Healing or Development

Change is always basically the same process of changing negative energy to positive energy, but where you start from to do the change process depends upon how dysfunctional you are in your overall life.   You will have to find where you are coming in last place, where you are kicked out of Eden, but you can start from one of two major categories, healing or development.     There is nothing scientific about the difference.  They are made up inventions, nothing that is truly reality, but the distinctions may be helpful.

Seeing change as healing is a metaphor that lets you know that the negative energy is so great that it is making it impossible to function well in your life.    The advantage of being in the healing mode is that you can feel that you can take all the time and gather all the support you need for the change.   Healing is about surrounding yourself with all of the best supportive measures you can to change the negative into a positive.  Healing to me is like going to a great resort and this is probably why our collective vacation mindset thinks often of resorts.   Resorts help you relax and regain your lost energy from the stresses and strains of everyday life.   The difference between a healing environment and a developmental one is the difference between how a stress-filled parent thinks about a resort versus how a child relates to it.   A child thinks about adventure and doing one activity after another until there is no time left in the day.   A parent thinks about relaxation and recuperation and sitting in the hot tub and eating food that delights their palates.    If you want to go on a holiday and sit by the edge of the pool or walk slowly on the beach, then the resort is healing and recuperating the stresses of your life.   If however, you take a holiday doing adventurous things like repelling from 100 meters or jumping off of cliffs, then the holiday is aimed at development in the same way that a child sees the holiday.

If you need healing, you need to think in terms of resorts, but if you need development, you can think in terms of adventure.   The more stress-filled your life is, the more you will opt for a resort approach to change, and this is the place where most people need to start.   Eventually, when your positive energy reaches a certain threshold, then the healing switches to development where you begin with the positive energy that you have and give yourself an interesting challenge.  It is not a contest; one is not any better than the other.   If you need healing, that is what you need, and no matter how hard you try, you will only end up in a worse state if you go for development when you need healing.   Likewise, it is easy to get attached to the healing mode when development is the choice you need.   When you need to train for a marathon, you shouldn’t be thinking of going somewhere where everyone takes care of your needs.

Healing is recognizable when you have that feeling that you just can’t take it anymore, or you haven’t been able to take it for a long time and you are using all kinds of coping mechanisms like drugs and alcohol or sex to keep you going.    I had a friend recently tell me that he had been feeling really depressed in which case he went to a doctor for some help.   The doctor prescribed an anti-depressant, which caused his hair to start falling out and a huge loss in his sex drive.  This is an example of a practice of many physicians who try to keep people functioning in the developmental mode by giving them a drug, when they should be in a more profound program of total healing.    Healing is about giving yourself all the support that you need to recuperate your lost abilities and regain the confidence of a young child in exuberant play.   It usually requires suspending a certain amount of activities so that the healing has time to work.   The worse the condition the more you have to suspend.

Development is what you do when you are already functioning well and you want to get to a higher level.  When you are feeling positive generally already, but you feel the urge to achieve more and develop a new part of yourself, then you know that you are in the developmental phase.  This is not to be confused with someone who has a lot of money although it doesn’t exclude them.   If you have an area of your life that is severely dysfunctional like in the area of relationships, your growth is not considered development; it is considered healing.   The reason it is necessary to call it healing is that success at the expense of relationships is not success; it is failure because something about your life is completely false and you need all of the support you can possible get in order to change it.   If you cannot understand this logic, just think about the world and all of the powerful leaders who gain territory and riches at the expense of the people, then you realize how sick a person can really get when they are just after wealth.   It would be disastrous for a person who is a failure in relationships like so many movie stars, for instance, to think about their career goals until they change their relational life.  Their lives are a disaster.   One of the best movies that illustrates this principle is Regarding Henry with Harrison Ford as the principal actor.   In this story he is a very successful lawyer making gobs of money, but his relationship with his daughter and his wife are in the last place category.  Suddenly one day he is shot in the head while buying some cigarettes.   He goes into a long extended healing and then when he is cured, he changes the whole direction of his life.   At the end of the movie, you could say that he had moved from the healing phase to the developmental phase.

This is why this process is called radical change because what is being asked of people, who we consider to be so successful, is to consider that maybe they have been considering the wrong things.   There is really absolutely no difference of someone wealthy who has lived a false life and someone who is living on the street and has lived a false life.  They are both in the same situation and if we support them, maybe their lives will get better.   Wouldn’t it be ironic that if community service groups would turn their attention on the very wealthy and reach out to them to help them out.   Now that would be radical.  I am not suggesting that every wealthy business person is living a false life, far from it, but it is not a big stretch of the imagination to see that the majority are in the healing phase, pretending like they are in the developmental phase.

The difference in the process of development versus healing is the orientation you have in time.   In the healing process all of your personal goals are suspended other than the area of healing, that is, you put your life on hold so that you can deal with the great healing that you need.   In development the setting of personal goals is the stimulus for change and growth.  Healing is an orientation toward the past with an eventual awakening of the future, whereas, development is an orientation toward the future with an occasional trip to the past to deal with negatives.   In healing you are dealing with some really difficult energy that has covered up your true self and its capacities.  It is oriented toward traumatic events or cultural trauma or the trauma of your family.  When you heal, you end up with a great deal of confidence and energy and then you are ready to challenge yourself.     With development you challenge yourself with a difficult goal and this allows you to face very difficult energy that stimulates your growth.  Radical growth in development means that you give yourself a big challenge and then fail miserably, learn from the failure and then keep going forward until you have achieved the goal learning each step of the way.   Healing is like opening the hood to the engine in your car and realizing that the car has serious damage.

Maybe the biggest veil here is the culture.  The world culture has become almost entirely ruled by material values that regards who has the most stuff as the most important.   If the world culture were oriented toward spiritual values, then the most important value would be who can do the best service because it would oriented toward qualities and not to quantities.  But as we are oriented almost entirely by the pressure of the bottom line, that being quantities, the people we value the most are the ones who have the most. Unfortunately this does not mean that they are doing anything at all beneficial to themselves or to others and usually means that they are doing a lot of harm.

If it sounds like daily change is against wealth, it is a misinterpretation of the process.  Daily change is a process whereby first you become wealthy in spiritual qualities and then the quantitative wealth may follow, but the opposite is not true.  It is like division.    36 divided by 9 gives you 4, but 9 divided by 36 gives you ¼.  To do daily change you must start in the non-material dimension (spiritual) and then the material.   Money does not generate a quality, but a quality can generate a material outcome with implications for money.   When you have a united family working together, they are capable of doing the impossible, but having a lot of money does not guarantee a united family.    Materialism is just as prevalent among the poor as it is among the rich because it depends upon where you start in the process.     Money is subordinate to the spirit, but in the overwhelming majority of the world, the spirit is subordinate which makes it possible for a person to be spiritual once a week for a few hours and subordinate that work when working with money or material conquests.

The primary concern, whether you are doing healing work or work that is more developmental in nature, is that you begin by feeling the impoverished state of your true self and work on your negative energy until it releases enough positive energy that you become functional and thriving.  In the non-physical realm poverty is a positive and it is a great idea to make friends with it because it is the motivation upon which all change is possible.   Without humility radical change is impossible.