Illness and Spiritual Healing  Illness originates from a lack of balance caused by different factors concerning the sick person as a whole; in the long run this can endanger the health. Therefore the unbalance affects the psychic and nervous sphere, and at last the physical one.  At this point pranatherapy is best when it is combined with conventional medical advice, as the energetic disorder is by then present on a physical and pathological plain. A serious healer will never have the intention to replace a doctor (neither to make a diagnosis), as the fields of intervention are different. Usually one identifies illness from a discomfort or when one doesn’t feel well, but a limited and distorted awareness of ourselves and of our own body is already an illness. The mind and the thought can deeply influence our body, and vice versa: thoughts of joy and sadness can have a positive and negative action on the body and on the mind. Restlessness, fears, hidden tensions, and all the moods, that sophisticated instruments of conventional medicine cannot see, can be perceived by our own sensitivity. They are the expression of the health and of the illness of our spirit. It is important to understand that our body and/or our mind are part of the same reality. Therefore the disease must be seen as a sign of unbalance, as a lack of harmony inside ourselves. From an esoteric point of view the body is a simple - but very important - instrument at the service of the soul. Sickness is hence a precise signal of our spiritual state. During this period of time - made of materialism, consumption and pollution – there has been a multiplication of external agents that put to the test our body and the psychophysical balance in its relationship with the environment. This makes us more exposed to sickness, and to the necessity to intervene in a timely way, independently of our interior state. Nevertheless, being more or less vulnerable, even under these conditions can be a synchronic signal(1) awakened by our own spiritual relationship with ourselves and with the existence. In this sense sickness can be considered an indirect result of our actions and life choices that are sometimes, according to reincarnation theories, related even to past lives, generators of Karmic(2) consequences. Every desire, every thought, every action taken by a person gives origin, always, constantly and continuously to a force in which the effects operate on that person and on their soul. Sickness can be a signal, a push towards evolution, even through the pain that it provokes. We have to understand that the mind and body are part of the same and identical reality. Sickness is hence interpreted as a signal of imbalance and lack of harmonisation of our being in a most general sense. Many times sickness becomes a master that gives us precious suggestions. Healing requires a deep understanding of this message. Otherwise, no medicine will be of help; each medicine will only shift the sickness to different plains, and onto different parts of our subtle and physical bodies. A spiritual healer can help the process of comprehension and hence of healing. A healing is really successful if the tensions that caused the original imbalance are reduced. In the absence of this, all those pharmaceutical products that are commonly massively prescribed - immediate and relentless remedies - might be useful to address the symptoms, causing imbalances and collateral effects, but not to cure and to re-establish fully your health. Sometimes suffering and illness are processes that the body triggers to cure and to de-intoxicate itself and that we block – due to fear – by fighting the illness with antibiotics. It is necessary to emphasise that the obsessive desire to forget and distance illness from ourselves means often wanting to postpone a meeting with our own conscience and responsibilities, accepting illness like an instrument of reflection and change. In pain we can more easily ask ourselves why we behave as we do, why certain events affect us, of our general condition. Hence, we can become aware and find deep within ourselves the reason and sense of things. Pain, can hence represent the work of the human being in reaching its own conscience, through the will to understand and to overcome its condition of ignorance. It is a purifying step. When sickness reaches the physical body it is too late, and the more that it has infiltrated the body, the more invasive and urgent interventions will be required: analgesics, antibiotics, surgical procedures etc... These practices - if all goes well - can re-establish a certain physical state, but the original problem remains and is ready to newly manifest itself through other forms of disease. Hence, Pranatherapy will be necessary to re-establish the balance on other levels and plains, to complete the therapeutic action. In truth, the process should be the opposite: conserve the subtle and spiritual balances to avoid pathological repercussions. Pranatherapy should be undertaken before: it is to be considered a routine and constant procedure to conserve your health and not for the cure of the disease. This should be valid for all medicine in general.  These general concepts are not to be confused with superstition or fanaticism: we should apply common sense to understand how to best harmonise the necessary interventions, especially in emergency situations, when the physical damage evidently necessitates interventions with intrusive techniques: for extreme conditions extreme measures are called for. If required these regenerative measures should be applied, not only for the physical body but also for the involved subtle parts, accompanying the convalescence with suitable treatments – Pranatherapeutic energy revitalisation treatments. These are particularly efficient, for example to accelerate the process of regeneration of damaged tissues or to avoid post-transplants problems of rejection. From what we have said it is evident that sickness is a bridge across which it is possible to return and reconsider one’s self. The way in which nowadays we face sickness is the symbol of man’s current condition. Every epoch has given a different interpretation to the state of sickness. Every interpretation reflects a religious conviction - philosophical and political - that has developed through history. It is important to emphasise the fact that frequently within the same society there can exist contemporaneously diverse ways of considering sickness. A very clear example is offered by the simultaneous presence of methods that start from very different assumptions:  allopathic medicine, that which is conventional and academic, that has as a base premise a mechanistic view of the world; Natural medicines, considered by many to be “complementary”, that are inspired by a more spiritual and holistic(3) vision of sickness. Often, official medicine considers sickness like an external factor to man: an uncomfortable incidence that should be addressed as fast as possible. In practice, in our current time, man doesn’t try to serenely face sickness, to understand it, to comprehend it, and to accept it as a clear signal that comes from the being – mind and body. The problem is that in this way we cure the sickness but not the sick. The dominant tendency is simply that of refuting sickness, uniquely lived as a negative experience lacking in significance, without trying to recover the teachings that it offers us. It is normal that this behaviour is even the cause of a radical fear of death. This attitude corresponds to the current consuming phase of our society: sickness has become an “evil” to consume as soon as possible. Thus, we are completely becoming estranged from our own body and entrust the task to provide for our health, or better for our illnesses – that become more and more numerous and diversified, with absurd and terrifying names - to other people: the doctors.    The delegation of the maintenance of our state of health to others, in addition to confirming our ignorance and of being unaware of ourselves, promotes a state of generalised fear: an additional fear that “civilised” man has created. Man, in fact, while increasing on the one hand its apparent ability to act on the external world with technologies that are always more refined, on the other hand there is a continually increasing disassociation with the deeper self.  In modern society we assist a continual delegation of tasks, both physical and mental, to the world of technology and machinery, with a consequent specialisation of work, fragmentation of knowledge, a homogenisation of patterns of work, habits, behaviour, and a standardization of communication.    But just in the period of time of an apparent maximum domination over nature, man rediscovers fear under the form of sickness, within itself. Man has mechanised all its activities, constructed an enormous quantity of useless sophisticated objects, at the same time creating an artificial need for these objects, of which, he does not even know how they function just like he does not know really understand himself. Sickness reawakens fear because it forces us to put into discussion our rapport with our body, to re-examine our convictions, and our basis. It gives rise to an internal crisis. Only if sickness were experienced in a strictly personal way - participating in the experience, like a moment of enrichment – it can represent an element that is perfectly integrated in the process of life and evolution. During the phase of sickness our state of consciousness and our logical patterns change, and we can find new, creative, intuitive and extremely valid solutions. The animal is normally able to re-establish its health, finding by itself, instinctively, and the most suitable remedies in the environment in which it lives. Man, on the contrary, through a relationship with nature that is always more mechanistic, has increased the distance between himself and the environment in which he lives, accepting, voluntarily and passively, alienating conditionings. Sickness has become also a means of social control that obliges each of us to the needs of conformism and of the market.  Man delegates to the scientist the job of analysis, diagnosis, cure, with laboratory research, chemical compounds and identical remedies for all. Sickness is no more a precious personal expression but a good for mass consumption. Sickness, like old age, is no longer a source of comprehension, but a state of non functionality to the system. All medicines that are on the market confirm only the impoverishment and the undermining of medicine that is more concerned with the sickness rather than the sick. Sickness is no longer a moment of comprehension but of war against symptoms and bacteria that exit from these wars always transformed and stronger (without counting collateral effects). The official western medicine is above all “symptomatic”, that is, it hunts down the symptom to subdue it with a specific drug, but not resolving the root problem. Often the symptomatic medicine permits a reaching of results – apparently rapidly – only because it acts on the symptom, that is, the pathological local manifestation and on the pain that is expressing it. Not addressing the real cause of the illness it reappears, maybe in a different disguise and the medical treatment may have worsened the damage.  Man has lost like this control, in addition to the value of health. The loss of this control is largely demonstrated from the enormous, absurd and superstitious use of medicines, of which little is known of their effective use or even their deleterious effects are discovered only after many years from their launch in the market (that came about certainly not only for altruistic therapeutic reasons but more for considerable pecuniary interests). This abnormal consumption has become an attempt to exorcise sickness through a frequently ridiculous behaviour and the world of health has increasingly become a world for “specialists” that are armed with an increasingly incomprehensible vocabulary used to classify medicines, remedies and techniques, that throws an aura of mystery and reverence onto the “official” world of medicine – that is conforming with academic dogma just like a religion. Heresy and sentence, to those, doctor or patient, that dare not to follow the official way. Unfortunately even the relationship between doctor and patient has completely disappeared. The doctor is no longer able to “feel” the patient through their intuition and sensitivity, based on a quasi-familiar relationship (remember the figure of the family doctor that was almost a member of the family and that could judge sickness within the light of a direct relationship with the sick, his personal story, his environment etc.). Today we run to get x-rays done, ultrasounds, CAT scans, magnetic resonances, just to put our minds at ease – and meanwhile taking in a load of deleterious radiation, frequently causing by themselves serious consequences. In “modern” society, especially in the most developed countries, the sick is considered a “social cost”, a temporary loss of productive capacity that can be compensated only if it becomes an adequate consumer of medicines, of medical tests, prothesis within those big and expensive “supermarkets” that we call hospitals. And so we are still light years away from researching the harmonic relationship with nature and with the energetic forces of the universe: the medical industry finds a place of honour in society while we lose completely the sight of every implication of individual growth and of spiritual progress (the latter is easily satisfied through consuming the goods of the religious industry - but this is another topic...). Fortunately, today many doctors, in particular young ones, are sensitive to this type of view point, and hence are careful to re-impose an adequate and personal relationship with the sick person. This relationship is built on the basis of a deeper understanding of human values, and a disposition of being more amenable to accept or to deepen knowledge - with an open mind - natural medicines. Given the actual environmental, social and cultural conditions it is very difficult today to abandon oneself totally to natural medicines, even if ideally it would be desirable. This is required especially as an efficient prevention, but, in the therapeutic field it is more necessary to find, case by case, what is the most appropriate curative path for a person to take, integrating every possible solution – allopathic or natural – in a harmonic and holistic way, with intelligence, and without sticking doggedly to either type of therapy. This is not only to face sickness but also to bring the individual back to a real state of well being. Thought has the power to act on the physical world and even on our body. Many illnesses can be considered as if produced from our thoughts and from our way of thinking. You should evaluate sickness like a difficulty that can be overcome even through a positive mental outlook. From an esoteric point of view, sickness is a phenomenon of the “tightening” of thought. It should be considered that our body knows better than us when it is time to do “a spring clean”. The problem is that of wanting to intervene at all costs, interfering with this process and impeding that the opera of natural detoxification occurs.   The pain associated with sickness should be lived, accepted and understood: all our life is a school that, even through sufferings permits man to evolve. A sickness never comes without a reason. Sickness is cured even and above all else with love, not only with medicines: a laugh, a hug, a word of hope, an outlook full of faith and optimism. When the mind is full of thoughts of joy, even the body shall be transformed(4). In some cases, being cured will be an act of humility, an opening towards us and all those near to us. With pranatherapy, through the laying on hands, the healer gives to the sick vital energy (prana) in a way that rebalances and purifies the body, re-establishing the right frequency in perfect harmony with the nature of life. During sickness man can rediscover themselves: tomorrow becomes hazy, the present enlarges, the body becomes a theatre of the physical life, and never like when we are sick are we able to observe our own body and its reactions. Time seems to stop and the external reality becomes more distant and hazy. The masks of security and strength crumble away and we take on new and more humble masks with a more meditative and deep nature: we hence put on masks which are more real, better fitting,  and that are more suited to ourselves. Today man becomes ill more frequently than in the last century and the causes can be many. In addition to bad nutrition, consider our fast paced life, and our way of managing society. With the birth of industrial society and super cities man has created around itself an artificial environment and has broken a series of natural equilibriums. The foods we eat for example are frequently not cultivated in the lands in which we live and hence have frequencies and rhythms which are totally different from our own. Pollution is always more evident in every food product that is profoundly stressed, not only by the indiscriminate use of pesticides, defoliants and preservatives, but by genetic manipulations, the consequences of which are still not well understood. Pollution of air, water, of the earth completes a sorry picture that man with his own hand has created in just a few decades. We should hence not be surprised if sickness in the community has greatly increased. All this, together with the use and abuse of medicines, that on a larger scale reinforce and diversify the causes of ill health, x-rays etc., provoke within the body a chain reaction, and even genetic mutations. From all this we deduce that we have a desperate necessity to live in a more sound environment, to cultivate our own vegetable patch, and to return to nature. Different to symptomatic medicine, natural medicine assumes a completely different outlook. The Pranatherapy, the phytotherapy, acupuncture, phonochromotherapy, homeopathy, just to name a few, do not stop at the symptom but go to the origin of the problem. The elimination of the symptom not only is useless but is counter productive because it interrupts the communication between the body and the person. Nevertheless “anti-microbial” disposition of modern science has developed due to modern men’s’ incapacity to maintain themselves strong in body and mind. Modern medicine is above all else analytic: it tends to divide the human body into separate parts, and isolate the sickness in a single location concentrating the cure in that specific part of the body and frequently deciding to remove it! Let it be clear that surgery is the downfall of medicine.  Natural medicines consider man like a holistic whole: it considers this whole as an unrepeatable individuality. These medicines, antique in their fundamental conceptions, are synthetic, empirical and find in the sick a common origin of diverse symptoms. They can intervene at both a physiological level and on the vital aura that surrounds the living body. The aura is one of the subtle bodies of the human being. It is commonly represented as a cluster of diverse colours that surround the entire body of every living being. Thought, emotion and feelings are all expressed through the aura. Every sickness of the body is first a disturbance and alteration of the equilibrium of the aura. If we did not live in such a polluted and invasive environment we could say in an absolute sense that an individual with a well balanced aura would be completely immune to any type of sickness. On the aura pranatherapy is applied to bring it back to the ideal equilibrium and hence to remove all negative reflections on the body: removing the cause of illness that resides in the aura makes its effect on the body disappear. 1) Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experience. Jung believed that some (if not all) coincidences were not mere chance, but instead a literal "coinciding", or alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstance. The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with these forces is what Jung labelled "individuation." Jung said that an individuated person would actually shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious. Jung spoke of synchronicity as being a "non-causal connecting principle", in other words a pattern of connection that works outside of or in addition to causality. Therefore, synchronicity interacts with events beyond the time and the law of cause and effect. 2) The law of Karma originated in the Vedic system of religion, otherwise known as Hinduism. As a term, it can at the latest be traced back to the early Upanishads, around 1500 BCE. In its major conception, karma is the physical, mental and supra-mental system of neutral rebound, "cause and effect," that is inherent in existence within the bounds of time, space, and causality. Essentially what this means is that the very being which one experiences on (say, as a human being) is governed by an immutable preservation of energy, vibe, and action. It denies the ostensible arbitrariness of Fate, Destiny, Kismet, or other such Western conceptions by attributing absolute reason and determinism to the workings of the cosmos. Karma, for these reasons, naturally implies reincarnation or rebirth since thoughts and deeds in past lives will affect one's current situation. Thus, every individual alike is responsible for the tragedies and good 'fortunes' which are experienced. The concept of an inscrutable "God" figure is not necessary with the idea of karma. It is vital to note that karma is not an instrument of a god, or a single God, but is rather the physical and spiritual 'physics' of being. As gravity governs the motions of heavenly bodies and objects on the surface of the earth, karma governs the motions and happenings of life, inanimate and animate, unconscious and conscious, in the cosmic realm. Thus, what certain philosophical viewpoints may term "destiny" or "fate" is in actuality, according to believers of karma, the simple and neutral working out of karma. Many have likened karma to a moral banking system, a credit and debit of good and bad. However, this view falls short of the idea that any sort of action (action being a root meaning of 'karma'), whether we term it 'good' or 'bad', binds us in recurring cause and effect. In order to attain supreme consciousness, to escape the cycle of life, death, and rebirth and the knot of karma one must altogether transcend karma. This method of transcendence can be linked to many religious interpretations, not only Hinduism and Buddhism, but other faiths and philosophical systems as well. From the esoteric point of view the one who follows a spiritual pathway should tend to use one’s own Free Will with Awareness, beyond the relative and limiting opinions about “good” and “bad” coming from the moral or from the convenience of the moment. This way one can act with purity and without attachment, therefore without producing karma and, finally, escape from the cycle of reincarnations. The illness can be a sign which arrives from far away, even from other lives, to allow us to understand something important. 3) Holistic health is a philosophy which promotes wholeness over the reductionism and dualism of conventional Western medicine. Its proponents argue against making an unnaturally acute distinction between soma and psyche, structure and function. According to the “holistic concept” the individual is a superior and complex result, something more than just a sum of organs. 4) Positive thinking means to think positively of ourselves and of others, to be optimistic about the different situations of life and their possible developments. This concept is based on one of the fundamental laws of Magic: “the Thought creates”. When we think positive we mentally create some thought-forms that will facilitate us to realise our original idea on the material plain by synchronically catalyzing the right events and circumstances.
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