This question is the most fundamental I have ever asked myself or my clients over my 74 years. We have all conceptualized or experienced healing in as many forms as drops in the ocean, moments in a day, or days in a long lifetime.
In its simplest form, we manage to escape from physical pain or symptoms of chronic disease. The medical model is satisfied with this achievement. Perhaps the allopathic physicians have extended our lives by days or months at least in our perception. Perhaps they have given us medications or surgery that have improved our quality of life for these moments of continuing engagement with our human family here on earth. Perhaps this time dearly bought has allowed us to complete a life-long project whose completion becomes our legacy. Let us not minimize these manifestations of physical healing that bring joy to many.
My question seeks a deeper answer that correlates with our sense of how the world is organized, what we are doing here, and how we are going to fulfill our highest purposes while enjoying this lifetime on earth. These thoughts naturally come to all of us, and our unique way of understanding the answers calls us into a form of living that heals not only ourselves and our families, but also the human family and other levels of beingness.
The miracle of twinship is perfectly designed to evoke such questions. Science as a materialist discipline has not yet uncovered the cause of the splitting of a single egg into two separate individuals, exactly alike at that time but destined to manifest differences through epigenetics. This process as most of us know by now attributes the unfolding of the genetic blueprint to life experiences.
As twins, we ask ourselves how we were chosen to embody this amazing phenomenon. We wonder what are the responsibilities that twinship holds. We puzzle over the nature of the bond and what it implies about love and loss. In fact, we wonder if we chose this life style ourselves because our souls needed this experience to evolve. And, if so, what about twinship enhances the evolution of the soul and the souls of other twins on earth?
I have come to believe that birth into a human personality is the most wrenching sort of separation from the Oneness that is Source or God. Healing in this way of understanding would be returning to the Source of our being perhaps through ascension to heaven or achieving enlightenment after millenia of reincarnations. Perhaps the twinship mitigates the loneliness of this separation from the Creator of the Ground of Being.
Healing could then be perceived as wholeness and integration. As the dream weaver Robert Moss advises seeking the lost pieces of our selves, the ones we have cut off because they were too painful or that we never lived at all because of dissociation during trauma. This experience of healing would perhaps entail engaging in psychotherapy or spiritual growth in order to come to Know Ourselves as the powerful spirits that we are.
The aspects of the Self can be found in dreams, shamanic journeying, intuition or illumination – instant knowing. The path back into fragmentation and dissolution of the Self leads through external reality, ideas given us by society and culture, false appearances of Good and Bad, and influences of family and friends who want to decide who we are. This is especially true of twins who are often compared and contrasted as if each is separate from the other.
Another lens on healing is energy. So often due to toxic experiences, false ideas, harmful people, bacteria or viruses, to name a few, our Qi or life force becomes stuck in the body and does not flow freely through the meridians or the organs. This arrested flow is the root of many disease states. Through means such as Medical QiGong, QiGong, yoga, Reiki and many other forms of energy work, we can free these bottlenecks. Thus healing would be experienced as understanding and enhancing the flow of energy through the Wei Ji fields. These fields protect us from harm and the theft of our vital energy by others who wish to dis-empower us.
With fluid energy we become capable of fluid beliefs and thoughts. We avoid the rigidity of some persons who swallow a belief system filled with untruth out of fear. We are able to look at many perspectives on any event or situation. We can accept multiple points of view. We are not prisoners of social norms, cultural practices, family systems. This freedom is a form of healing that the Self undergoes through a lifetime or inside a moment. Nietzsche, as one example of modern philosophers, believed in perspectivism, allowing differences to thrive and honoring each as valid.
The process involves identifying complexes inserted into our psyches by other people, including mothers, fathers, siblings, children, employers. These complexes are hungry beasts who hijack our feelings and thoughts to feed their false narratives. Unless we dissolve them they grow and can take over our lives. In fact, they can kill us. We must be willing to discover the Truth about who we really are. The lies are not ours; they come from the mental bodies of persons whose development is arrested or delayed. These individuals functioning at lower levels of consciousness will ultimately evolve in the lifetime of the human race. There is no need to take them with us. Freedom from them is healing, cutting the cords of emotional bonds and sacrifice of the Truth that we know in our hearts. These persons are often jealous of the twinship and try to undermine our relationship with the co-twin.
When we ultimately consider that matter was formed by sound vibrations, we can begin to relate our own lives to various theories of cosmogenesis and then decide what fits best for us now as an explanation of creation. The sound theory allows us to consider harmony and order as foundations of healing. Many of us use music to create the environment of the present and the sound waves of the future. The mutually exclusive wave and particle from quantum physics reveal our nature as duality – perfect for twins.
Pablo Sender of Theosophy quotes Madame Helene Blavatsky that only by becoming one with the object of perception could we understand its essence and purpose. This approach flew in the face of science in that age. Scientists were supposed to be objective observers. Of course we know now that there is no such position in the universe. We are all interconnected. The twins have already learned this form of wholeness and healing by becoming one with the object. This healing through merging is often what psychotherapists do in the transference and counter-transference. We become each other as one so that we fully understand. The therapist becomes the client and sees through her eyes. This ability takes years of suffering and listening to our own inner voice. Twins are born with this capacity, perhaps choosing to come to earth together to explore loving from a twinship point of view.
In my years of studying French philosophers, beginning in college when I spent nine months in Paris studying with my twin sister Malinda at 18, I have become fascinated with the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre and his paramour Simone de Beauvoir. Their companion in the bars of Paris was Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize winner author, who refused the term Existentialist. He called his philosophy of life by the term Absurdist. Just now, listening to a university lecture on his non-fiction work, the Myth of Sisyphis, I was reminded powerfully that philosophical suicide in his mind was equivalent to physical suicide, an escape from the anguish of a life with no answers. He attributed this escape from the absurdity of life to philosophers, actors, artists, religious believers, and all manner of persons who cannot face that life has no meaning with pure perception and perseverance.
His antidote is constructive and life-affirming acts of rebellion. Create anyway even if the world will not recognize you and your words will not outlive you, nor will they change the human condition. Continuing to publish communist literature in the midst of WWII in a Paris occupied by the German military, he exhibited the courage of his convictions. For many, healing may occur in active rebellion against blind authority, parental figures, social norms and laws, patriarchy, and other isms. These acts are necessary for the young to escape from the tyranny of the powerful and express free will in the service of justice and equality. Camus certainly did so. He was killed in an automobile crash in his middle years so his full work failed to achieve fruition. No doubt, we could have learned more from this brilliant iconoclast.
I heard his words again from a thousand miles away. I was a different woman at 18, perhaps still a child. The street life of Paris was exciting, stimulating, seductive. The cafes were filled with students near the Sorbonne and L’Institut des Etudes Politiques. The Theater of the Absurd, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Becket, Jean Genet occupied our young imaginations. Now I ask myself, did life not give us some indication of a larger purpose? Was she so silent when we cried out in the night? I have come to hear the crying of the gulls, the blossoming of the flowers, the soaring of my heart, the vibration of truth. I no longer despair that there is nothing.
Eventually we each find our way up the mountain. Some may be arrested in development indefinitely, even more than one lifetime. Most of us grow towards the light and blossom into creativity of the spirit. This growth correlates with acceptance of life on life’s terms. Fighting our Fates takes tremendous energy away from self-realization and commitment to a spiritual life of love and service. Opening to the Muses is my path at this time in my life; they lead inward.
Thus I ask myself and my clients:
What interests you now?
What lights you up?
What stops time for you?
What do you want to give up?
Ed Abdill “There is an Inner Self that urges the conscious self to change, to develop, and to realize more of the potential that lies within, to gain mastery over the whole self at all levels of expression.”
Most recently I have been studying the Crest Jewel of Wisdom, an ancient Hindu text attributed to Shankaracharya, one of the Vedanta texts in an era when all wisdom was passed from guru to disciple. These ancient texts preserved in Sanskrit, the earliest written language, are foundational for the Hindu belief system. Healing in this context would mean embracing Absolute Truth over Relative Truth in spite of our minds habitually returning to the changeable reality on earth. Pursuit of security through rituals, pleasure, or good works is a wasted life. The only Truth is Brahman, the unchanging, the limitless, the pure, the timeless. The most important realization through the pursuit of this knowledge is the absolute fact that we are Brahman, that Brahman exists within and through us as through the creation. We however are limitless as Brahman through our own eternal soul Atman.
I mention the Hindu tradition because it is the source of the belief systems which pervade the East. The principles of reincarnation, the exigencies of Karma, and the requirements of Dharma, and the hope of an eternal soul originate here.
Perhaps preparing ourselves for an eternity of peace is a worthy approach to healing. The characteristics most admired in the seeker after Absolute Truth are devalued in our culture. People who seek the spiritual path are often criticized and ostracized. I have kept my psychotherapy practice open and accepting of the seekers, particularly among the young who have tired of running after satisfactions that do not last. Are these seekers healed? Do these characteristics arise from many life times of reincarnation? Perhaps they are signs of stability on the path. Each time I find myself frustrated by the illusions of scarcity, limits, time and space, I move towards peace with a remembrance that I am Brahman. I am not small, vulnerable, terrified. I am Brahman.
Viveka: discrimination between what is real and what is appearing real (Maya)
Vairagya: dispassion towards enjoyment of the fruits of action here and in the hereafter
Shama: mental steadiness and focus, undistracted by sense perception
Dama: control of the body and the senses, as often indicated in the breath.
Uparati: doing what is to be done, Dharma, duty
Titiksha: enduring conditions beyond one’s control such as the pairs of opposites, heat/cold, pleasure/pain
Shraddha: faith pending understanding, trusting in the words of the teacher
Samadhana: a focused mind for meditation using mantras
Mumkshutvan: a desire for liberation from the bondage of time