Our True Potential for Healing
What I find most inspiring in Paramhansa Yogananda’s book How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality is the understanding of our potential for truly healing ourselves. This book accurately reflects the path I have traveled in facing my own health challenges. We can feel caught – victims of the pain we experience or of the prognoses of doctors.
I was told I would be on medications for the rest of my life, that there was nothing I could do about it. The turning point for me came when an energy healer at Ananda Village in Northern California told me just the opposite. My initial doubt dissolved when I met someone who had actually healed herself from the condition that challenged me.
The door opened to my own potential for healing. Yogananda explained, “No disease is incurable. Some diseases are beyond the reach of medicines, which by their nature are limited, The medicine is non-curative – so doctors call the disease incurable! But the power of the Infinite is unlimited and can heal all disease.”
When I started to meditate regularly and to invite God into the process, I weaned myself naturally from allopathic medicine. I have since heard many other stories of natural healing. In his book Aum: The Melody of Love, Joseph Bharat Cornell describes how Nayaswami Sadhana Devi handled a kidney stone attack. I have heard from women who have given birth and had a kidney stone that the pain of kidney stones is even worse than that of labor. During her intense pain Nayaswami Sadhana Devi chanted the word AUM while focusing on the area of her body in pain. While she was chanting AUM, the pain would disappear; when she stopped she would feel the pain again. After she had chanted deeply for two hours the pain went away completely.
A friend shared a story of falling and spraining her wrist. She had been hiking with her young son. They were far from any city and daylight was disappearing. She knew she would have to find a way to drive home. She remembered the idea from the Energization Exercises of tensing and relaxing a muscle while imagining drawing in the life force of God. With full focus she tensed and relaxed the muscles around her wrist for 5-10 minutes. The pain was gone and she was able to drive home safely.
There are also stories of people finding healing from chronic conditions. A woman named Evy MacDonald was confined to a wheelchair because of ALS; she had been given six months to live. She decided to accept the situation and offer it to God. She asked for forgiveness and utilized positive affirmations. Not only did she regain full functioning of her body and heal from the disease but she also felt herself constantly filled with joy. In one of his talks Swami Kriyananda explains that healing techniques will not work if you are not happy.
We see the same principle in How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality – the key word is, I believe, “Glowing”. Swami often spoke of saints like St. Francis who even when very sick were in bliss. Swami himself often revealed joy and expansiveness in the midst of his many physical challenges. Even though we can not always control what happens with the body, the opportunity always exists for us to feel our soul happiness.
To be inspired to discover your full healing potential and to learn the physical, energetic, mental/emotional, and spiritual healing techniques for realizing that potential, please join the online course Embody Vibrant Health.
