Blessings, Balance, and Gratitude

One of the services which I offer as a healer is what I like to call a Blessing and Balancing Gratitude Ceremony. It is a way of honouring old habits, old messages, old ideas that may have served us in some fashion in the past, but they are now holding us back from growing and moving forward in our lives.

Is It Spiritual Growth or Spiritual Change?

This month is supposed to be all about Spiritual Growth in The Pagan Experience. From my previous posts, you may have gotten the idea that it’s not a subject I spend a lot of time worrying about.

Floating about the internet I have seen this quote: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

It’s been attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (French Jesuit priest, philosopher, and a paleontologist) and also to G. I. Gurdjieff (Greco-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher), so we don’t really know who said it first. Or indeed, if either of them actually said it.

I combine this with  the work of Martha E Rogers, a nursing theorist whose work, The Science of Unitary Human Beings, has greatly influenced my practice as a healer.

The first major concept in Rogerian Theory is that the Energy Field constitutes the fundamental unit of the living and the inanimate. The energy field is infinite. Rogers discusses two in particular. The first is the human field. Human beings do not have an energy field but rather they are energy fields. The second is the environment. Neither field can be reduced any further.

Substitute Spiritual Being with Energy Being. We are not living human beings having an energy experience; we are living energy beings having a human experience.

I’ve tucked the word living in there because it’s important. What do we know about living things? Easy, they are in a constant state of change.

Every minute of every hour, our physical bodies are undergoing change. Cells die and are replaced, enzymes and hormones and other body chemicals are released in order to keep our physical body in homeostasis. Minute adjustments make sure our blood doesn’t get too acidic or alkalinic or sugary. Our bodies are constantly changing.

Now, we may not notice what changes are going on inside of us, but we would sure start to notice if they stopped!

If something cannot change, it dies. This holds true whether you are talking about a living creature, a philosophy, a religion, a language, anything. Something to keep in mind the next time you come across someone claiming their religion has been passed down to them unchanged since the year nought (or earlier, or later).

As an Energy Being in a physical body, my energy body is constantly changing. Some may call this growth, and indeed sometimes it may even resemble growth. I don’t need to worry about whether or not I am growing spiritually because right now I am alive. My physical body is alive. My energy body is alive. (The discussion on whether the energy body continues to live after the physical body dies is for another time!)