I used to direct the usual Ignatian Retreats
giving more emphasis on many hours of praying which
was very much liked by all. In 1991, a group of sisters
came for their Silver Jubilee Retreat for a month to
Belgaum. One among them was a very sick person. She
suffered from arthritis, asthma, chronic ulcers, always
feeling cold, even in summer she had to use warm clothes
including socks. At the age of 18 she had a paralytic
stroke. Though recovered, her one hand and leg did not
regain full normalcy. She could not attend
the normal time-table of the retreat. What she could
do only was to talk about her past life's many many
sufferings and feel sad. She had plenty of fears. She
even under went exorcism as part of treatment to make
her well. Towards the end of the retreat she told me
that her hand became normal! Crooked figures straightened.
After a few days her leg too became normal! It was very
difficult for me to believe the cure as I had not come
across this type of cure in my earlier retreats. I had
seen many charismatic healings, but this was entirely
a new type of healing for me as we had never prayed
over this person during the retreat for healing. Only
she was helped to handle her negative feelings
of sadness, fears, guilt and anger. Her
asthma disappeared, a person who could not touch cold
water without getting wheezing started taking cold water
bath in the mornings without any asthma problems. It
took 3 months for me to make myself
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believe this healing was true and since 1991
till today, she is free from her years old illnesses.
This made to reflect about the process of healing and
I came to realise the role of negative
feelings in our life and how we have to handle them
for our mental and physical health. Since then,
the 1st week of St.Ignatius' Retreat Scheme became more
important for self purification from every sort of negative
feeling which does harm to us. It is not enough to make
a good and sincere confession with good resolutions.
One has to go deep into one's past life experiences
to purify one self. It is by going
into deeper levels of feelings, I came to realize that
conscious level forgiving is insufficient and only through
working over the negative feelings of hurts and anger,
one can reach real forgiving from the depth of one's
heart where the memory of the hurt doesn't hurt in any
way.
In our
usual retreats, we do not generally enter into the feeling
level. In the conscious level we can do a lot and feel
that we have been purified and our contact with God
in prayer is all real and genuine:- our forgiveness
is genuine as we make a very sincere confession.
What is missed out is that in our usual type of retreats
we do not enter into the sub-conscious level. Only when
we enter into the sub-conscious level, we begin to become
aware that though we forgive, our negative feelings
have not disappeared. In fact, one is shocked to discover
how much anger and resentment and deep seated unwillingness
to forgive and accept and be good to the 'enemy' from
the depth of one's being.
Only when we
work out our negative feelings we become internally
free. Though we think we accept our parents,
brothers, sisters, caste, economic status, body, sex,
sexuality, complexion, height, weight, intellectual
qualities, deficiencies, limitations, losses, pains,
crosses, sicknesses, sins, jealousy, mistakes committed,
we will discover what we do in the conscious level is
not fully real but quite much imagined. It is easy for
a woman to say in the conscious level, I am proud to
be a female as God has created me! But if she goes into
the sub-conscious level she would definitely find it
is not all that easy and there may be plenty of conflicts,
resistance, anger even towards God for having been created
as a female person especially in our Indian context.
So the need to become aware of the need of purifying
and redeeming our sub-conscious.
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