Basic Guides to Self-Healing

1.       Meditating Specific Symptoms

• Give yourself time to be aware of your immediate bodily sensations of any state of illness or dis-ease. Ask yourself and become more aware of where and how you feel your dis-ease in your body.

• Remind yourself that the pure awareness of any sensation, emotion or thought – however painful – is not itself a sensation, emotion or thought, and is innately pain free.

• Staying aware of any localised sensation or symptom, remind yourself that it is itself an awareness of some aspect of your life-world and relationships that is a source of unease or ‘dis-ease’.

• Wait until a spontaneous awareness arises of what specific aspect of your life-world it is that the sensation or feeling of dis-ease embodies – and is itself an awareness of.

• Grant awareness to one localised sensation or feeling of dis-ease or discomfort after another, staying with it long enough until it too recalls you to some specific aspect of your life world, present, past or future.

• Take time to follow this process through – making sure you attend to every region of your body in the process – until your overall sense of dis-ease lifts and your overall sense of self and body alters – transformed by the very awareness you are granting it.

2. Cultivating whole-body Awareness

• Remember: only through awareness of your body as a whole can you gain and maintain a sense of your self as a whole – your ‘soul’.

• When you feel ill therefore, do not focus solely on your symptoms – on localised sensations, thoughts or emotions – but instead seek to maintain a sense of your body, self and life as whole.

• If you feel yourself suffering from what you think of as a purely ‘mental’ or emotional state, remember that every such state is always accompanied by a particular bodily sense of yourself.
  
• Conversely therefore, even if your symptoms seem to be purely bodily, attend also to the thoughts and emotions that tend to accompany them – for these will give you the best clue to the underlying life-problem that they symbolise.
  
• Understand too, that any mental, emotional and bodily state that you experience when you feel ill is at the same time a ‘self state’ or ‘body identity’ – a particular bodily way of feeling yourself – who you are.
• Attend therefore, not only to the way your symptoms ‘make you feel’ but to the way they make you feel – the overall sense of self or ‘body identity’ that accompanies them.
• If you can, choose to fully feel and indeed even amplify any felt sensations of dis-ease or sickness symptoms rather than seeking to suppress them.
• Trust that any mood or feeling, sense of dis-ease or bodily symptom – if it is given enough time to be fully felt, amplified and inwardly followed – will in time automatically transform itself into a new feeling, a new sense of your body and a new bodily sense of self or ‘body identity’ – one now free of the need to embody or ‘somatise’ itself through symptoms of one sort or another.