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I thought it might interest you to hear about a strange series of
coincidences that taught me some important
lessons about spiritual healing.
It started early one Sunday morning, near the end of May, when I went
out to get groceries. I usually drive to the grocery store, but I also
bring one of those folding shopping carts in the trunk of my car. My
townhouse condominium is a bit far from my parking spot, so I bring the
cart to take groceries from my car to my house. The cart was very old
and battered and was already missing a few of the horizontal wires that
form the sides of the cart. The cart also wobbled when it rolled
because the wheels were so off kilter. It worked well enough from my
parking spot to my house, but I wouldn't want to have to use it if I
walked to the store and had to bring the groceries home on foot.
When I got to the grocery store, I noticed that new shopping carts like
mine were on display in a prominent location where they hadn't been
before. In fact, I had never noticed a prominent display of carts like
that at any grocery store ever. I didn't think anything unusual of it
at the time. I finished my shopping and took my groceries home. As I
was wheeling the cart full of groceries from my car to my house, I heard
the tinkling sound of one of the metal wires that form the sides of the
cart bouncing on the ground. The wire had fallen out. None of the
wires had fallen out for years. I didn't think anything unusual of it,
but I put the wire securely back in place with my leatherman pocket tool
and brought the groceries into my house.
The next week, as I was going out to my car to go to the grocery store,
I heard the same tinkling sound as the week before. The same wire fell
out again. The cart was completely empty, there was no reason
whatsoever for that to happen. "Okay," I thought to whomever was
listening, "I understand. It's time for a new cart. No problem." At
the grocery store I bought a new cart, it was the last one left on
display.
This was an interesting coincidence, my old cart started falling apart
just when the grocery store has a prominent display of new ones. The
next step in this strange series of coincidences was when things
started to go wrong.
Later that week, while doing my usual three times a week workout of
calisthenics and weight training, my shoulder began to hurt. I had had
an occasional slight ache on and off there for many months but I just
avoided the exercise that seemed to cause it. The other exercises never
seemed to make it worse. Until now. Over the next two days the pain
got worse and worse. I tried ibuprofen but it didn't seem to help. I
had some pain killers left over from my last root canal four and a half
years ago. Fortunately they kept me going until I was able to go to the
doctor the next day. Otherwise, I would have gone to the emergency room
in the middle of the night. It hurt that much.
The doctor told me I was doing pretty much the right thing, rest the
shoulder and continue using the sling I had been using. He gave me a
new prescription for the same pain killers. He also told me to keep
taking the ibuprofen even if I didn't notice it working. The injury was
too severe for the ibuprofen to eliminate the pain like it might on a
simple sore muscle, but it would reduce the inflammation and the
recovery would be faster. Even if the pain seemed to be getting worse,
it would still be less than without taking the ibuprofen.
This lesson about how ibuprofen works taught me something important
about spiritual healing.
In addition to the ibuprofen and pain killers, I had been using a
spiritual healing technique
that I had learned at a Spiritualist church. Spiritualist do not
believe spiritual healing is a substitute for mainstream medicine. We
believe in using it in conjunction with mainstream medicine. I've been
told by people whom I've given healing to that it has helped with
various conditions including depression, cold symptoms, breathing
difficulty, and others. I had used it successfully on myself before for
sore muscles. However in this case it seemed that just like with the
ibuprofen, it didn't miraculously cure the injury. I knew that a
miracle was unlikely but one always hopes and when hopes are not
realized, disappointment inevitably follows.
However, just like with the ibuprofen, spiritual healing treatments
should be continued even if they don't seem to work right away. While
it is impossible to predict the outcome for any particular case,
spiritual healing is believed to be able to decrease the severity of
symptoms and reduce the amount of time needed for healing. I knew all of
these things from the classes I had taken at church, but now that I had
had this experience myself, and I realized that it was also true with
mainstream medicines like ibuprofen, I really understood it in a much
deeper way.
A few hours after the doctor's appointment, I felt much better. I didn't
need the pain killers any more. This totally astonished me since I had
been so uncomfortable previously. I wondered if the pain went away so
suddenly because of the cumulative effect of the spiritual healing I
had done.
There was also another possibility. Some people believe that sometimes an illness is intended to teach the
sufferer a lesson. There are even healing techniques that use
psychology based on the belief that once the lesson is learned, there
is no longer a need for the disease and healing will then occur
spontaneously. I never really believed this before, but now I wondered
if that was why the pain went away so soon after I understood this
lesson.
There was one more thing I understood more clearly from this
experience. During the most painful period of the injury, after a
session of
self healing,
while I did not necessarily feel relief from
pain, I did experience some relief from suffering. Pain is a sensation.
Suffering is an attitude. Constant pain can really wear you down, but
after a session of self healing I had a much more positive
attitude even though I was disappointed that the pain remained. I was
interested in doing things rather than lying in bed feeling sorry for
myself.
A person's psychological outlook can help or hinder healing.
Stress can cause disease. A positive attitude can help in recovery. I
knew all of this from the classes I took at church but now I really
experienced how spiritual healing can improve one's psychological
outlook when suffering from pain and in that way facilitate healing. I
had a much deeper understanding of this phenomena from the experience.
This effect also helped me when I used spiritual healing during the long
wait in the doctor's office and at the pharmacy getting my prescription
filled. There are many trials associated with medical conditions and
spiritual healing helped me to get through them with a better attitude.
What does all this have to do with the shopping cart? Well, a couple of
days later it was grocery day again. My arm didn't hurt if I was
careful about how I used it, and I was gradually regaining a full range
of motion. However, I still couldn't drive my car because it had a
manual transmission. I walked to the grocery store and took my new
shopping cart.
As I walked to the store I wondered about these coincidences. How come
my old cart started falling apart just when the store had a display of
new ones? How come I got the new cart just before a minor ache I'd had
for months turned into a serious injury and I couldn't drive and really
needed a properly working cart? I thought it must be a sign telling me
to look deeper into the meaning of this injury. Was the injury planned?
Were there more lessons in it I needed to learn? Was there anything
else unusual about the injury? I realized there was one more thing that
was coincidental. About a year earlier I had started going to the
Spiritualist church that I currently attended. Since then, I had been
going to the class in spiritual healing at the church. On the same
Sunday that my old cart started falling apart, I was asked, if starting
a few weeks later, I would like to be one of the healers who does
laying-on-of-hands during the Sunday services. I agreed to do it.
Here was another coincidence: just before I was going to be a healer in
the church services, I was given this "advanced course" that taught me
so much about spiritual healing by experiencing those things for myself.
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