Explaining the Paradox of Healing
A paradox is two or more things that seem to contradict each other, but when we look deeper, aren’t contradictory at all. That old saying that so many of us are drawn to “everything happens for a reason” is a paradox – it appeals to our sense of order until we run into the truly awful things and if we don’t know how to find the “rightness” behind the truly gobsmackingly awful things that can happen, then we tend to abandon it.
Then we miss out on some gobsmackingly (there’s that word again lol!) – then we miss out on some gobsmackingly powerful ways of influencing our world. When we work with the energy that is to be found at the heart of the paradox, in terms of healing, then we literally step into possibilities that will knock your socks off.
What I call the paradox of healing is simply that there IS a rightness behind every seemingly even awful wrongness of every horrible symptom or pain or disease and when we find the rightness of that … call it energy, call it a place in our brain, call it whatever you like but don’t call me late for dinner – then we are flowing with / harnessing / accessing the power of the universe itself for creating infinite possibilities in healing.
You’ve come into the clinic with an idea of something that you’d like to fix or heal for your horse and / or yourself. Look around the world and you’ll find someone who had what we commonly call a miracle and has healed that thing. How do YOU get some of that?
I had a vision of what it means to treat symptoms, whether we’re treating them with modern medical techniques and drugs or even whether we’re using alternative medicines to treat symptoms. When we treat symptoms – the things that we see that are wrong – then it’s like sticking our finger in a hole in the dyke that holds back the rising ocean and while we’ve got our finger in that hole, another hole pops open and leaks water, then we have to stick our finger in that hole and then another one opens up and so on, until you run out of fingers. Get the idea?
We don’t want to be sticking our fingers in holes OR fixing symptoms (although it may be appropriate to support symptoms while we keep our eyes open for the root cause) – we want to be finding the root cause and changing that – creating something new or better and have us and our horse experiencing inner peace and happiness or even excitement, WHILE we ‘re on that journey.
THAT’s my idea of ultimate perfection, although there’s many versions of perfection along the way as well. Let’s make the healing journey and the life journey itself a happy one. What do YOU think?
The effect of fear
When it comes to healing our beloved animals, blocked up fear is the biggest thing that gets in the way of the kind of healing that’s possible – their fear and ours, and ours is the one that we can change.
The message of fear is that there is something to know or do to be and feel safe. Given the way that each of us experiences our connection to others, at least some of our fear will be our inner guidance system telling us what we need to know – or do – in order to support THEM most effectively.
Leading up to every clinic, Caroline and I have long ago noticed that we do some rapid personal growth in order to bring the best outcome to each clinic. For this clinic, one of the big ahhaaas was prompted by Sandra pointing out that what we called “worry” was really plain unadulterated fear – and that we were downplaying that fear. That brought about a cascade of insights for me around how much I’ve been getting in the way of my own power. All of a sudden I’m seeing how often I worry about all kinds of things that I hadn’t noticed before. Pausing and reflecting even momentarily on “what is it that I am afraid of here” has led to a VERY interesting and transformative few days!
Most of you will find yourself worrying about your horse and whatever’s going on with them. Being able to notice when that happens, soften into a curiosity about what’s really going on here, identifying what that fear is about, understanding it, taking action if needed and opening up all those limitless possibilities that happen when we flow with the universe – that and whatever else crops up in response to peoples’ individual needs, will be what we’ll be working on in both the lessons and the live sessions.
Our first task
Our first task for the clinic is to set a deliberate intention to notice ALL the threads that contribute to these symptoms or behavior that we’re seeing in our horse (or in your dog for a couple of people). You can start with your horse if you like, although invariably we’re going to end up working on ourselves. So if you have some symptoms happening that you’d like to get to the bottom of and change, then you could decide that you’d like to notice ALL the threads that are contributing to your own symptoms too. Horses love reciprocal healing as much as they enjoy reciprocal learning, reciprocal understanding and reciprocal communication.
Our live sessions on Tuesday and Thursday Melbourne time, will show you how to set an intention that feels good for yourselves and will flow into supporting some people to start seeing a thread or two.
When I video’ed this “intention to notice ALL the threads of Goldie being sick – the active sarcoids and losing weight so rapidly”, she demonstrated the usefulness of doing this brilliantly and then the videos vanished into the universe.
Since everything really DOES happen for a reason and I automatically open my mind to notice the rightness behind the wrongness, I see that the THIRD session and its video needs to be in this first week and you’ll find that below.
There’s nothing to be gained in describing the first session in too much detail, because it was unique to me. It was a feeling in my head while I was sitting with her, that I literally just gently felt – softened with and got curious about – overall just a gentle willingness to feel and notice what it was telling me, if anything. After a while the feeling kind of expanded and that was the end of that session.
The second session two days later, I could see she’d dropped even more weight, despite her enjoying two hard feeds a day and an enormous amount of green feed in the paddock and unlimited good hay. So here I was, still on the intention of noticing ALL the threads behind what I was observing – that day I was observing the weight loss – and I got the insight that ever since Goldie arrived a bit over a year ago, I’ve been worrying about her putting on too much weight. She came from very dry and sparsely grassed country, to a rich, predominantly green dairy country and I’d been worried about how a quarterhorse would adjust without getting laminitis. I had actually CREATED her losing weight by worrying without getting to the bottom of the fear that worrying is. When I got that insight I felt her laughing at me.
So did I CREATE that weight loss by my attention on it, by my worry, by my unaddressed fear?
Good question.
So… what’s the message? Is there something I need to know or do NOW?
What does it feel like for me to think “Did I create that?”
Is that even true?
Because the right answer will always feel good, feel expansive, feels RIGHT.
For those of you new to this concept of the right answer ALWAYS feeling good, you’ll see and experience this for yourself over the course of the clinic.
Shit on a stick
A couple of days after that session about her loss of weight, we had what I laughingly call “shit on a stick” at feed time. Now Goldie is a horse whose manners at feed time have always been excellent. With all my oldies gone now, only Oliver gets a proper hard feed – everyone else gets a bit of a chaff treat out of a bucket, maybe with some seaweed meal or garlic occasionally – each horse taking turns politely while I’m holding the bucket. So Goldie’s outrageous pushing on me for her feed was incredibly out of character. The video is afterwards – I was too busy making myself safe to take my phone out and record at the time!
p.s. Whatever you’re thinking and feeling while you’re watching the video AND with your own horse, pay gentle attention to that and by all means ask questions in the live sessions.
The day after this, she walked away from me with the bucket rather than push on me, with the same kind of a feeling that a teenager has when they roll their eyes at you and the day after that I waited for her to move away a little so I could put her feed down without being crowded, which she did. So it seems that thread is dealt with.
Her coat looks better, but she’s still losing weight and her breathing still isn’t good, so clearly there’s more. Since that breathing worries me, THAT is what I’ll feel into when I go out to her today – because worry is simply the Mental Feel version of fear. There’s a message in fear – to ignore or suppress that, costs me both inner peace AND the opportunity to access the energy at the heart of the paradox.
And again, if this is new to you, we’ll be covering this lots of times during the clinic so that you’ll get to experience it for yourself.
Goldie’s Summary so far
Opening up to ALL the threads of her condition:
- Brought me a feeling in my head which I’ve since identified – I’ll share it in the clinic.
- Brought me an insight about how my unaddressed worries / my fear have been a contributing thread.
- Brought up for her an old thing about the humans fear at feed time that had caused her to feel stress and tension around food.
- I’ll fill you in later in the clinic on what is no doubt more threads to come.
Your threads and your horse’s threads will no doubt be different to ours. Starting tomorrow morning we’ll have a look at what you and your horse’s threads are.