Relaxation and Healing

When we’re feeling unwell, we go to bed. It’s instinctive, we don’t need to be taught it. The body sends the desire for healing to the mind through its chemical messengers and neural transmitters and the idea instantly comes into our conscious environment – ‘go and lie down’. Animals, birds, fish all do the same thing. I had a black cat once, Skippy. She was knocked down outside our house. Her hip was damaged and for four days after being seen by the vet, she didn’t move from her corner in the lounge. She just lay there, eating only occasionally, but never moving from her basket. On the fifth day, she suddenly pulled herself up, stretched her injured hind leg as much as she could and gingerly walked to the cat door. For all those days her internal doctor had told her what was needed to help the healing – complete rest.

We have many internal systems within the body; the circulatory system, the digestive system, the nervous system, the respiratory system, the lymphatic system, the endocrine system, and so on, but there is one system which you will find hard to discover in any medical text book – the body’s healing system. It’s strange, but although this is the most important system we have, we know little or nothing about it. Why? Well quite simply, it is because we are unable to see it, measure it, touch it or explain it. So, scientific research largely ignores it. ‘It’ll heal on it’s own’; ‘give it time’ is what we are often told. In other words, let the body’s own healing system take care of itself.

Our inner doctor, this wonderful healing ability, is one of the most primal functions we have. Unless there was a built-in facility to quickly stem the flow of blood, fight infection and repair torn layers of skin, any simple cut would ultimately result in death through blood loss or disease. Human beings as a species would never have got off the ground, neither would any other living creature. So the body’s self-healing function is one that demands much closer examination and we should take steps to encourage this amazing ability to develop. From the foregoing, therefore, you will understand why I tell all students of healing that the ‘THE BODY WORKS BEST WHEN IN A STATE OF REST’. Relaxation allows the body’s healing system to work at maximum efficiency without the obstacles of over-riding stresses and other daily concerns. Relaxation, as a state of being, is when we place ourselves fully into the hands of our body’s many healing systems; mental, physical and spiritual. Full relaxation is often hard to achieve, but the gains made from it are far more beneficial to the ‘whole’ person than any pill from a bottle. A relaxation session brings immediate benefits to both the physiological and psychological systems of the body and begins a healing process that can be felt and experienced throughout our normal daily lives.

Healing is not the same as curing. This is one of the hardest facts for anyone studying the healing therapies to understand. I am no longer surprised at the looks of sceptical disbelief when I make that statement to my students. ‘Of course healing is curing. If someone is unwell, I want to cure them – to heal them of their illness.’ If this were the case, then offering healing to a dying patient would be a waste of time, for their illness will more than likely have deteriorated the body organs and tissues to such an extent that there is no longer any possibility of a physical cure. But, even a dying person, can still receive great benefit from healing. I offered healing once to a lady with severe spinal cancer. For a number of weeks she had been restricted to a special mattress on the floor whilst her husband slept alone in their double bed. It was extremely unlikely that healing would cure this lady of her cancer, but I did what I could and then left. The next day, her husband told me that about an hour after I had gone, his wife had got up from her mattress and climbed into their bed. The first time she had been able to do so for weeks. Healing had eased the pain and allowed her to return to the comfort of her husband’s arms.

We must always remember that each person is a complex organism. He or she may have physiological, mental, even spiritual problems. They may live with tangled and hectic lifestyles. They may have relationship troubles; drugs or financial. So many facets make up our lives and they all react upon us in either a good or bad way. Every thought we think causes a physical, chemical and electrical reaction within the body - this is why visualisation is such a powerful therapy - and each situation we find ourselves in similarly reacts upon us. We are susceptible to every experience we have – for good or ill – and any one of them could be the embryonic start of a health problem. A problem which can sometimes take many years to show itself. ‘Curing’ any of these will normally be a case of simply removing the symptoms. ‘Healing’ them, however, enables the person to overcome what was initially the cause of the problem and allow them more able to cope with it. Stress therapy does not prevent stresses from appearing in our lives. What it does do is enable us to more successfully handle them as they arise.

My definition of healing goes something like this:

Healing is the coming together of body, mind and spirit into that state of being where the limitations of the patient become maximised.

In more simple language, this means that, although we may have a severe health problem, relaxation and healing offers the opportunity to view things from a different perspective. One that enables us to cope more easily with the restrictions which our illness places upon us. This, in turn, offers the possibility of a more useful and satisfying existence both for ourselves and those loved ones around us.
Relaxation and healing go hand in hand. It is impossible to benefit from healing if you are in a state of agitation. Healing is not mysterious. It is a perfectly natural phenomenon of humane living. It can comfort, revitalise and redress the imbalances caused by illness. The function of healing is generated in the love and compassion of one person for another. This is not the deep love of a man for a woman, mother for a son, but the natural empathic feeling one should try to cultivate for humanity as a whole. A desire to fulfil the role which life itself has set – to assist those whom we meet along the way. We all have the ability to give healing to one another in many different ways, some to a greater extent than others.

Healing can relieve pain, accelerate tissue and bone repair, even change mental outlook, but it is the peace that comes from this experience which I find most remarkable. The feeling that there is something working within us for our overall wellbeing. Something which wants us to be well, and it is this inner power that has the sole purpose of bringing us back once more into ‘wholeness’. The ability to be part of this process, and to encourage it, is, as far as I am concerned, what I find the most humbling.
When you come to a healing session, your sole purpose should be to let go and enjoy to the full the time spent in its atmosphere. Have your mind open to what the therapy has to offer and let your inner doctor, your body’s own healing system, take advantage of the many energies activated during this special time. These energies are gentle and may be used safely by all ages, from the newborn to the frail and the elderly irrespective of their state of health. Healing is non-invasive, without side effects and is now being used, under one name or another, throughout the UK in GP surgeries, hospices, cancer support groups, post-operative recovery, drug rehabilitation, prisons, HIV/AIDS centres and the care of the elderly. Healing is complementary to normal medical treatment – it does not replace it – and therefore can be used with confidence alongside conventional medication or natural remedies.


(Michael Noel)

+