Heart-centered Trance
Being a clear channel:
Transparency and self-advantage in healing
Healing is energy that issues from the natural power that animates the world around us. Healing involves an acceleration and intensification of this always present cosmic energy. We don't have to actively do something, but rather merely become a clear vessel of natural energy. When we are clear the cosmic energy spontaneously accelerates, intensifies, and concentrates as it surges through our beings. This idea is well expressed by Mohawk Chief Tom Porter:
"But one time I picked up a book by a Lakota man, Fools Crow. He's talking about healers. When you heal, you have to make a prayer first. Some people thought that he was a good healer, but he said he was not the healer, it was God, the Creator. All he was is an air pipe. The Creator's spirit goes through this pipe and into whoever needs healing. Our job is to use prayer to keep the pipe open and clean so the spirit can pass at will to do the job of healing and make a spiritual good life."
In my healing work I use heart centered trance to clear my cluttered psyche and thus become a receptive vessel.
In heart centered trance, consciousness abstracts and focuses its attention upon the underlying coherence of the entire field of its perception, it draws attention away from individual elements of the field.
Heart centered trance is viscerally experienced in the center of the chest. This heart is the heart of one's being and is equally the heart of everything that exists. Here is the knot where all phenomena come together, all things continually proceed from and return to this nexus.
In simple trance the psyche experiences pure disintegration. The mind/body displays a marked reduction of responsiveness to its surroundings. In heart centered trance, individual thoughts evaporate, but consciousness retains an undifferentiated and intense focus on the substance of its being. It is acutely, albeit subtlety, responsive to the surrounding field of phenomena.
Used in healing, heart centered trance is slightly altered. In healing the heart moves from its normal location in the chest to the place where the healer's hand contacts the body of the client.
Being a clear channel: Transparency and self-advantage in healing
Healing energy flows best where there are no obstacles in the psyche where its flow is hampered. To be a clear channel of healing energy, one must be able to see transparently and acknowledge one's own motives. The idea that one can "selflessly serve others" is a mistaken understanding of interpersonal relationships. When such mistaken views occupy psychic space, energy must be expended to defend their plausibility. This is a futile waste of energy, and this gratuitous movement of energy inhibits the flow of the pure energy of healing.
It is much more useful to realize that healing enhances one's own welfare as much as it enhances one's subject of healing. The effective healer gains a priceless gift; through her work she achieves an exquisite intensification of her connection with the ground of her being. She fully connects her heart with the heart of Being.
Performing works of healing for others does not make one holy; it does indicate one is wise regarding one's own self-interest. A healer has learned how both the self and others can mutually benefit from the seen and unseen forces of this world we inhabit.