Being with the Void and Letting It Speak

My spiritual teacher and mentor Martin Exeter once said that the most powerful word in the English language is “Let”. After more than thirty years as a practitioner in the healing arts I am finally beginning to understand what he meant. In order for healing to occur both the individual who is seeking assistance and the practitioner offering their service need to develop the ability to let go into the unknown, into the darkness from which the light of perception and understanding will come. Interestingly, one of the animals that has been a guide and totem of mine for several years now is the owl. Owl medicine is very much about being able to maneuver and navigate in the dark. Therefore, I have come to refer to this skill in the healing arts as sitting in the void or in the dark. Any knowledge or information that might naturally arise comes after going into the void, after the heart has had a chance to relax and get engaged. The habit of chasing the sundry thoughts that arise prior to attaining stillness is a hard one to break. You don’t want to be chasing these “rabbits” and thinking that that is an effective treatment. These are but mere symptomatic echoes arising from the core of the actual condition. Stillness will take you to this core. Any content that is relevant follows this stillness.

Central to an effective healing process is the capacity to sit in the unknown. Not just once but over and over again. Every time I see a person for a healing session I am being asked to go straight into the darkness, the creative void, and wait. This can be the most challenging time of the session and embedded in this initial phase is a paradox. A person comes to me for my confidence, knowledge, and expertise and yet what gives me this is, in fact, my own willingness to go deeply into the place of not knowing. It took me years to cultivate this place inside myself. I had to let go of many of my own needs and issues: the need to impress, to fix, to change, and to heal being the most primary. Ironically, when I let go of these needs I landed on the biggest issue of them all, fear. Fear that nothing would happen, fear that I would make things worse, fear that the person would not like me, etc. You name it, the range of thoughts and emotions was endless. It was only as I became aware of what was occurring and then consciously chose to move through these fears to a place of stillness that I finally began to comprehend how vital this initial phase of letting is to any true healing process.

I had a most interesting experience of this once with a man named Doren who had come to me as a last resort. He was a man in his seventies and had just been released from a hospital stay of three weeks where he was being treated for migraines. Nothing that they had done had brought him relief and it was at the prompting of his children that he decided to try something alternative. He arrived in my office with his wife’s assistance, hunched over and dragging an oxygen tank. He agreed to lie down on my table and I began the session simply by holding his ankles. I stayed in this position at his feet for over fifteen minutes. During this time, both he and his wife were talking steadily, asking me questions, and making conversation. Normally I equate the word “quiet” with going into the void, so that a clear slate and place of stillness can emerge. In this particular case, however, the technique of the moment was to let go and engage in the conversation at hand. The more he conversed the more relaxed he became and gradually I could feel his body beginning to unwind and settle. As the session carried on I had to continually call my mind and heart back from the strong desire to “fix his condition” because he was in such obvious pain and suffering. I stayed with the confidence and understanding that the health in him would correct his symptoms and surface of its own accord. When he came back for a second session the following week I could hardly believe it was the same person. He was walking virtually without assistance, no longer on oxygen, and he had had only one migraine rather than the usual seven since leaving my office. Although it would be tempting at this point to lay claim to my own healing capabilities, what occurred had much more to do with him and his openness to his own healing than it did with me. I was simply there to hold a place for the process to unfold and not impose my own ideas and concerns upon what was taking place.

This example points to the crucial importance of maintaining an awareness of letting the process unfold of its own accord. In this waiting time there are several things going on simultaneously. First and foremost, there is the process of connection being established between myself and the person who has come to be with me. This may take the first ten or fifteen minutes of the session. Given that this is commonly the full length of a regular visit to the doctor, it is no wonder that many physicians and patients get frustrated with the constant constraint of these time pressures. It is during this time that the opportunity is afforded for me and the individual to relax and let the wisdom already present in both of us surface. I call this dropping from “book learning” into the wisdom of the heart. This inherent intelligence is always there actually, but what has happened is that most of us have become disconnected from it. Sitting in the void, therefore, is the time when a reconnection with this deeper flow of insight and understanding is also being reestablished. The tendency is to grasp after a quick intellectual diagnosis and then immediately begin a standard protocol for working with that particular disorder. At issue is the fact that every person truly has something distinct and unique occurring for them and with them. If the time is not taken to see this, the opportunity for healing will most likely be short circuited. Always at some point in the session, information will begin to surface. Having the courage to wait long enough to let the rhythms of the heart begin to move is the key. This will in turn trigger images and information from the mind to begin to flow. This is what I know to be the essence of the phrase “beginner’s mind”.

Once the flow of images and content begins, the next major challenge is actually moving with the information you are receiving no matter how strange or bizarre it seems. Step one is to listen, step two is to act. A classic example of this in my own practice was with Audrey, a woman who had been coming to see me on a regular basis for several years. She came in one day with severe back pain. Now over all the years of seeing Audrey I had never once touched her physically, because Attunement is a predominantly a non-touch healing art. On this day, however, the message came through loud and clear to have her lie down on her side rather than her back. In addition, I needed to do most of the session with my hands lightly touching her rather than completely off her body as was the usual case. With only the small voice of protest that always arises at a moment such as this inside myself, I let go to the impulse and proceeded to work with her as the body was calling. When I spoke with Audrey the next day to see how things were progressing, she called me the “miracle worker” because the pain had been steadily unwinding and disappearing.

Attunement is based in the awareness that all the information that is needed is sitting inside each of us. Although it has taken years to trust that this is true, I now know it to be a fact without question. The main art is to continually release into the process and meet the natural sense of anxiety that arises at the start of every session, because I am walking straight into the unknown. From there I become a witness to the absolute miracle as the body’s own natural state of health begins to surface again. It is this state of health to which I pay honor and primary attention. Although I will be aware of distortions and disease and acknowledge their presence, it is the current of health upon which I focus. Health arises out of the darkness, out of the void.