The Healing Power of Being Held in Loving Embrace
Part Eight — The Magic and Mystery of Enchanted Spiritual Healing
I had just finished reading Thomas Hübl’s Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. It had stirred up in me my own decades long, repressed trauma. I was a naturally oriented gay man, but my religious and cultural grid kept me from recognizing it until I was 60 years old. After reading Hübl, I realized that it was not being gay that was traumatic. It was hiding that reality from myself and others. In one striking sentence, Hübl summed up my situation: “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
My WeSpace group met the next week and it was an opportunity to have “an empathic witness.” When it came my time to share in our opening “connection” time, I shared the above. I am not one to often share deep, challenging feelings because repressed me (regardless of twenty years of therapy) is usually not very aware of them. My friends, recognizing an unusual occurrence, listened intently. After I shared, they did exactly what I needed. They held me in loving silence for a long time. No advice. No fixing. Just holding me in their love. I could feel being held in that magical loving embrace all over my body.
I felt whatever was left of the decades of trauma slowly melt away. It was profoundly healing.
There may still be more work to do, but in being seen and held I was released from the grip of being unseen and alone in my trauma.
This for me was a powerful example of the healing power of just being held and seen by my WeSpace group. We didn’t need to solve anything, or figure it out. We just sank into the loving and healing energy of our collective presence.
Afterwards, others remarked how healing it was for them too!
They held a friend in Jesus healing love
It was a dramatic scene with the crowds surrounding the house where Jesus was teaching as recounted in Matthew (9:1–8), Mark (2:1–12), and Luke (5:17–26). It was so crowded, that the men carrying a paralyzed friend on his bed could not get through the door. So they climbed the outside stairway, removed the roof tiles, and let him down directly in front of Jesus. Jesus saw the extraordinary faith of these friends in plowing through the crowd and tearing up the roof to get their friend to Jesus. All three gospel accounts report Jesus saying, “When he saw their faith he said, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’”
In the Jewish religious metaphor of the day, the concept of forgiveness presumes, in its oldest meaning, that sin is an evil, malevolent force that adheres to the sinner. Forgiveness is the divine means for removing it. When God "forgives" one's sin, it is identical with the curing of the person and the regeneration of their strength. It means, they will live the “full human life of 70 years.” (Encyclopaedia Judaica).
This is the incredibly strong connection that existed between divine forgiveness and healing in Jesus’ day. Perhaps this man’s eventual paralysis was even linked to the feelings of separation from God and the shame of religious “impurity” that accompanied illness and the outcast in Jewish society.
But the really incredible thing here is that Jesus pointed out that it was not the faith of this man that healed him. Notice that Jesus said, “When he saw their faith he said, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’” It was the faith of the man’s friends that resulted in him declaring the man’s sins were forgiven! These friends not only physically held and carried him to where Jesus was, they spiritually carried him into where being “cured” of his sins happened. How about that for the power of a first century WeSpace group!
Together in the Healing of Divine Holding
While there is a great deal of healing and spiritual power in a one-on-one meditative embrace, moving into the group collective field has a different energy of healing. In part 3, we saw how this effect happens in large gatherings like Lourdes or other crowds, whether in the physical or mystical realm. But there is another form of healing that comes from being in a small, sacred circle like a WeSpace group.
In my experience with my group, an important element was being able to express and be seen in a deep, loving way. This is really only possible with a small group of close companions and loving friends.
In this holding, it is less like a group hug and more like a mystical enfolding and intertwining embrace. The touch is happening at deeper levels than skin to skin, and the subtle energy is being shared among one another in the field of love, where our boundaries are less defined.
To enter into this space with others requires a degree of trust that is generally built up over time through increasing relational presence and care. In my own group, I have known some of the members for decades and others just a few years. But I knew it was a safe space where I come and find healing through being held in empathy and love.
Most often our trauma and healing work will still need direct attention and work in various forms of therapy. I myself worked for ten years with an energy healer and twenty years with various therapists. A WeSpace group doesn’t exist primarily as a support group or overly focus on our personal problems. But at times we can come to one another to be held in the loving embrace of empathetic healing and holding together.
Dedication to the highest spiritual goals
Jesus always kept in mind his goal in life which he expressed in various ways. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength…(and) love your neighbor as yourself.” In his first “sermon” he identified with Isaiah’s vision of bringing good news to the poor, letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming God’s favor (Luke 4:18-19). It might also be summed up with “I have come that they may have life and have it in all its fullness” (John 10:10).
It is important that as followers of Jesus we keep the goal in mind, too. To be fully released to pursue these things, we often need to experience a great deal of healing and transformation in our lives (though not as a prerequisite). That is where healing practices and Integral meditative prayer practices such as Whole-Body Mystical Awakening are vitally important. But alone, they are not enough.
Steven Swanson, in the scholarly Journal of Yoga, writes about the key to the integral structure of consciousness as understood by Gebser. He says, “Above all, the key seems to be dedication: dedication to realizing the highest possibilities of humankind and beyond. Snatching up the flashes of dedication we experience throughout the course of our lives, whether seated in meditation or stuck in a god-awful traffic jam and working them for all they’re worth.”
The Gebser Flavor of Integral
In conclusion — the Gebser Flavor
I woke up one morning recently with a new realization in my life-long spiritual journey. My Christianity now has strong Gebser flavor! It was as plain as day to me. It was as beautiful and mysterious as a moonlit night. It was a sparkling reality deep within. Geber’s integral framework has provided me with my natural inclination toward:
1. An archaic structure that is transcendent, formless awareness.
2. A magic structure that frees my dearest friend Jesus and other spiritual beings and realities to be thrillingly personal presences and, at the same time, cosmically mystical in a thoroughly fantastical world that I find to be an increasing reality for me.
3. A mythic structure that allows spiritual realities to be described in the most meaningful, personal, and cosmic stories and symbols.
4. A mental structure of a liberating, biblically, historically, integrally informed theological framework.
5. An integral structure that allows all of these to coexist in a satisfying way that passionately grips my mind, heart, and innermost being.
I am grateful to Ken Wilber for starting me on the integral journey. It always took some work translating his understanding into a Christian framework. With Gebser’s integral understanding, rather than needing to do translating work, I founded he translated me! He showed me how I could hold all the seemingly disparate pieces I live by in an astounding blend of progressively wrought theology, life-giving stories, symbols, and metaphors, and thrilling mystical realities in a richly differentiated and seamless unity.
The healing of the world
I close this series with Geber’s visionary words:
“This integral attitude may be fruitfully combined with certain practices, such as meditation . . . Yet these techniques are of secondary importance, and their only value lies in facilitating that inner attitude. What is needed is care, much patience, and the discarding of many preconceived opinions, wishful dreams, and blind demands; and it calls for a certain detachment toward oneself and the world, a gradually maturing balance between all inherent components and consciousness structures.
Whoever has ennobled, intensified, and prepared his consciousness, so that an enrichment of the Integral consciousness is achieved, lives in a state of participation in the world as a whole. This participation, which is conditioned by the Integral consciousness and which, even now, is to be found in individuals in every part of the world, holds the possibility for the healing of the world. It will depend on those few who are already consciously realizing this process and who are, thus, enabling the new forces to take effect in the individual, the world, and humanity.”