One of the major things I learned during my eight-year daily yoga practice was to relax while falling. What I mean by this is one of the properties of doing yoga asanas (poses) is to arrange your body in ways it either never has been placed, or is blocked somehow from being put in a particular position. This can lead to losing your balance, discomforts, straight out pain, or some sort of emotional release. The key to making progress with yoga asanas is to relax while the body gets accustomed to out-of-range placements, pain or falling. In this way, the “fight-or-flight” response is lessened, and it’s then easier to approach the pose the next time and gain greater range of motion.

This strategy of relaxing while falling became automatic with me, so that anytime there was an experience of pain or discomfort or imbalance, I would simply let go, relax and regain equilibrium–allowing the energies to re-adjust and re-discover new pathways for healing.

On the other hand, one of the hardest things for me to get is that EVERYTHING is for healing. That sounds good, and reads nicely for a Facebook meme, but in practice the temptation to lose patience and take pain, setbacks, and emotional upsets personally can get profound. Uncertainties, worries, and general monkey mind shenanigans can really take the wind out of one’s sails and leave him shaking his fist at the universe while questioning his very existence. Yet, this nearly bizarre axiom stands as one of the most intimate truths of human existence: It’s all for healing.

But, Obi Wan, what are we healing from? What property of life is it that would allow pain and suffering and also the healing of that same pain and suffering? It seems like an exercise in masochism, and I certainly have accused the universe of sadism before, but, really. What’s the attraction?

Some would say we are here for learning, but that can’t be entirely correct, because we are, at our core, all-knowing, consciousness, so it is more accurate to say we are here to remember, if anything. Put the two concepts of healing and remembering together and we have the restoration of infinite consciousness.

From what I’ve gathered by being down here on our beautiful blue marble for the past 66 years (of this life), is that our poor Earth has been subjected to eons of wars of control–battles between forces that would keep things unconscious for the thrill of control and power, and those forces of consciousness bringing freedom of choice and wondrous creations of light and love. This grand duality of intention, borne out of the very dynamo of universal creation itself, serves a purpose. And I believe that purpose is the embodiment of our full consciousness into this dimensional world.

So, on an individual level, what we are healing is the rift between the automaticities of unconsciousness, and the full, infinite awareness of total consciousness. We are literally transforming that which is unconscious into that which is conscious.

At the core of asana yoga, for example, the practice requires one to awaken and make conscious all the energy meridians of the body, so that through the thousands of energy channels flows unimpeded life force, love, prana, and awareness. When any of these energy channels are blocked or constricted, it is experienced as discomfort, pain, confusion, emotional turbulence, or imbalance. By consciously manipulating our energies, we achieve a healing of that rift between what was once unconscious and is now conscious.

The prime manipulation is letting go–passing the pain and suffering from the clutches of the monkey mind, to the open, powerful, loving embrace of our Creator self–the Creator of all, within which we move and have our being. It’s a falling away from control that decisively wrests control of our lives from would-be slave masters, and our own programmed, habitual thought–the Matrix, if you will–of our limitations, held and manipulated by the dark forces that would see us all doing their bidding as slaves and automatons.

As we fall away from dualistic control and allow the entire power of a loving universe course through our energy systems, we become free. We become uncontrollable, wild and dangerous to dark agendas. We relax and let flow the cosmic energies of love and light, in the service of the Creator of which we are all One.

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