feel comfortable again, we touch in a humble, silent but pervasive manner the real wellness of being alive, and yes, life is beautiful.

A loving presence?  It can be a grand mother, a child, a husband or wife, a sister or brother, a friend.  These are various shapes and forms of the vessels containing ?if all is well ? the magic potion.  It needs not be only in a lover shape for, ultimately, love is not something we make: it is something that flows through us. A liquid well being, streams of mellow and golden caress, a soothing tingling in the chest, a bath of exquisite fulfilment. Love is all that and more, much more because it is an energy that flows into us from God. Every one who loves carries it. And if you love your dog, it understands this. But do we?

So love works also in a therapeutic sense.  The hurdle here is that love cannot be faked.  I mean, when love is faked, it is not love.  We cannot ask a nurse to start loving a patient or a manager to love his employees because this would accelerate the recovery of the patient or make the staff member more productive.  In the best of the case, the nurse or the CEO would understand the point but this is not enough. Love does not work this way.  To love, we must feel love, we must have it inside, and to have inside us, we must get it from somewhere.  In other words is our cup full to the brim with love, half full or half empty or does it only contain a few drops?  This will make a difference when we pour our cup onto someone else. It makes a difference to the effectiveness of our love.

Now the question arises: how to love?  From where to get love? Or, how to fill the cup?  If we do not get any love for ourselves, it is hard to give back any.  The Beatles sang:? I need somebody to love? but many would also sing in tune ?I need somebody to love me?. So, most of us are depending on our emotional environment to be capable to give love back to this environment.

And precisely here we can get badly hurt: divorced parents, teenagers broken hearts, dysfunctional couples are many instances that dry up in us the flow of this subtle energy of love.

Besides, it looks a bit like a vicious circle because quite generally and even without acute emotional crisis, love seems to fizzle out in environments that do not sustain it. Ask the nurse with her hypochondriac patients, the teachers with kids that have no respect for them or the civil servant with the dreadful boss.  Ounce upon a time, they wanted perhaps to serve, to give something to society, which is a form of love, but they grew tired.

Is there then a way out of the vicious circle?

Yes there is. Beyond filling the cup because another vessel pours its liquid into it, there is a magic way to fill the cup from inside.  And this is what the High Yoga of raising the kundalini within the spine achieves. For the kundalini is the dormant depository of residual divine love within our intimate spiritual body. A yogi, who has his kundalini awakened, can tap the source through meditation.  The advantage is that then, the energy can flow even in a "love deficit" environment.