Holding in the Light – Meetings for Healing
January 9, 2025 § 1 Comment
Usually, when we’re asked to hold someone in the light, it’s in the midst of some other situation, very often just after meeting for worship, and we devote no real time or attention to the practice. This is why I feel it’s mostly an outward form whose only value is the shared sympathy it evokes in the gathering. This is no small thing, but it’s not a serious attempt at healing or even comforting the person held. For real attempts at healing, we need a dedicated meeting for healing.
I know that Friends with deeper commitment to the gift of healing than mine, and with broader and more current study and experience, hold meetings for healing among Friends. I’ve never attended one, so I don’t know what these other models are. But I’m sure that other approaches could be at least as effective as the one I describe below. But this is what I know can work—not often, to be honest, but sometimes.
I mentioned my training in Silva Mind Control in previous posts in this series. As a teacher, I used to lead programs for graduates of the course in which healing circles figured regularly and prominently. That practice might offer a model for our own meetings for healing.
The Mind Control practice was an energy circle. We sat in a tight circle holding hands. If we were working on someone in the group, they sat in the middle. The leader would guide a meditation in which we used the deepening technique Mind Control taught and then visualized energy—light—moving from us out of our right hands into the person next to us, and on around the circle, and back into us through our left hand from the person on our left. It was like a spiritual cyclotron, which is a physics particle accelerator that uses two “D”-shaped magnets to spin electrons around in a circle.
At some point, the leader would ask us to all visualize the energy curving up to an apex above the center of the circle and then either funneling down on the person in the middle or out to whomever we were working on at a distance. If the latter, then we called up whatever visual images of the recipient we have, either in memory or in imagination.
It was that simple, all of it easily adapted to Quaker faith and practice. First, deepening, however you do that. Then calling up the Light within. Then cycling the energy—the Light—in the circle until a “clerk” senses that the circle and the energy/light are ready. Then focusing the “beam” on the recipient and holding it there until the “clerk” feels the work is done.
Whatever the “therapeutic” results for the recipient, the practice builds strong bonds between the participants. The energy is often palpable, beautiful, even thrilling, with compassion and desire for healing rising within in wonderful waves. This emotional energy is perhaps where the healing actually draws its power, rather than the exercise of imagination.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1b: Relaxation with Focus—The Breath
August 1, 2024 § Leave a comment
First, a note about brain waves. A commenter has said that my information about brain waves is out of date, and I wouldn’t be surprised. I learned what I passed on in the early 1970s and have tried to update my knowledge since. That’s fifty years of research ago. I should have mentioned that. That doesn’t change the value of using techniques that shift our consciousness more toward the dream state, though.
The words “breath” and “spirit” are the same in Sanskrit, Greek, and Hebrew for a reason. The word “inspiration” means both being inspired and breathing in for a reason. Your breath and your spirit are intimately related.
Breath is the only autonomic function we can consciously control. Taking deep breaths slows us down. Slowing the breath relaxes us.
Deep Breaths
There’s more to taking deep breaths that you might think. We normally breath from the chest, even when we take a deep breath. But it’s better to take a deep breath from your belly. Well, technically, it’s from your diaphragm. Here’s how you do it: As you breathe in, let your belly expand. When it’s bulged out as much as is natural, then switch to the chest and finish the inspriration. Now that’s a deep breath.
Paying Attention
This is the basic element in any breathing exercise: to just pay attention. Just keeping your attention on your breath is a powerful deepening exercise. Your mind will wander off onto something else after a few breaths. When it does, you just bring it back to your breath. That simple. The more you sustain your attention in this way, the deeper you sink. But now for an added element to paying attention.
Letting Go of the Expiration
This utterly simple addition to attentive breathing is even more effective: Pay attention as you exhale and exhale naturally, without force. When all the air in your lungs has been expelled, DO NOT BREATHE IN right away. If you just wait and pay attention, your body will naturally pause between breaths for an amazingly long time. This is a letting go of breath, a letting go, letting . . . until your body naturally starts the next breath.
Allow this letting go, breath after breath, and you will go deep after deep.
Now, sometimes you might feel a little panic while doing this. Your body—and your mind—are not used to this extended pause. If you feel compelled by this little anxiety to breathe, go ahead, No problem. Return to the exercise with the next breath. You might feel the need to make this breath a deep one. Go ahead.
The more you continue letting this pause after exhalation take place, the longer the pause is likely to last, until you reach a floor. It’s at this point that I usually switch to the next part of my practice, if I haven’t already.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1a: Relaxation with Focus—The Eyes
July 31, 2024 § 1 Comment
To start
I sit in a comfortable chair that helps me keep my back as straight as possible, feet flat on the floor. I close my eyes. I take a couple of natural breaths.
The eyes
The brain devotes seventy-five percent of its activity dealing with the outer senses to vision. So just closing your eyes reduces brain activity substantially. But one more eye technique can jump-start your descent into the depths: looking upward.
I was taught that the reason that saints look up in sacred art is because looking upwards lowers brainwave activity. The artists somehow intuitively knew this. Of course, they could also have been looking up toward heaven. Same thing?
Brain waves
Let me get into this a bit. The brain produces four bands of brain waves from different parts of the brain, and these regions of the brain contribute different aspects of our consciousness. The bands of brain waves are named alpha, beta, delta, and theta. All parts of the brain are firing at once pretty much all the time, so we are always producing all of the brain wave groups, but at any one time one of these groups has the greater share of the total brain wave pie chart.
Our normal wakeful consciousness is in beta (so-called because it was the second to be discovered), between 14 and 21 cycles per second (CPS). Alpha (the first to be discovered), between 7 and 14 cps, is the brain in the dream state and in periods of deep relaxation or creativity. Theta (4–7) is deeper sleep and responsible for fight and flight. Delta (1–4) is deep sleep.
Back to the eyes. Looking upward shifts the brainwave balance toward more alpha, less beta.
“Deep up”
You can raise the upward angle of your gaze in three stages. The second stage brings you deep; the third stage is a very powerful deepening exercise.
Stage 1: Just look up, which you will easily do with focused and sustained attention.
Stage 2: Deliberately look even farther up, as far up as it seems “natural”. You will begin to feel a little strain on the muscles controlling the eyes; it’s a little bit uncomfortable.
Stage 3: Look even farther up, with the focus of your gaze up inside your skull deep behind your forehead, where the pineal gland is. This is the third eye.
Doing this feels really weird, and I can only sustain it myself for a moment or two. But that’s all it takes. You will feel a tension in your forehead and in your brain and a mental plunging sensation—I don’t know how else to describe it. When you release your gaze, you will notice a major difference in your consciousness.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1—Introduction
July 30, 2024 § 1 Comment
Download the series
I have created a page aggregates the posts in which I describe various techniques for centering down or deepening, shared from my own practice and experience. Here’s the link:
Deepening Techniques for Friends
When the series is finished, I will publish a pdf file for downloading on that page with all of the posts in one document.
Deepening techniques and spiritual formation
I think that spiritual formation is one of the more important roles that a Quaker meeting should play in the spiritual lives of those members and attenders who want it. By spiritual formation I mean, as Sandra Cronk put it in her School of the Spirit pamphlet Spiritual Nurture Ministry Among Friends, helping people
“grow in relationship with God and become more receptive to the work of the Inward Guide.” In practical terms, I see spiritual formation as efforts to help members to clarify their faith, to identify and mature their spiritual practice, and to integrate both their faith and practice into the Quaker way.
Our meetings don’t do a good enough job of spiritual formation. We don’t usually mentor newcomers. We don’t usually provide programs that expose our members to the various spiritual disciplines that might serve their formation, let alone teach these disciplines. We leave this process of self-discovery and maturation to osmosis, to chance, and to personal initiative.
And when we do focus on spiritual formation, we very rarely pass on techniques for deepening consciousness. The Christian tradition is in general very weak in its understanding of consciousness and the role it could play in spiritual development; Quakerism is only marginally better.
So I want to try to fill this deepening technique gap a little bit. I have a lot of experience with meditation in several disciplines, and I have a settled devotional practice that really works well for me. I want to share it here in a series of posts.
Much of what I will be passing on comes from yoga, which offers a several-thousand-year-old science of consciousness. Most of the rest comes from my time as a teacher of Silva Mind Control, which has a sinister sounding name but is a quite effective self-help and psychic healing toolbox with a quasi-scientific approach centered around brain wave science. Mind Control teaches some deepening techniques and their theory.
These techniques are just what I’ve come to for myself and they won’t work for everyone. We each have our own spiritual temperaments and the whole point of a Quaker spiritual formation program is not to inculcate but to invite, not to indoctrinate but to share, to explore together options that we might find fosters and deepens our spiritual and religious experience.
I feel this is especially important for the quality of our worship. I believe that deepening one’s consciousness is one of the most important things we can do as Friends to foster Spirit-led vocal ministry and the gathered meeting. The more people who have entered a deeper consciousness, the more likely the meeting is to be gathered, and techniques make a difference.
A personal outline of practice
So let me start in this post with just an outline of the routine I use when I meditate, which I’ll unpack in some detail in subsequent posts. My practice progresses through three phases or clusters of technique:
- relaxation with focus,
- starting with the eyes looking up,
- then breathing deeply,
- then focusing and consciously relaxing discreet sections of your body, working from the face down to the toes in concert with your breath; then
- prayer, broadly defined,
- affirmations in concert with with breathing and relaxation,
- inviting in the Presence, however, you define that, and
- projecting out your “mind forms” of healing and blessing; and finally
- meditation proper, that is, sustained inward attention on something that serves your deepening.
In the next post, I will start with the eyes.
Through the Flaming Sword 