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© Pamir Kiciman 2011

Awareness is a quality which utilizes more sources than the intellect or the brain’s information processing. The thinking mind cognizes and perceives but neither of these add up to awareness. Awareness includes presence; the presence of the one cognizing. It also considers experiences available from other sources. Signal processing isn’t the only experience available to the human organism.

When we look out at the world with the five senses and what the brain processes through them, the world is solid and works in specific ways. When we look out to the world with awareness, its solidity starts to break up. It also becomes apparent that there are other possibilities in the way the world works.

This is true of our inner workings as well. If we only cognize our challenges and dilemmas, many times they seem unsolvable, set, and punishing. If we bring the same into awareness, however, space opens up and new possibilities arise in that space. We also find that we’re far less identified with or even as those ‘personal problems.’

If we imagine that our mind is like the blue sky, and that across it pass thoughts as clouds, we can get a feel for that part of it which is other than our thoughts. The sky is always present; it contains the clouds and yet is not contained by them. So with our awareness. It is present and encompasses all our thoughts, feelings, and sensations; yet it is not the same as them. To recognize and acknowledge this awareness, with its spacious, peaceful quality, is to find a very useful resource within. We see that we need not identify with each thought just because it happens to occur. We can remain quiet and choose which thought we wish to attend to. And we can remain aware behind all these thoughts, in a state that offers an entirely new level of openness and insight. — Ram Dass

The Heart-Mind

The thinking process gets all the fanfare. Schooling produces thinkers. Our mental capacities are touted, researched, edified and respected. Rightly so in many ways; the human mind is a pretty amazing thing. What becomes detrimental is the focus on the mind to the exclusion of other amazing aspects of our being, the chief of which is the heart.

This isn’t the biological heart or the heart of romance. It’s not operating only at the level of emotion. It isn’t entangled in our self-identity as ego. In fact it’s free of us entirely, acting as a backdrop to daily existence, and a container for the human journey.

In Sanskrit this Heart is called hridayam, the locus of consciousness where our true Self lives.

There’s nothing bad about having an ego. Those thoughts and feelings are necessary for a healthy personality. But if you identify so strongly with the ego that you think that’s all there is, that limited view can keep you from your deeper Self. — Ram Dass

As amazing the mind can be, it’s also conditioned, fragmented, distracted, trapped and fearful. It isn’t able to extricate itself from such influences by relying only on its own brilliance. It needs the balance of the Heart, and the awareness that’s available there. It needs to become heart-mind.

… in all Asian languages — at least I’ve been told this; I don’t know all Asian languages — but in all Asian languages the word for “mind” and the word for “heart” are the same word. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

There isn’t a mind without the Heart. Thinking without awareness gets us into trouble. We become narrow and exalt temporary truths. Thought-generated awareness is limited, the input it gets comes from the material world which gives us only a partial view.

The heart-mind is awareness turned inward, awareness of the spiritual universe within, and the quality of that awareness, the feeling that accompanies it, is love. — Ram Dass

Awareness

True awareness doesn’t originate in the mind. Cognition and perception are too narrow to produce awareness. There’s a contemplative quality to awareness and routine thoughts are too fast and disparate to be contemplative. The mind needs the ballast of the Heart. The mind is linear and trapped in time. The Heart is nonlinear and timeless. With heart-mind we can be in time and deal with our daily life, and also renew and recalibrate in the timeless. With heart-mind our sojourn in time is sweetened and enhanced by our diving into a nonlinear, timeless center of wholeness.

Mind by itself also leaves us trapped in ‘local problems.’ These are the stuff of everyday living, all the usual pressures, stresses and dramas. Awareness sources in the nonlocal. It’s ever-present and impersonal. It doesn’t make judgments or evaluations. It simply and directly reveals what is. Although readily available, like the Heart, awareness needs to be cultivated, promoted and made familiar to our consciousness.

So much of what is considered “smart” is brain-based. There’s another, holistic intelligence; that of the Heart. Education, business, social and behavioral sciences all emphasize brain development. Yet we’re inhuman without the Heart. It’s not the heart of cardiology or heartache that trumps the brain, but the Heart of exquisite Being and Presence.

Awareness is available at the Being level of reality. Here there’s Presence. Mind isn’t equated with the brain in its superlative states. Mind breaks the barriers of the brain. Yet even then, if it doesn’t hold hands with the Heart, it can’t know itself, it can’t participate in Presence.

Presence is ineffable, but it can be known and felt once we make ourselves available to it.

This presence whether experienced as Allah, as Atman, as Sunyata, or as the Buddha-nature or as Bodhisattva; whether as Tao or as the One or as the Divine Feminine, is the atmosphere in which humans breathe deepest and without which they eventually suffocate. — Thomas Berry

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In the rich history of cross-cultural healing traditions, the healer was responsible mostly locally with his or her art. The world was simpler, less crowded, there was more isolation and globalization hadn’t emerged. The healer was the tribe’s health care system. He or she was also an integral part of the entire functioning of the village on all levels. The healer was consulted not only in personal matters, but matters of the tribe, its identity and relationship to nature, the world, and others.

© Pamir Kiciman 2011

Little of this has changed today. Modern medicine has emerged and marginalized the healer somewhat, not because it’s more effective but because it has huge financial backing. However, there remain isolated tribes where the tradition of the healer remains consistent with historical models. And there are healers in urban culture who follow in these same footsteps.

What has changed is that the village has become global and the tribe is now nonlocal. Issues at hand are much more complex. What the healer heals and how has shifted.

Today’s urban healer must be a global citizen. The healer’s primary sphere of influence may still be his or her ‘tribe.’ Yet, the evolutionary stage of planet Earth and humanity is demanding that the healer becomes a healing presence in the world, and not only during a healing session.

Today’s healer carries the healing presence moment-to-moment so that there’s patience and deep seeing. This prevents reactions to a headline or personal situation. In the face of personal and global events, the healer responds in the world, rather than reacting to the world.

Being able to see below the surface allows a healer to be even-minded and take the long view. The short view is full of attachment, agenda and outcome. It’s limited, reactive, nonresponsive, and reductionist. When events are considered from the reduction to a headline, a corrective and healing response is out of reach. The healer waits and sees, until all factors emerge to be considered.

The cultivated healing place inside is a compass and firm ground which lets the healer remain calm and nonreactive. The healer responds thoughtfully. Thoughtful response is a quality of the awakened Heart. The awakened Heart is primed by practice. Healers practice not to get somewhere, but because it’s the crucible of change.

Healers practice not only with others, but first with themselves.

Once the Heart awakens, it has ready access to universal wisdom and compassion. Universal wisdom and compassion further helps the healer to be responsive, enduring and consistent. The healing way is living from a healing place inside and being a holder of a healing worldview.

The Heart is a place where events can be considered with patience and nonattachment. Nonattachment is a vehicle for clarity. This Heart isn’t the organ of the heart, or the heart of human emotions. It’s not physical at all. It doesn’t really have a location. This Heart sees whole. It’s awake to the eternal. It has shed any bitterness. It’s alive in the moment and pulses in scared rhythm.

It’s the very Heart of Life and it’s available to everyone, healer and nonhealer alike. In fact, we’re in an evolutionary cycle where healing is being asked of everyone.

Please find much more about this subject here and scroll down.

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Healers have been active at least since the beginnings of recorded history. The literature of medical anthropology as well as cross-cultural studies show that virtually all non-Western societies and most of the non-Anglo communities in the United States still use some form of indigenous healing that lies outside the realm of traditional allopathic medicine. The fact that the art of healing has been in existence for so long attests to the underlying belief that healers have special abilities to use their consciousness to help others. —Frank Lawlis, Ph.D.

Fortunately many indigenous systems and others have been studied and documented, honoring and legitimizing the Healers of the world through time. The healing way is living from a healing place inside and being a holder of a healing worldview. Central to the healing way is the Healer. Today, however, the village has become global and the tribe is now nonlocal. What the Healer heals and how has shifted, together with global shifts.

Here are only some of the ways in which the Healer manifests, specifically in relation to world events, rather than personal healing:

• The Healer is calm and even-minded.
• The Healer is nonreactive and grounded.
• The Healer sees below the surface.
• The Healer takes the long view.
• The Healer works with symbols.
• The Healer is a diviner.
• The Healer knows the course of events.
• The Healer never wavers from healing.
• The Healer is constant and patient.
• The Healer is heart oriented.
• The Healer’s Heart territory is expansive.
• The Healer lets all events dissolve in the Heart.

From this dissolution the new emerges.

It can be hard for the human side of the Healer to know and feel that all the spiritual qualities s/he is radiating are making any actual difference. Discouragement and/or burnout can set in if outward evidence of healing isn’t seen. Large scale, rapid change isn’t the way of the world, although that can happen too as evidenced by world news in the last month or so. The Light Healers share definitely adds up, is stored perhaps, or shifts things imperceptibly. A lot of times, it’s not known how and where the healing “work” does good. And then it surfaces all at once, often in multiple places at once.

It has to be realized that these phenomena are happening in epic cycles that the mind can’t truly grasp. The best approach is to simply practice, for the sake of practice. Practice is for practice. It’s not for gain or world transformation. The world changes because we practice, not because we practice to change it.

The demands on the Healer in modern life are different and more strenuous. The world is now complex and intense.

Here are some ways to stave off any overwhelm:

• Treat signals you receive as information only. They are data, that’s it.
• These signals are not entering your mindbody in any way, not becoming part of your subtle body either.
• These signals are merely insights for you to understand and help in a more precise way.
• For it to be true healing, it has to be sourced in universal power and compassion.
• If it sources in your own heart, that’s limited and can be quite frail/fragile.
• Your heart is part of the equation, but not all on its own.
• It relies on what comes THROUGH you.
• If you rely only on what comes FROM you, it spells trouble.
• If you relate while healing from emotion only, transfer is inevitable.
• If you relate while healing from pure feeling, an informational matrix, then Spirit can do its work and you are free.
• The healer has to be a warrior with a strong spiritual backbone.
• The better your conduit, the better you can help.

The essential element in not yielding to overwhelm is to be in Big Heart, come from Big Heart and let Big Heart heal.

For additional thoughts on the Healer, read here and here. Please also share your own thoughts regarding this matter in the comments section.

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

Donate to this blog. Thank you!

© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Compassion is a quality of the awakened heart. The awakened heart is one which is healed and transcendent of petty concerns. The natural human capacity to feel for and with others is where compassion begins. Compassion circumscribed by one’s immediate family and friends is an imitation of itself. It never quite peaks and can lead to narrow self-interest, and thus conflict. Compassion isn’t only love, kindness, empathy, or altruism. It’s a combination of these, making it entirely different. It must break the shores of personal concerns before it can truly become itself. Attached compassion is not really of much use to anyone.

True compassion brings with it a clear awareness. This awareness is abiding, as is compassion. Both are sourced in the same origin. Compassion and awareness engender each other. Awareness can open the heart to bigger compassion, and compassion can open the mind to greater awareness. This is the power and effectiveness of working with abiding qualities; they’re efficient and direct.

Compassion elevates both  the bearer of it and its recipient. Because it sources from an abiding place, true compassion is effective in an endless sphere. Likewise, compassion is very practical and not reserved for highlight moments. It’s an everyday companion and a peak experience all at once.

Compassion has to begin in spiritual contemplation and practice. It’s there that whatever needs to be healed in our humanity can be healed. We’re born with a good heart. Living can bake a crust on it. It’s also not necessarily an awakened heart at the start. Thus there’s inner work to be done. To awaken the heart to its true nature is extremely rewarding because it returns us home, and reveals our best in all areas.

Compassion at the human level is better than any of its opposites. Compassion that’s harvested from its universal source by personal inner practice is inestimably valuable. This is the compassion we must tap and share widely.

Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and the deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment.  —Arthur Jersild

What’s often missed with compassion is that it’s also a tremendous source of strength. An eternal resource such as compassion is solid and far-reaching. It brings with it other timeless qualities and informs our human experience on all levels.

Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution. —Kahlil Gibran

How have you accessed compassion, how has it instructed you and where have you applied its goodness?

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

Donate to this blog. Thank you!