The Three Treasures and the Path of Healing
In ancient, traditional Hawaiian healing practice and philosophy, honor is given to the three part nature of life. There abide the sub-conscious, conscious, and super-conscious aspects of Being. The subconscious, they call the Unahiplili, or the “friendly unconscious.” This is the realm of the primal bodily mechanisms of organs, blood, and moisture. These systems operate without the need for any conscious intervention. The conscious is called the Ohane, the Spirit of the Will. Forces that arise in the Ohane focus our minds, the choice to live in love and gratitude, and to allow it to move through you and permeate all aspects of your Being. The super-conscious is called the Aumakua. It is the pure spirt essence that shines in the light of your eyes and is carried on your breath. The Aumakua is the place where all experience can be purified and cleansed of all attachment.
In Classical Chinese Medicine these three aspects of Being can be seen reflected in Three Treasures; the Jing, the Qi and the Shen. The Jing is the friendly, primal unconscious, the Qi is the Spirit of the Will and the waking consciousness, and the Shen is the Purity of Spirit. All three, when operating harmonically, combine to create healing action. With your HeartMind, where the Qi of true consciousness resides, you communicate with your Jing (essence of Being, embodied in this life) through conscious gratitude and love. With an established connection between Qi and Jing, then you have the power to directly beseech your Shen (spirit) to help you rise in a spirit of grace and gratitude.
This is using the Three Treasures for the sacred art of healing.
With grace and gratitude, directed through your HeartMind consciousness, form a pearl of light. Take this pearl of light, and with your sacred breath draw it throughout your body. Let this pearl be “sticky.” It attracts the pain of buried unresolved emotion stored in your body. This can include physical injury as well as mental and emotional anguish.
In spirit there is no injury. Spirit cannot be injured. The injury at the level of spirit comes when we forget that we are connected to spirit. The art of healing is remembering your connection to spirit and honoring it with gratitude.
The ego does not own the healing, though it may want to. Be aware, your ego is a good source of consolidation for your confidence and your presence, and the place where you have choice. That is all. Dance with it. And let it be. And when you enter the healing space, let it be observing, on the side, if anything, knowingly get your ego out of the way of spirit. And to keep the ego occupied in a healthy way, use it to keep an eye on the horizontal realm of time and space.
Healing takes place in the spiral realm of time. Time is not linear in this realm, time spirals in circles moving through time. There is a linear time, and that is the world where we make agreements to meet, and where we keep appointments. Where we are conceived, gestate, are born, grow old and die. This is important for the ego to track. For when we drop into the spiral time of healing, we must keep one aspect of self anchored in awareness of linear time, lest we spiral out with the healing energy into infinity.
And of course, we will spiral out into infinity in the healing space. In the healing infinite space all time can be accessed. That injury that happened when you were a child, that injury that happened to your mother, father, grandmothers, grandfathers that was left unhealed and turned into a heavy stone. With spiral time you can visit there with grace and gratitude and release it back to the eternal.
Your HeartMind holds your ego. With practice you hold it lightly, in truth and higher vibration. It can then travel between the worlds. It can drop into the deep places, where the stones of pain and hurt can be found. And it can rise to the high places where infinite love, compassion and non-judgment rule the field of action.
And in the purity of life unfolding, even the lower, deep places are not only the realm of pain and hurt, they are also the realm of manifestation and “getting things done.” The bowels digest the food, make the nutrient rich blood, eliminate the waste products of living. Like a tree dropping leaves or sloughing off bark or bud skins so that the flowers of life can emerge.
We are flowers, we are trees, we are flowing rivers of life. The waters of our rivers nourish the growth of our being, and also carry away the silt that would clog us up. It is carried off to where it can nourish other forms of life. The lotus grows in the mud, muck and mire of the swamp. The flower that it yields is fragrant. We smell the fragrance of the lotus and it transports us to higher states of being. And still we breath in and we breath out. And the fragrant oxygen we breath in feeds us, while the fragrant carbon dioxide we breathe out feeds the lotus. It’s a circle. Honor the circle. It’s all a circle.
As I child I was raised by spiritual people. They were religious people, but not in the sense of wearing the cloth, or being members of an order, but rather good, plain common people who lived from love in their hearts, with love of the divine in the traditions in which they were raised. My father was a simple, fun loving man who laughed heartily and ate with gusto. One of my vivid memories of Dad’s down to earthiness came every spring on long family drives through the Ohio countryside. The farmers dutifully spread manure on the fields in spring, and as we drove alongside the fields we kids would wrinkle our noses. Dad would take a deep breath, and say with a big smile, “Smell the fresh country air!” We responded with “Oooo Dad, you’re crazy!” But inside, I knew exactly what he meant, and to me, the smell of manure on the fields was one of profound beauty.
The lower realms indeed, the gritty lower realms of life are life itself unfolding, life itself. This is a cherished beauty of life. And in this dance of nutrient density, combined with warmth of sun and life giving waters, the seed breaks open its shell, the root anchors deep in the soil and the sprout shoots to the sky. And indeed, the earthy smells of Ohio countryside in Spring are juxtaposed in my mind to the fragrance of Springtime blossoms in Charleston, S.C. balanced by the oh so fragrant smell of the marshes at high and low tide.
In pain and injury, some judgment has taken hold to squeeze out the growth of this cycle. Some cling to the bud, or flower, some deny the dropping of the chafe back to earth, some are repelled by the fragrance of the muck and mire. And this reaction actually stagnates and solidifies into a sour encrusted cancerous canker. With breath of grace and and gratitude we may move this encrusted canker once more. We may release the clinging and judgment and allow the processes of life to dance forward.
In this we use breath, exercise, good food and herbs, healing touch and body mobilizations and a lightness of spirit to engage with all life. We experience the luminescent pearl of spirit and it dances through our body clearing away the detritus of daily living that we might be fresh and new in each moment, receiving the lightness of being and releasing the stones of pain and hurt.
This healing is brave, courageous, honest and intentional. It is the act of not denying the pain, or trying to ignore or suppress it, but rather to feel it, with loving non-judgment. It is a part of the magnificent process of living, growing, blooming and dying. To envelope all in higher love and gratitude, that is the grace of spirit radiating through all. We are in our essence, pure spirit, unencumbered by pain and suffering. The path of healing is to learn to yield with grace to this ultimate truth.
