CHOOSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE

YOUR INHERENT HEALING FORCE (*)

 

QUESTION: I’m in a health crisis. I’m perplexed, hopeless, and paralyzed about what to do. Can you help me? 

 

ANSWER: Your physical system contains a natural healing force that is always ready to cooperate with you if you give it a chance. When you lack physical, mental, or psychic health and are perplexed, hopeless, and paralyzed about it, it is because it doesn’t occur to you that you have within yourself the possibility of correcting any situation you are in which is not to your satisfaction! 

 

Ignorance of the “inherent healing force” within you is the first and most important issue that must be tackled. A prerequisite to return to perfect health is knowing that this level is intact inside of you. But hearing it, even vaguely thinking it, and knowing it are not the same. To know it, you must go through a “correcting process” to gradually understand certain spiritual laws and take personal responsibility for violating them. Then you can “reestablish” your health step-by-step to the original level where your perfect functioning exists. 

 

You may ask, How is perfect health possible? It’s possible because our perfect health “did not go away.” Because we“have been away from our perfect health.” Otherwise it would be impossible to get it back. When you make an effort to comprehend certain spiritual laws and to correct their impairment, this “live power” begins to operate in you. Imagine then that you can come back to perfect functioning. 

 

You might now ask yourself, “Why do I ignore -- not want to know -- the possibility that powers exist within me to create perfect physical health?” The Guide tells us we ignore these powers because we get negative pleasure from complaining! This makes us deliberately embrace negativity and deliberately (unconsciously) violate spiritual laws that would open us to the “live power” within us. 

 

The Guide adds that we want to stay ignorant of the “live power” because it appears to us that the “correcting process” imposes a heavy toll on us. In reality, shying away from taking personal responsibility for violating spiritual law is what exacts the heavy toll. 

 

Jesus knew the importance of taking personal responsibility when he asked the invalid man at the Pool at Bethesda who had been invalid for thirty-eight years, “Do you want to get well?” The invalid must have answered, “Yes,” because Jesus is said to have responded, “Then get up and walk!” In other words, take responsibility for your health and all that that entails! 

 

Once you go through the “correcting process” by (1) challenging the obstacles that keep you ignorant of the possibilities within you and (2) understanding and taking personal responsibility for the spiritual laws you have violated, you need to use this “live power” that is released in you. Use it to let go of the pseudo-safety of hate and cruelty towards others and change your personality into that of love for others. 

 

Flick the switch from destructiveness to constructiveness, from separateness to inclusion. Once you use your power in this way, the power will expand and extend. But you have to master yourself first in order to use this limitless power for purposes outside yourself. 

 

You have the power within you to solve your own health crisis. You don’t need to beg or ask God to solve your problem. Remember, Jesus told a fig tree that wasn’t bearing fruit to die. It died “immediately,” and next day was found shriveled up. Scripture tells us if we have faith, we can ask the mountain (our problem) to “move from here to there,” and the “mountain” will move. The message is clear; you have the inherent healing power within you to remove your “mountain.” 

 

Healing requires a deep and more than physical relaxation of the entire human system. But if having a health problem is suspected as the ultimate reality or is assumed to come only to life’s “stepchildren,” this must create bitterness and rage in you. Don’t deny this. Don’t defend against these feelings. If you are defended against anything, you are in a state of tension and therefore unable to heal yourself. In this spirit, it is important for you to let go, too, of any insistence that you have towards your physical, mental, or psychic healing. 

 

The Guide tells us, “He who denies the undesirable is not much different from he who denies the desirable, who does not permit himself to rejoice in it!” In other words, learn to “accept everything and resist nothing.” 

 

You may want to consider and imagine one more thing. The Guide tells us when we eliminate what is in us that breaks spiritual law, we could be completely happy, without sickness, worries, and even death as we experience it! He then says in this state, our return to the spirit world would happen in a different way than by decay, old age, and sickness, or accident. It would be a sort of “dematerialization.”

[paraphrased excerpts from #11, #141, #216, #253]

 

See below, the Spiritual Laws that are guiding principles in your return to health [excerpts of Spiritual Laws from Guide Lecture #194]

 

The Law of Personal Responsibility

 

The Law of Personal Responsibility is THE main element of the Pathwork teachings. It is the primary principle that guides the Pathwork. At first glance, personal responsibility is sometimes hard to accept. It seems so much easier to accept even defeat, if only one can blame the circumstances on bad luck or other people's faults. Accepting the Law of Personal Self-Responsibility wipes out self- pity, resignation, passive endurance, smoldering resentments against the injustices of life, and the famous masochistic game of harping on “one's case against life.” 

This law is the guiding principle on the search for the root of one's obstructions. By contemplating one's life, especially the fulfillment and the lack of it, one can regard it as an instant blueprint that outlines the areas where there must exist an inner corresponding attitude for either fulfillment or lack of fulfillment. This approach is diametrically opposed to the usual attitude, but it is indeed a reliable and truthful one that must always lead to results provided one goes deeply enough and is truly honest in this endeavor. 

 

According to Your Belief, You Shall Experience

 

One of the most important laws is what all Scripture reiterates: according to your belief you shall experience. If your belief is that you cannot change, that the universe is hostile, that your ultimate fate is tragedy, then indeed you will, you must experience just that. All your actions and reactions are geared to bring this about. Conversely, if you truly believe that you can change and grow out of negativities, destructiveness, hopelessness, misery and poverty, that the universe is abundant joy in every respect and that you can experience this truth, then indeed, you cannot help do so. 

 

Life Cannot Be Cheated

 

A finely calibrated inner mechanism sends forth its “messages” according to which you yourself cannot violate the divine laws beyond a certain degree. So, for instance, if you are unconsciously launched on a road of hate and spite, you cannot believe in the possibilities of love and fulfillment. If you unconsciously want to cheat life by wanting more than you are willing to give, you violate another important law, so that no matter how much you may try to believe in the possibility of life’s abundance, it will not work. It will not “take.” Your substance will refuse impression, until you remove this violation of law. Life cannot be cheated – and it’s well that way. 

 

You Cannot Skip a Step

 

Another law is that you cannot skip a step. If you want a result, but this result depends on the elimination of obstructions that violate another law, the obstruction must first be dealt with. Therefore your meditative aim may have to be altered along the way. If you are not willing to correct what stands in the way, the result cannot come. Creation in this area cannot take place. 

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(*) posted with permission by Moira Shaw