You as Intuitive, Mystic, and Healer
Years ago I was on a flight to London and across the isle from me sat a couple with a screaming infant, and I mean screaming. The mother was so upset that she couldn’t calm down her baby that she was also crying. The tension generated in the cabin by this screaming baby was almost palatable. At one point, a man offered this three-month-old chewing gum. After about two hours of this torture, I got up and went over to her and offered to help. I did therapeutic touch on the infant, running my hands through the baby’s energy field from his head to his feet, for about five minutes. The baby fell asleep and remained sleeping until the flight landed in London. The woman seated next to the mother said to me, “What kind of healer are you other than brilliant?” I said, “I’m not a healer,” and returned to my seat. Since that time, I have never conducted any form of healing therapy on another human being, but I have obviously never forgotten that experience.
I have never wanted to have anything to do with the field of healing except as an observer and a teacher. The role of practitioner held no appeal to me, and to some extent, still doesn’t. And yet, something deep inside of me is changing. Something is always changing and shifting deep inside of me, only this time, it’s deeper and more profound than in years previously. Writing Invisible Acts of Power changed my life, as I have told so many people during my months on the road doing a book tour. It’s sometimes hard to explain how writing a book can change your life. Certainly, Invisible Acts was not the most complicated book I have ever written – that honor goes to Sacred Contracts – whew, that was a monster of a task. But Invisible Acts was a depth charge that connected me via the stories of well over 1,200 people now to the domain of the sacred. I had never strayed from that domain as a teacher, but I obviously had lost some kind of contact with it as a human being. Reading the letters sent to me by all of these people who shared their profound, wonderful, frightening, miraculous, and heartwarming experiences inspired me to read sacred literature again as a way of finding teachings from great spiritual masters and scriptures that supported the eternal truths that we are here to be of service to one another. In the process of reading this precious literature for eight to ten hours a day, my “intellectual” spirit took a back seat to my soul, and away I went into the realm of the mystic. So, what exactly does that mean?
Well, to start with, it’s like being given a new lens through which to view the whole of one’s life. Everything looks the same, but nothing is the same. Values change, life goals shift, and you re-evaluate once again the whole of your work and your teachings. I have spent years teaching about the nature of intuition and the human energy system. Then I added Sacred Contracts and learning how to interpret your life’s agreements with this Universe according to the symbolic language of the soul – namely archetypes. To me, this is a cosmic map that gives order to the chaos of one’s life here on earth, for there is order in chaos once you have the code, and archetypes provide that code. And as things work with me, while I’m teaching one thing, I’m learning something else behind the scenes and always the classroom for me is my greatest laboratory. I am at home in the classroom working and being with people who – so incredibly to me – come to share a part of their lives journey with me.
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Teaching the Sacred Contracts workshops these past years through CMED, (which is pure bliss for me), has provided me with endless opportunities to observe all kinds of intriguing things, not the least of which is the most popular archetypes on campus, so to speak. Like names that run in cycles….Dylan, Jackson, Sydney, Jennifer….you know what I mean….like who names their child Marge or Ruth or Agnes these days? (Maybe Hazel…..I think what’s her name did….) But as I said, you know what I am referring to – we do things in cycles because we do have this system called the collective unconscious. And right now, some of the more popular archetypes on campus are Mystic and Healer. (Just as an interesting point…rarely does any one choose Entrepreneur – now why is that? And yet, people in the “new age” are forever complaining about financial problems…..seems to me that that age old division between church and state, money and spirit – needs to be dismantled and it can’t be soon enough – but that’s for another discussion). Back to Mystic and Healer – these are two popular archetypes in every audience, and not just for the people coming to the Sacred Contracts workshops. No matter where I lecture, people relate to these two energy patterns with a deep sense of intimacy.
Now then – previously to where I am today in my life, I held the view that genuine “healers” were rare. Many, many people were active in the healing profession, but a born gifted healer was a rare find. And as for mystics, well, they were equally rare. More monastic than mainstream, mystics required, at least traditionally, certain living environments conducive to their intimate spiritual lifestyle. One would hardly expect to find a mystic, for example, working at Meryl-Lynch or selling real estate or as a pilot for United Airlines. But then comes one of those experiences that causes a person – in this case, me – to say, “who says?” Times change, and no doubt, times are changing. We are changing.
One of the greatest insights that came to light – or do I mean “came into the light” – for me while compiling and writing Invisible Acts had to do with these two archetypes, specifically how they fit into our contemporary spiritual culture. That is, if we are no longer going to the monasteries in droves as we once did, did that mean that mystics were going to become a thing of the past OR were mystics simply going to exist outside monasteries – and maybe even fly planes for United Airlines for a living. I gave that some thought – and then more thought….and then more thought….and then, I took those thoughts to the marketplace, as they say, and with that lens in place, I watched, listened, and spoke with people every place I went. Of course, I didn’t say, “I am now observing you as if you were a potential mystic”….nonsense. I just had a different openness.
This spiritual culture we are living in is a complex mixture of a lot of odds and ends, in addition to a genuine desire for a connection to one’s spiritual path. Those odds and ends, however, are substantial. (This, incidentally, is the subject of my next book) – but for the sake of our discussion in this Salon, it is enough to say that we’ve created a rather hybrid spirituality that is comprised of a desire to develop intuitive abilities along with a desire to find ways of staying healthy that include incorporating a body/mind/spirit approach to health. Simultaneously, a desire/passion in finding a spiritual path as opposed to practicing a religion emerged and inn the course of one culture investigating all three domains of interests, wires got crossed and they somehow became a part of one and the same thing – with spirituality taking the lead. For example, do you take yoga for reasons of health or as a spiritual practice? Which is it? Is your psychological work in therapy also part of your spiritual practice? Is that what a spiritual director would say? Being out of pain is the goal of therapy – is that the goal of spiritual direction? And what direction do you expect from your own intuitive voice? And what about your spiritual guidance? Is this one and the same? Do you distinguish the two? Is Divine revelation the same to you as an intuitive hit? Is spiritual direction the same as Divine revelation? How can you discern the difference? Do you understand the difference between awareness and discernment? What is the difference between having spiritual practice and an interior theology? Too many goals….too many paths…..too many, far too many wires with little or no clarity.
For all the confusion that I have and continue to witness, one truth that remains consistent is that the yearning for a genuine spiritual commitment in people is real. There is a call to mysticism that bubbles like a stream underground in so many people, yet they only allow themselves to experience that stream in its most basic, if not shallow, form – which is as gut level intuition. To allow the stream to become of river is, and understandably so, a most intimidating thought for people – and yet, they cannot deny they are drawn to that place, to that river. But intuitive abilities are nothing more than foreplay, like psychic fun and games. And that’s fine….for a while. But make no mistake – intuitive development is NOT a spiritual path….it is simply a sharpening of gut instincts. But the frustration of these “mystics without monasteries” is real, and I can see that as well. Because people believe that intuitive ability is their means to maintain control in their lives, they fear that by acknowledging the more authentic interior voice, their lives will spin out of control. And thus, they create the condition of being “6th chakra mind Mystics”, never fully incarnating the power of that archetype – while living as 3rd chakra intuitives - and the frustration is written all over their life.
As for the Healer archetype, as I mentioned earlier, the research and writing of Invisible Acts of Power caused me to reconsider my understanding of what it means to be a healer and who is a healer in this world. I was reminded as I slipped back into the library of sacred literature that I had begun to collect since graduate school, that the ability to “heal” in the spiritual or energetic sense of the word, often developed organically within some of the great mystics, such as Hildegard. These medieval mystics, for example, never set goals for themselves in terms of becoming healers; that ability emerged in them as their interior strength and spirituality matured. That realization combined with reminding myself that healer-as-occupation was only one manifestation of that archetype, made that “ah-ha” light bulb go on. That’s when I realized that every single person is a healer enpotentia and that you need not declare yourself a healer nor become a healer by profession in order to acknowledge that skill within yourself. Rather, you need to understand the nature of your spirit as a healing vessel that you can allow to be used as a source of healing – if needed – through the course of your life, not unlike the time when I was flying to London and helped that mother and crying infant.
Intuitive-Mystic-Healer
The thread of the intuitive, the mystic, and the healer exists, I believe, in the vast majority of people that comprise our contemporary spiritual culture – perhaps even in you. I see this pattern as so present, so powerful, so deeply a part of the invisible network of the Divine, that I created a year-long program of instruction that will have elements of a retreat as well as elements of instruction as well as elements of personal development – all with the intention of leading individuals through this awakening and into their power as what I now think of as becoming an “invisible act of power” – healers and mystics without monasteries.
And within the context of this course, I will for the first time, teach the art of energy healing, one-on-one, in a group, and at a distance. Odd how we end up doing exactly what we swore we would never do….but that’s how things are in this world. (Shortly before this CMED program begins, I will invite you to send in your prayer/healing requests as every morning we will begin class with a healing session and then prayer-healing groups will be formed that will continue during the year).
Personal Questions
Now then – as for you……where are you in the midst of all this? While you might be miles and yards away from anything to do with intuition, healing, and mysticism….you are, I can promise, changing in some deep and profound way that is fully in harmony with who you are and your own spiritual path. The question is: are you allowing that change to happen or are you interfering with your emerging self? Here are some questions for self-examination and, like the ones in the previous Salon, and in the one before that, journals are great for keeping a record of your own inner life. Consider that if you haven’t ever doing journaling.
1. Be still for a moment: what part(s) of your life is/are changing?
2. Describe the nature of these changes and identify which frighten you, which do not, and what the difference in fear/faith is for you.
3. What do you feel you are being “called” to do now in your life, and by “called”, I am referring to something emerging from you inner self?
4. What archetype(s) do you identify with that you have had very little actual connection to in the physical or literal sense in your life.
5. Do you identify with the Intuitive, Mystic, and/or Healer?
6. Have you ever done a spontaneous healing?
7. Do you ever have the sense that you could tap into a current of deeper cosmic or healing power IF you pursued that choice?
8. What are your greatest spiritual mysteries?
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God bless all of you and from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for so much….
Love,
Caroline
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