Sunyata and Healing

My interest in healing evolved as I sought a shortcut to the long ascension path of the traditional spiritual disciplines. I considered we really don't have 30 years or longer to devote to meditation, nor the environment to support such practices and began looking for alternatives.

One thing I saw was that the end phenomenon of most spiritual disciplines was expressed as some form of love-bliss and I reasoned that it was this end phenomenon which could could form the foundation of our beginning practice as well as the end. The Taoists encouraged this cultivation in the form of the yin practice of the Inner Smile, and the Tantrikas as well in the form of Mahamudra practice which is defined as the union of Bliss and Emptiness. The emptiness portion of this practice - described as the realization of the Void, or emptiness of all phenomenon, including that self which we define as personality is implicit in the Buddhist term "sunyata."

I noticed that the end phenomenon of healing, in the disciplines of energy psychology, were likewise a recovery of that joy and freedom which were the earmarks of liberation. There was also a parallel to the idea of sunyata in the theory and practice of "releasing" reactive emotions, sensations and judgements. Releasing or letting go of these lead to the recovery of our native unconditioned joy. Here i saw that as the masters have always said, there is nothing to attain. Rather as the Vajrayana Budhists so eloquently said, it was a matter of clearing the obscuring emotions and their agragates of
experience. Buddha mind was original mind, not a thing created, only recovered.

Today I revisit the idea of the seeking the Void, seeking sunyata or the realization that all phenomenon are ultimately empty (formless) is essentially a healing practice as much as a spiritual discipline. It is interesting to me that the Tantrikas put so much emphasis on what we might consider the negative side of the emotions. Bliss is actually sought through realization of the emptiness of conditions triggering our reactivity - a reclamation of the fluid spaciousness inherent in all things. It is right here, right in the middle of our conditioned illusions - seen as devoid of permanence or independent existence, that healing and freedom manifests. That is the perfection of releasing.

In energy psychology, originally based in meridian theory, tapping works to release our traumas and the incessant replay of inapropriate emotional and psycho-somatic content. Other systems evolved whereby the simple intention to move, "stuck" energy through and out of the body, or holding the
intention to return said energy back to its source, further reinforced the idea that it was a expression of  "void-ance" as a reduction of the energetic "charge" which was invested in its form-ation, leaving it essentially without the power of form needed to effect any harm.

This can also be applied to the several healing methods which counsel us to maintain a certain stance of pure or neutral observation when engaged in healing practice, un-invested in result or the idea of an "I" doing something. This is pure sunyata practice.

The healer then like the Zen inspired archer says "IT" shoots, and the ego gets out of the way. Others might say we become a channel through which "IT" as grace may act, or through which healing happens best the more "I" am out of the way.

This brings me full circle back to my early years of sitting Za-zen for hours each day seeking a realization of the Void. I am encouraged that we as "healers" have new ways of explaining and teaching this, yet I am also struck with a conclusion that there may not yet be very much of a shortcut to any deep realization of this emptiness, which now seems to me to be the very heart of healing as well as enlightenment and liberation. To see the emptiness of a condition, whether it be a physical condition, a mental poisition, an emotional reaction or the Illusory nature of sensate and self existence, seems to the me to be the panacea, the universal remedy, which healers and sages and philosophers have sought for throughout human history.