Spiritual healing through physical AND energetic means

Interaction on another spiritual board a couple months ago. Initiating comments are in

block quotes:

Emotional pain is held in the body.
That means that all of us are suffering from some level of PTSD.

I am glad you wrote this, I couldn't agree more and it is so helpful, from my perspective, to validate this.
SO many of us are walking wounded.

There are many ways of releasing this, however, and direct body-work is one of the very best, because while spiritual practice in theory can go deep enough, the reality is that this buried pain is also a barrier to going that deeply in spiritual practice.

I am a big proponent of body work (massage, etc) in conjunction with conscious spiritual/energy work. I have found it helps my body to release the habits of 'holding' and pain, as well as the energy that I mis-stored in it.

I have found utilizing my meditation techniques before, especially during, and directly after body work, help me to get so much more out of a treatment. I can more comfortably release, and let go of A Lot more in each treatment. No matter how proficient the body work is, I get good value. When I work with great body workers, I see amazing change in my body. AND I `hold' the changes, very often.

In the past, when I was less conscious about working on a spiritual/energy level to heal, I was in a lot of pain. I received quite a lot of body work, and it did not `hold'. For example, about a dozen years ago, I went every other week for work on my lower back, etc for well over a year - to someone who is a very good body worker. I would feel quite well after the treatment, with a low level of back pain. Then almost exactly 24 hours later (I noticed this after about a year!) I would be hit with major fatigue and have to go to bed for about a day (give or take) – I was completely useless during that time - physically ill and emotionally overwhelmed. After awhile, my lower back pain would slowly return and I would resume my regular life, with no real lasting change.

I didn't know then, but I sure see it clearly now, I was experiencing something that can be called the `rubber-band effect'. I couldn't `hold' the change. My current perception of my experience back then is that I could make the physical change, but I couldn't make the deep spiritual/energetic change (I wouldn't let go, and let Gd about some things - but I was unaware of this...), so the physical changes I had made, changed back.

I see my system as an orchestrated unit working hand-in-glove – when the body changes, I have to be willing to change spiritually as well, or the body changes back. Or, as I can allow change spiritually, the body changes to come into alignment.

The end of my story of my back is – I did major, major spiritual/energy work about the issues in my lower back (most of it around abuse), mostly in meditation and also during body work. It took a long time and it was sometimes hellish to deal with the 'pictures', emotions, patterns, etc, as they came up and out of my system! But now I almost never have an issue with my back, for a couple years now – after living with varying levels of lower back issues (from immobilizing to merely annoying) since I was 16. Hallelujah, this is a wonderful thing! And, even better than living with much less physical pain – I live my life with much less of the sadness, despair, fear, hate, victim patterns, etc, that I had been 'storing' in my lower back, as well.

To the Spiritual Healing available to us!
Amen!