From illness to illumination
April 2014
By Sanjiv Ranjan
Through a range of powerful insights, and transformational exercises, Sanjiv Ranjan unfolds the secrets of the self-healing journey
Even your bodies, perishable as they seem, could certainly resist degeneration, did you but love each cell of them – with equal zeal.
Mikhail Naimy in The Book of Mirdad
Self-healing is the state of being where you enter into a deep communion with your own self, a state of being where you move into oneness, into alignment, with the whole.
All aspects of the ‘self’ heal, the moment you understand your own mystical secret. Light floods your being. Darkness is dispelled. You become the light of this world.
What is health ?
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
So, if we were to formulate a definition of disease that was close to being holistically accurate by WHO standards, could we say that disease is: a state of active physical, mental and social unrest, and not merely the absence of health?
If this definition were true, which does seem logically possible, then the second and third components (mental and social unrest) can only be rectified through self-healing, through exploration of the darkness within, through a thorough understanding of the missing links.
Having worked with people suffering from grave life-threatening or life-altering diseases, one learns that mental and social unrest are the real culprits. Mental and social unrest create stress, which plays havoc with the immune system, causing it to break down. Once the fortress has been breached, the internal defence mechanism having broken down, it leaves the organism open to mutations within the genetic infrastructure as well as influences from outside (environmental factors and pathogens).
Illness is when you slip, when you move away from mental and social comfort, when your emotions are torn, when you flounder in the darkness created by spiritual oblivion.
How is illness born ?
 Free flowing joy is a bulwark against diseases |
Illness is dark energy. Its sole purpose is to tell you to . . . explore the missing links, the blocks to joy.
Self-healing is actually a journey from illness into illumination, from links which are missing, to the completion of the story of your life. A story is beautiful only when it is complete. It can be enjoyed thoroughly only when there are no missing links.
Your pain is an internal fire alarm system. It is created by your body to tell you that it needs your attention, that some aspects of your emotional life need your attention… that some of your thought patterns need to be examined, some of your habits need modification. . . that there is an active mental, emotional, spiritual and social unrest within.
The same goes for fever.
Fever is an immune response. Your body creates it so that it can fight the invading pathogen. But you kill the fever by popping a pill. Fever is a self-healing mechanism. The healing of a fractured bone is a self-healing mechanism. The healing of a cut or a wound is a self-healing mechanism. Your body is programmed for healing. All it needs is a little bit of your time, energy and patience. And loads of your love. You have to come home to self-healing, you have to trust the healing powers which are intrinsic in you.
A sensitive young boy left his home to study engineering after having cleared a very competitive exam. But following his departure, he started having fever on every alternative day. He was subjected to a battery of tests but nothing was found amiss. The fever continued for six months and his health deteriorated.
When he came into therapy, he was asked to pay attention to his fever, and get in touch with his feelings, to just be present to the fever and listen with love. When he perceived the fever in the above way, he accessed a feeling of tremendous loneliness. He broke down and cried for the first time since he had moved away from his house. He realised that being separated from his mother had been a tremendous shock which had got buried in the daily struggle to deal with an environment which he perceived as hostile.
The fever was an internal coping mechanism. His body needed his attention. It wanted him to deal with what was happening within. Through guided introspection, he ultimately realised that you cannot stay in the nest forever. You have to find your flight. You have to love it. You have to embrace it. You have to actively seek the freedom of the sky.
When he accepted and understood that he could carry his mother in his heart forever, that when he missed her, all he needed to do was go within, his fever healed. It never came back.
Self-healing is always magical, because within you resides magic, and self-healing is healing from within.
The placebo effect
This is the untold story of self-healing.
 Tune into your body to hear its soft messages of healing |
The same goes for clinical trials with drugs which have the potential to evolve into medicine. Most of the times, control groups (people who have been administered a placebo – false medicine) show more or less the same results as those which were administered the drug under trial.
In a clinical trial, 83 arthritic patients were given sugar pills instead of their usual medicine. A second group received their usual medication. The percentage of people who reported relief was the same in both the groups. In addition, those people who had received sugar pills, but not reported any relief, were given injections of sterile water. Sixty four per cent reported relief or improvement.
So it is your faith in the medicine which works. And if you don’t believe in a medicine, no matter how potent or well proven and tried its efficacy is, it won’t work for you. If you believe that it will kill you, it actually may. A lot of people who are on cancer medication have a very negative response to the medicine they are taking. They are told it is toxic. They believe it is toxic. Toxic, it becomes for them. Their bodies succumb more to the medicine than to the cancer.
There is on record (Journal of Projective Techniques and Personalities 1957;21:331-340), the immensely baffling story of a man who was called by his doctors, Mr Wright. Orange-sized tumours had invaded his neck, groin, abdomen and chest. His doctors had given up on him. And then one day he heard about an anti-cancer drug called Krebiozen. He was sure it would cure him. He was in the last stages of living, fighting for every breath, when the first injection was given to him.
Within three days, his entire condition began reversing and the tumours had shrunk by half. He was seen joking around with the nurses, convinced that he was about to be cured. In ten days he was discharged from the hospital well on his way to recovery. There was yet another patient in the hospital who had received the same treatment, but without any improvement.
And then one day he read some negative reports about the drug. From then on his condition began to deteriorate. His doctors once again began to treat him, and knowing his previous response, they lied to him that the drug had been improved and they were injecting him with a new improved version. Once again he began improving and became much better.
Unfortunately, Krebiozen was completely discredited in the newspapers, and when he read the report, Mr Wright died within days.
Then there are people who don’t respond to medicines and when doctors give up, they are asked to pray and seek help which is divine. And there are some who do so. At times they are healed. . . maverick miracles of healing which science does not believe in.
I consider myself blessed that I have had the opportunity to witness many such healings, where people who believed in miracles actually drew them into their lives. And through observing them one understood that self-healing is intrinsic. It flowers from within. And it is a function of faith. It is a function of belief. Self-healing is a Faith-Belief Effect.
And whether the faith is on something outside you or within, it does not matter, because faith transcends all boundaries of space and time. Faith is powerful by virtue of the fact that it takes you beyond a material existence and connects you to the world of spirit, to the more subtle worlds where energy pre-determines events within the framework of space and time. It takes you into the causal matrix which exists within your mind and weaves your future into place.
The magical matrix of self-healing
The matrix is a place within your mind. Your mind is everywhere within and around you. It exist3s within your brain. It exists within your cells. And it extends all around you just like an electron cloud protects the nucleus of the atom. The electron cloud is mostly energy waves which travel across dimensions rapidly, which is why an electron can exist simultaneously in several dimensions.
All the matrix needs is your presence and your intent, so that it can sculpt your future. The moment you are present to your own mind, you can make health and well-being a choice. When you choose both, self-healing happens.
The fact that you are the pure light of existence cannot be denied. You can run away from it for as long as you wish. But ultimately you will come back to the point where your story began, because even though you think you run upon a straight line, the straight line is actually a very huge circle.
Stillness will pull you into the centre of the circle, where truth resides, and you discover ‘who you are’.
At the place where your centre exists, healing is instant. Your power to live becomes infinite. Death becomes volitional. Man is a being of volitional consciousness. His will is free. He is free to live from faith. And he is free to explore doubt. When you have faith, self-healing is spontaneous. When you doubt, you go astray. You search in vain for help, and it never comes. Because the only help that actually works is the one that lies in your own hands.
So once you understand that self-healing is a Faith-Belief Effect then the first thing you need to do is understand how important it is to embark upon this beautiful home-coming.
Self-healing is nothing but home-coming.
The Keys to your Home
There are four keys to this magical journey.
1. You have to ‘believe.’
You have to believe that self-healing is a very vital aspect of the life that you live. It will help you to move out of spiritual oblivion. It will help you to stabilise in joy. It will help you to breathe the nectar of well-being.
What are beliefs ?
Beliefs are energy fields which exist, Yes they do exist, whether you believe it or not. They exist around your DNA. And these fields are in a constant state of exchange of energy and information with every cell in your body. They are important because they can alter the bonding patterns in your DNA.
For example, if you are constantly told each time you have ice-cream, that it will give you a sore throat, the energy fields around your DNA will create reactive proteins. An inflammation will result.
Beliefs are the seeds which you sow in the soil of your mind. When you alter a belief, your experience changes. Thorns become flowers. It is alchemy.
For a belief to be powerful, it has to be lived.
If you shuffle the letters a bit you will see the message . . . Belief . . . Belife.
How do you live a belief?
You experience life as a function of your thoughts. So the type of thoughts that you think, fortify your beliefs. To transform a belief, you need the help of the restorative energy of love, because only love can transform. Only love can make something a beautiful part of you, so that it does not result in an illness.
When you look at an ice-cream you have to love it. You have to eat it with awareness and love. You have to think that your body will lovingly absorb it into you.
When you eat, you make something a part of you. You make it a part of ‘Who You Are,’ which makes eating essentially an act of supreme love. When you eat, eat with awareness. If guilt surfaces then let it surface, watch it and let it go, let the guilt go.
You can do it with the help of a simple statement to yourself, like – I accept that I am feeling guilty. But I now let it go into the healing light of the universe. In its place, I welcome love.
Do the same with fear.
Both, fear and guilt destroy love faster than termites sneak through wood. Release them from your mind, release doubt and shame too, release everything which you feel needs to be released, until only love stays, love for the ice-cream, love for your throat, love for yourself and love for the world in which you live in. And you will notice how the magic uplifts your soul. How free you feel. How blessed life becomes.
Reviewing and renewing your beliefs is a very important aspect of healing. It will determine the quality of the attention you give to yourself. If you are suffering from cancer and believe that it is the end of the road, then you have already lost the battle. But if somehow you could initiate a change in your belief system and believe that it is curable, and if you shift your focus from the disease to wellness, if you shift your focus to living totally, instead of dying a painful miserable death, then you will heal.
Cancer can be healed by the self, because it is a disease exclusively created by the body on its own. The DNA has forgotten a vital link in the processes that govern protein synthesis. So it is creating abnormal and immature cells. And anything which is abnormal can only be handled with the maturity and the wisdom that love brings into your life.
2. Being intimate with your feeling
This is the key to your well-being. To live from the ‘well of being,’ you have to connect to your feelings. You will have to examine your feelings. And when you examine your feelings the first question you have to ask yourself is – am I being true to my feelings?
Am I living from emotional honesty?
Do I smile when actually I am feeling helpless and sad within?
Most times, helplessness is hidden with a smile, which is why it can never be transformed. Helplessness belongs to the world of tears which should be allowed to flow. Or else you are fooling yourself. You are also fooling the others. Most of all, you are fooling your brain and your body.
More than fooling, you are also confusing it. And a confused body is even more dangerous than a confused mind, because in every minute within you, countless chemical, mechanical and biological functions are taking place. They are taking place simultaneously.
You have to feel your emotions, intensely, completely. And you have to learn to express them honestly. You have to forget about all the images that you put up to the world. It is the only thing that will serve you well. It is the most important missing link to your well-being. Once your emotions are honestly expressed, there is no toxic cesspool within you. And since there is no cesspool which covers your light, it will automatically shine. It will illuminate. The darkness, which is disease, will spontaneously be dispelled. And if you continue to live like this it will become so powerful that it will make you the light of this world.
In case you are suffering from an illness and wish to be healed through the power of self-healing, then one of the things you can do is make a Bucket List. Of everything you wish to do, to make yourself happy.
The ‘Bucket List’ Exercise
Sit down with paper and pen.
Ask yourself . . .
What are the things that make me happy, that fill my heart with a wild joy?
(If it is not a wild joy that you seek then you can opt for tranquillity or anything which feels uplifting, which makes you feel free.)
Make a list. Write it down on paper.
Now resolve and work towards setting yourself free from all mind-sets which do not allow you to pursue what you truly want to do.
Feel the passion.
Feel the burning need within.
Feel the fire within because fire also gives light.
Allow its light to dispel the darkness within.
Once illuminated from within, illness cannot reside. The passion to pursue your dream will make you forget your illness. And the moment your mind goes beyond the illness, your body does too. As you go about fulfilling your bucket list, as you get engrossed in life fully, faith floods you. You begin to believe in life and this belief in life, triggers healing. No matter how big the disease, how curable or incurable it is, it will recede. And what remains is an indomitable spirit.
3. Gifting yourself your own attention. Being present.
What is attention? Basically being attentive entails being focussed. There is a certain one-pointedness within your mind when there is focus. You do not allow distraction. To trigger self-healing, you have to bring your entire focus on to yourself. You have to become attentive to your own self. You have to attend to yourself.
Self -healing is attending. It is a tending. You tend to yourself with tenderness, with care, with love, the way one tends to a baby. Babies grow because they are being tended to. And self-healing is also a kind of growth.
There was something which existed within you as a seed. But the seed shrivelled up because it was not allowed to be moist. There was no soil with which it could be nurtured. No water so that it could swell and break open from its enclosure.
The illness is the shrivelled up seed. And the body has an infinite capacity to heal and repair all damaged seeds.
The first thing you need to do is make your own self, the most important aspect of living. You have to feel precious. You have to be self-centred. If you cannot be your own best friend, your own biggest well-wisher, you can never be powerful enough to serve anyone else. You have to live from the motto –self before others. If you have served yourself well, you will be of service to millions of others, but if you have not served yourself, you will be a failure. You will live like a beggar. You can never create an empire. An empire serves millions by virtue of the services it bestows. An empire serves the self before it serves anyone else.
The next thing to do is to shift your attention from ‘curing the disease’ to ‘creating wellness.’ Wellness exists within you. Wellness is the well where all your wealth is hidden, where the things that truly matter to you are hidden. There is a very simple exercise which will help you to move towards wellness.
The ‘Wellness Exercise’
Sit quietly and ensure that you will not be disturbed. Take a paper and pen and answer the following questions; write attentively, with passion.
What does wellnss mean to me?
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What would my physical state be if I were to be well?
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What would my emotional state be if I were to be well?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What would my mental and social state be if I were to be well?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
How would I be relating to myself if I were to be well?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
If sincerely attempted and followed, the above exercise will go a long way in helping you to experience the miracles of self-healing.
BODY CONSCIOUSNESS: Listen to your body
Another very important aspect of attention is to be present to your body. To be aware of the phenomenon which is ‘body consciousness.’ It’s simply being present to your ‘self.’
I was once working with a lady suffering from violent bronchitis and it was body consciousness which ultimately helped her to heal.
Body consciousness is when you tune in to what your body is telling you. It means being aware of all the sensations that you are feeling, all the signals that it is giving you, and interpreting it in a way which helps you to evolve and grow, as well as make the right decisions for you. Your body is your best and most intelligent friend. The moment you tune into body consciousness, you begin to relate to a very powerful space within you, and the mysteries which lie within the human heart, begin to reveal themselves to you.
Coming back to the case of the lady I mentioned, she was someone who could never say no, she could never express what was truly on her mind, due to a fear of being abandoned. She felt compelled to please everybody in her life.
But the truth is that you can never please everybody. You can never hold yourself responsible for someone else’s state of mind. What she was attempting was unnatural as well as onerous. It was taking place at a tremendous cost. All her choked voices, things that she had never said, were festering inside her and giving rise to an incessant cough which did not let her sleep.
The missing link was that she did not know how to strike the balance between honouring herself and honouring others.
‘But how can I ever know,’ she had asked tearfully. ‘Ask your body,’ was what she was told. Your body communicates through sensations. If it is sending you signals of distress you need to introspect. She healed when she learnt to pay attention to the wide variety of sensations in her body, like the contraction in the heart, the choking sensation in her throat, each time she was emotionally disturbed. At such times she learnt the importance of reassuring her body, to touch her throat with love and say that she was present, that she was listening, that she was aware of the discomfort and that she would allow herself to be guided into healing. It also helped her to understand how far she should go in helping others, and when to step back and say ‘no.’
She became honest to her emotions, and learnt how to express herself gracefully. It strengthened and fortified her relationships. It also made her aware of those she needed to let go. It healed her.
Hence make it a habit to listen to what your body is telling you. It is processing information at a speed far greater than your mind. And if there is a conflict between your heart and your mind, or your gut and your brain, it is far safer to go with the former in both cases.
The more you listen to your body, the more it will talk to you, and greater will be the ease with which you live your life.
4. Living from an everlasting overflowing gratitude.
Gratitude is a very powerful energy which resides in your heart. To unleash its healing effect one has to feel it intensely. Print this simple self-healing read-out, and paste it in a place where you can see it every day, especially at night before you sleep.
GRATITUDE: The greatest attitude for a healthy life.
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Immerse yourself in gratitude
In the universe within my mind, there is no such thing as a crisis.
Anything that looks like a crisis is only an opportunity in disguise.
In the universe within my mind, there is nothing that I take for granted. I am grateful for the small miracles of everyday life.
In the universe within my mind, I am always present to the miracle which is my physical body. I look after it wilh love and gratitude.
In the universe within my mind, I am eternally grateful to all those who love me and nurture my life.
In the universe within my mind, I am grateful to all those people who differ from me, whose thoughts are divergent from what I hold to be true. They give me a chance to evolve, expand and grow.
In the universe within my mind, I express my gratitude to my parents, who blessed me with the chance to experience life. I set them fr