Love Heals

When I decided to heal myself of terminal cancer in 1976, I heard the idea that “love heals.” Everyone seemed to know this, and since healing myself was now a matter of life and death for me, I decided it would be a really good idea to add this to my self-healing arsenal.

I had been diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor at the level of the neck, and it had been declared inoperable and untreatable. I had been given one or two months to live (unless I coughed or sneezed) the year before, and by some miracle, I was still alive – perhaps because something in my consciousness had changed in terms of my attitude toward life.

I still had to find a way to get rid of the cancer, and the idea of using love for that sounded like something I could use. The only problem was that I was not really sure what love is, and I felt like I needed to be sure in order to use it for my healing.

I looked around at what people were calling love, and much of it didn’t make sense to me as a healing force. It looked more like domination (“I love you, therefore now I tell you what to do” ) or slavery (“If I ever found him with another woman I would do this or that to him…”). Certainly, there were a lot of different ways of expressing love, but these were not the emotion itself that I needed to use. How would I know when I was feeling love, in order to use it for healing myself and saving my life?

I went to hear a conference entitled, “What is love?” I thought, “At last I am going to find out.” It seemed as though the Universe was answering my quest and guiding me to where I would find the answer I was looking for. The person talked for two hours, and the conclusion of the talk was, “Love is.” Perhaps that made sense to the person speaking, but as for myself, I know no more than I did before.

I heard of a kind of backward definition – love being defined by what it is not. I had heard it described as something without judgment, and without expectation. If you begin with a perception of someone, and remove the judgment – judging them as wrong about something – and removing the expectation – wanting something from them – you are left with a way of seeing them that feels good somewhere in the vicinity of the heart. I felt that must be a good clue. That might be love, but I felt I could use something a bit more direct, another way of getting to that place.

One evening I was alone at home in a meditative space, considering the question of love, and a symbol appeared on the wall, which I understood as a message from my Spirit. It was heart with light shining from the center, and the number “1” visible through the center and extending to the outside of the heart, with the word, “Acceptance,” written below.

For me, this was the key to the opening of my heart chakra, understanding the true nature of love, and knowing when I was feeling that force that heals.

I used the symbol as a visual meditation, seeing different messages in it each time I looked, and understanding that this was because of the nature of my perceptual filter each time I looked at it, according to what I was feeling or going through that day.

One day it said to me, “Acceptance is Number 1.” Another day the message was, “Open your heart. Look inside. See the light.” Another time it was “Accept your individuality, and the individuality of others.” Sometimes I saw an eagle,

I could relate to Acceptance as something I could use to raise my vibration from a solar plexus place to a heart space. Accepting “what is” allowed me to emotionally accept the situation that existed, to remove the emotions about what was happening in order to be in a clear space from which I could change the situation. Accepting people as they are, rather than deciding how they should be, allowed me to let go of control, which I understood to represent tension in the solar plexus chakra, and see them from a clearer sense of freedom in the solar plexus, and in fact, to see things about them that I could appreciate, at the level of the heart chakra.

I found that if I thought of someone I judged, and the quality about them I thought was “wrong,” I could ask myself if I could remember a situation in which someone else could have used those words to describe me – and I always could. Of course, I could easily tell myself that when I was in that situation I had a good reason for doing what I was doing – and then I could understand that perhaps, that other person might have the same good reasons – and then I could see the other person with compassion, and perhaps not so different from myself. Where there had been a wall between us there was now a door, a possibility for a communication.

I recognized when I was feeling the love, by the sensations in my heart, and I felt I had something to work with, something I could add to the other tools I was using to heal myself.

I decided that in a meditation I would surround myself with people who I know loved me, and to feel the love, the connection I felt with them. I could then take the feeling, the physical sensation that I recognized that went along with the emotion, and direct it to the part of the body that needed it, feeling that part opening to the love, accepting it, and feel something happening there, a little more each time I did it, until I felt no more symptoms.

Eventually, when I went back to the doctors for a new examination, they decided they must have made a mistake.

There is a way to read the body as a map of the consciousness within, in order to determine the inner cause to a physical symptom. The key to this map is the chakras, the energy centers found in Hindu philosophy. Each chakra represents certain parts of the consciousness and certain parts of the body. When there is a symptom in a particular part of the body, we can see that it represents tension in the person’s consciousness about something specific happening in their life at that time.

There is a personality profile associated with each symptom, a way of being that is not really who the person is, but rather what they have been doing. There is another personality profile associated with having no symptoms, a way of being that is always accessible in the person’s consciousness, and that is who the person really is. Healing is about releasing the stressed way of being and returning to our natural state of balance.

We can say that anyone with a symptom has not been themself, not being who they really are.

Why would someone choose to not be himself or herself? Either as an expression of love, to change in some way in order to be loved, or as a reaction to the perception that they are not loved, or would not be loved if they were being who they really are. There’s often a love story involved – an unhappy love story, perhaps, but a love story nevertheless.

It’s interesting to note that the immune system is controlled by the thymus gland, which is associated with the heart chakra, and therefore with perceptions of love. We are told that this gland atrophies during adolescence. It would seem then that at that time in our lives, we change from the direct experience of feeling love, to accepting society’s values in which the true feeling of love is considered a non-ordinary experience.

When we don’t feel the love, we look for evidence that it is there or not. “He did that, therefore he loves me,” or, “…therefore he does not love me.”

Many symptoms and diseases are considered as “auto-immune” problems – difficulties with the immune system, and therefore with the person’s perceptions of love, and the symptoms themselves show how the person has changed their way of being, not being themselves because of these perceptions (or mis-perceptions).

We know that a strong immune system protects the individual from many diseases, and that strengthening the immune system is a way to release the symptoms. It is the perceptions of love, what love really is, that will strengthen the immune system.

We are surrounded by people we love. An interesting question to ask ourselves can be, “How much time do I spend during my day feeling the love that I have in my heart?”

Do we focus on the love, or on other issues that we have allowed to get in the way of the perceptions of love? If we have been filling our consciousness with the fears, anger, insecurity, and issues that are, in the final analysis, not really that important, we can choose instead to hold our attention on the love, and feeling the contact, reminding ourselves if we need to that this is really the most important thing in our lives, and what we need to do to remain healthy.

The more time we spend feeling the love that is always there, the more we strengthen our immune system, making it easier to release any symptoms, and maintain our natural state of health and balance.

Love really DOES heal!

© Martin Brofman 2009