"Your cut finger is a message to you to slow down. Take some time out to rest for a minute. Not only will it help your finger to begin to heal, but it will give you a chance to get a fresh start yourself."

Some years later I got the lesson repeated to me. I had a headache and asked a teacher for an aspirin. She gave me some, but then added,

"These pills will only stop you from feeling the pain. Better close your eyes and relax for awhile and see if you can discover what is causing the pain. It’s a message to you that you need to understand."

These simple lessons in healing contained the seeds of some profound principles. We can perceive illness, or accidents--any disruptions in harmony, for that matter, that cause us to pause with concern--as messages, angels if you wish, to alert us that something is wrong and that we need to get back on track. Rather than simply fix the symptom, true healing means understanding the message of the symptom--treating the symptom as a symbol maybe--and responding to what is learned. Healing is also more than a mechanical response. We can put on the band aid, but we don’t do the healing ourselves, the cut heals itself. Healing is an expression of the life force, not of our own doing. Yet, we are of the life force, so we do play a role, somehow. It is my finger, and when the finger heals itself, it is "me" that is healing. There’s a mystery there, one that ties me into the life force--it is beyond me, yet of me, part of me.

Healing as a spiritual event, a physical event, or a psychological event--these are dimensions of the same thing. I remember the mystic scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, who valued the principle of "correspondences"--what we usually think of as the ancient principle, "as above, so below." One of his expressions of this principle was that when someone laughed, the angels sang. Another way of saying this is that events at a physical level have their corresponding events at a psychological level, and there is a corresponding pattern of events at a spiritual level. One level mirrors the others and can be read as symbolic of the others. In terms of healing, this means that spiritual healing has its psychological as well as physical correspondence. One can approach the spiritual through the other levels. I can put a band-aid on my finger (physical) and rest (psychological) while the finger draws upon the patterning of the life force to achieve the healing.

Sometimes I am dismayed at the assumption of some people who are "into spiritual healing" that they can leave psychology behind. To them, any suggestion of the necessity of psychological work as part of their spiritual healing is to impugn the integrity of their spiritual maturity. In their minds, they have transcended psychology, and need only invoke the spirit of healing to effect their cure. To these people, especially, and to others I would recommend the book, A Psychology of Spiritual Healing (Chrysalis Books).

The author, Eugene Taylor, Ph.D., is a historian of psychiatry, who has written several books on consciousness and spirituality. In a treatise that is both personal and scholarly, he presents his vision of how the psychological level of healing can make us receptive to the spiritual level of healing, and how the spiritual level affects the psychological. Emanuel Swedenborg, who serves as a major inspirational source for the book, would have approved of Dr. Taylor’s multi-level approach.

Taylor offers some "laws" of spiritual healing that can be both understood psychologically and experienced as a mystery. These sentences are worth contemplating: Love is the only answer. We are never alone in the universe. We should cultivate the higher emotions. Spontaneity is an important key to recovery. We should always remain loyal to something. Illness can be creative. Pain is friendly. Winning may really mean winning over the mind of discord within oneself. Sickness can be a message about unfinished business.

One of the principles Taylor discusses that I find most interesting is that all healing involves relationship. Re-establishing a healthy relationship with God, or the life force, finds its correspondence in improving our relationships with others. We can’t "do" healing and we need to recognize our inter-dependence with life beyond our own boundaries. We need to be humble enough to accept help from others. We also need to be realistic and accept the fact that others have a need for us to be well. Those who have been blessed by experiences of healing are often inspired, if not always obligated, to pass it along to others. Healing is a gift we share with each other, both as its own form of spiritual experience, and as a practical testimony of the mysterious blessing of life itself. That’s good psychology!