Excerpt from
Extraordinary Healing:
Transforming Your Consciousness, Your Energy System, and Your Life
By Marilyn Gordon

Transformational Healing is a movement of consciousness through the difficulties of our lives and into advanced states of being in which miraculous shifts occur. Everyone is suffering in one way or another. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, saw people who lost their arms and legs from mine fields, boat people who'd been raped and killed, and then he saw others in French cafes sipping coffee without a thought about the rest of the world. He vowed never to live a superficial life again. He was able, then, to transform the suffering he saw into wholeness and advanced states of awareness.

The very fact that most of us do not remember our higher consciousness and we identify with a limited reality, is a form of suffering. Impermanence is a form of suffering, too, and it is something that everyone must experience at one time or another. Everything on the earth plane is shifting incessantly - including the people we hold dear, our body parts, our homes, our incomes, and our possessions. And because everything is in flux, we are wise to go more deeply to a place of essence within, in which there is a sense of comfort in being "home," in being in a place of profound connection with a changeless level of serenity and truth.

Transformational Healing is a way of paying attention to our suffering, looking at it from the witness state, experiencing how it feels or sounds or what it looks like, and then releasing and healing it by making this connection with a more transcendent state of consciousness. This helps us to view our difficulties differently by shifting our level of awareness. There is truly a temple of healing that exists within. The healing process is a movement from darkness into light, from the unreal to the real, and from death into immortality.

We can also understand that human suffering has value and even beauty. If you look at the panorama of human experience, you can see that it is a part of a range of highly valuable experiences that deepen and enrich the soul. It not only deepens, but it creates courage and strength. The daily frustrations, losses and insufficiencies - all of these are prods to push us on an upward path of spiritual awakening. There is a perfection to all things - even the most gross of human experiences in wars, terrorism, in acts committed against us. They are hard to bear, but something is being shifted around. Hearts are being deepened in their sorrow. Wounds, once opened, create opportunities to bring in grace and uplifted understanding.

Glaciers form, ice floes melt, mountains shift, volcanoes erupt, flowers die, species are born, predators leap, prey runs away - and everything happens in a natural flow of experience. It is both a horror show and a display of ecstasy. In the panoramic overview, it is the natural movement of things creating the unfoldment of life as we know it.

If we are able to experience our difficulties, allow ourselves to come to know and feel them, we can then move beyond them and come into the ultimate healing states. When darkness is lurking in the corners of our being, it shows up as headaches, sickness, unresolved fear or anger - clouds covering our light. The moment these elements are acknowledged and even loved (because they are all extraordinary teachers), then you open up to the process of great transformation.

The three stages of healing are: experience, release, and transform.

The first phase of this healing work is allowing yourself to fully experience your experience, to come to know what's inside. The second is to release the experience, and the third is to transform it. Every experience carries a richness and has value. Paying close attention is the first step in the process of self-knowledge. It is a process of looking with an inner microscope or magnifying glass and just seeing what's there. It's about looking, for example, at current experiences that are taking place in the body - pains, constrictions, tingling, holding - whatever is happening in the moment. It's also about looking at the mind and emotions - seeing whether there is sadness or rage or tightness or shame. It's about looking even more deeply at the experience, possibly finding the roots. The roots may be in childhood, or they may go all the way back to the womb. Or they may go to another lifetime, or to a belief or a tendency of the mind. You can explore pain, old traumas, tendencies of the mind, fragments of self, and the exploration will lead you to some form of self-knowledge that can create more freedom within you. A transformational experience is often embedded in the experiencing process.

Not only does the deep inner mind function as a repository of all the records of past experiences, but it also miraculously stores solutions - innate homeopathic remedies of the soul, gifted to us to solve the dilemmas of our lives. Within the memory banks of the subconscious lie images, metaphors, flashes of wisdom, healing directives that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew how to tap in their healing temples. The solutions essentially lie within the soul.

Release is a clearing out that initiates an opening of a reality that had been closed or unknown. Sometimes release happens naturally as a direct result of "looking deeply" or "paying attention." Other times, we can assist in the release process by using techniques such as energy therapy, which taps away old traumas, fears, resentments, guilt, grief, shame, anger and emotional trauma. You can find a variety of release techniques in part 6 of Extraordinary Healing. Release is a clearing out of your consciousness. It's like cleaning out your closets and drawers, releasing old correspondence or outworn clothes. As you discard these, you ready yourself to invite in a new level of your life. You're ready to initiate an opening of a reality that had previously been either closed or unknown. Release, again, often takes place as a natural outgrowth of paying attention to your experience. As you stay with your experience, often a miracle happens. One person found a lotus at the bottom of a murky pond. Another felt as if she were experiencing a birth process through a very dark tunnel and out into an experience of light.

Another way to experience the transcendent is to call it forth. You may call in a guide to assist you; you may surround yourself with light - or beam it on your previous difficulties; you may bring love and comfort to your past, present and future; you may feel the presence of a transcendent figure or consciousness that shifts your situation into another dimension of light, joy, awareness, love and peace. As we have said, very often the way to the light is through the difficulty. It is about diving into the full experience of the dual universe - the dark and light, the sacred and profane, the sensitive and gross - and moving into knowledge, love and profound inner power.

By moving into these altered dimensions, you find perceptual shifts in which you see everything in your life from a new perspective. It may mean, for example that you see everything that has happened to you as a kind of blessing to help you become a wiser, more compassionate human being. It may mean that you see someone who's hurt you as a powerful agent of change in your life and who has perhaps propelled you to seek higher ground.
You come to understand the trials of your life as transformational experiences.

In addition to perceptual shifts, you also find that you understand the life of the spirit with greater depth. As you move through darkness and into the light, you come to understand the trials of your life as transformational experiences. Something then lifts from you and lightens your load. You feel it emotionally, physically and spiritually. You are lifted into lighter emotions. Your electrical and biochemical systems are moved into states of well being. You are lifted up spiritually so that you understand experientially that there is a source of great power that lives within you. This is the nature of transformation.

William Blake knew about this when he so nonchalantly began one of his poems with the line, "As I was walking amongst the fires of hell one day…." He knew he could walk there because he was going to walk right out to the other side into levels of consciousness in which he could "see heaven in a wildflower and eternity in an hour." Exploring the darkness can ultimately lift you into a more infinite reality in which you are in touch with your essence. As you combine this process with the shifting of the electromagnetic energy system, you provide even more avenues for change.

As you read on in Extraordinary Healing, you'll understand more fully the root causes of your current challenges, how to find them, and how to move through them into expanded levels of consciousness. We are working, as you remember, with the subconscious, the higher self, the mind and the energy system. All of these are the components of a healing system that moves you gracefully from darkness into light.