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Spiritual Healing:
Healing Through God's Love.
Walking With God On The Sufi Path.
"Spiritual Healing does not take the place of other healing modalities. Instead, it becomes the basis on which all other treatments rest."
In training to be a Doctor of Alternative Medicine, we were taught to treat the patient with a mind-body-spirit approach. I had no problem accepting that there is almost always both an emotional link and a spiritual one that is involved when a person is chronically or seriously sick. Yet, my training did not give me the tools that I needed to approach the issues of emotions and spirituality. My own spiritual tradition is that of The Roman Catholic Church, yet I honor the spiritual essence of all religions, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam and long to understand them and discover the deep beauty within each.
What led me to the Sufi Path?
I was attending a health expo in Los Angeles over three years ago...and I heard a Sufi Medical Doctor speak about the need for spiritual healing in our patients. He said that every sick person had a place in their heart that was closed off to love at some time in their life due to hurt, disapointment, betrayal, etc. He said it was a doctor's job to help the patient open that place to love again.....and then physical healing could occur in leaps and bounds. I knew in my heart that he spoke the truth. I was at the next seminar given by this man, Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe. I actually knew very little about The Sufi Path yet followed my heart by enrolling in his school, The University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism. I signed up for a 3 year commitment and completed those studies in July of 2009. I was joined by other students , all of whom were either healers from one modality or another or seeking to become a healer. All of us seemed to be seeking a deeper connection with God and a desire to be instruments of His healing for our patients.
At Healing School, I had the opportunity to take the Sufi Promise and receive a Sufi name. Our guide from Jerusalem, Sidi Al Jamal, gave me the name "Rahma". The name means "Foundation of Mercy". Sidi told me I was given that name because it comes so natural to me to be merciful to others.....yet also because I need to work on being more merciful toward myself. Kind of ironic, right? In order to become a healer, I must open my own heart to healing...Just like they say when you are on a plane, "Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you reach out to help others".
According to James Keeley, a faculty member at the university, there seems to be a fundamental difference between the people who heal and those who stay stuck in chronic patterns. It seems that those who have healed had or developed a relationship to Spirit. For some, this is a relationship with God. For others, it is with love or Universe. Regardless of what they call it, each of these people had faith.
This resource enabled them to face their challenges as experiences they had to go through in order to grow as individuals, not as problems they had to eliminate. They realilzed there was meaning behind what was happening to them and reached out to the support and guidance of the Divine to discover it. Their faith allowed them to be fully present and acknowledge their painful experience until they were given what they needed to leave their pain behind.
So many modalities of healing are available to us today. Everything from allopathic medical care to homeopathy, bodywork, nutrition, psychotherapy, and many others are employed to change states of disease and unhappiness to ones of health and balance. While great attention is placed on remedying the symptoms, the patient's experience or what it means for them to be going through these times of pain is often overlooked.
Spiritual healing takes the radical stance of saying that our experience and what we believe an illness or challenging situation means for us is just as important as what is happening and the causes of these struggles.
The foundational principal of spiritual healing is that, while difficult things do happen to us, none of these things cuts us off from the support of the Divine. Spiritual healing focuses on connecting us to the love and suppport of the Divine in painful situations. When this support touches the places of our pain, our experiences are guided into those of balance. Healing then happens. This healing is passed on to our emotions and thoughts in the form of peace. This peace is displayed in our bodies and lives as health and balance.
Spiritual healing is more than positive thinking or looking on the bright side of things. It is genuinely experiencing the love, guidance, and support of God in a situation that previously felt terrible because of what we believed it meant for us.
We can spend so much time avoiding what hurts, we never discover this inner resource of Divine support and instead continue to look outside for answers. It is easy to overlook our experiences and not realize that, at the foundation of our beings, we believe we are cut off from what we need and must respond in an unfulfilling way. Our focus is often on changing the circumstances that are upsetting us, but spiritual healing shows us that we must first come into harmony with what is happening and act from a sense of balance before our actions will lead to real, lasting healing.
Many times, the negative things we believe a situation means can make us more miserable than what is actually happening. Anotherwards, the the sickness that is from us, comes from the negative meanings we assign to difficult events. The cure within us is our connection to the Divine that can guide us into harmony, regardless of what is happening in our lives.
Focusing on what is happening and how we got there rather than on our experience and what we believe a situation means for us is called living on the outside............as opposed to being inside with an awareness of our internal response. We must let go of wishing things were different and face the fact that this is what we are being given right now. Whatever is happening is meant to happen, even if we think we are the cause of our own suffering and should know better. We must momentarily release our ideas of right and wrong as well as fair and unfair. This allows us to be in a relationship with the events of our lives.
We discover that we have what we need in every moment when we stop arguing with the flow of events, become conscious of our experience, and support that experience by turning inside to receive Divine care. When we consciously connect to Divine support, we are able to embrace the process of life through all of its ups and downs and flow with the changes because we experience a sense of peace and well-being that is available, regardless of what happens to us.
Could it be that all of us only have one core issue?.....and that is whether or not we are experienceing the love and support of the Divine at our core. When we are experiencing this support, we feel at peace, think positive thoughts, speak positive words, and take positive actions that all lead in the direction of healing. We are then able to base our well-being on the availability of God's support instead of on things and events. Experiencing this stream of love allows us to be fully alive and present for all that life brings.
While most healing has to do with trying to figure out how not to hurt, spiritual healing is based on the belief that, when we hurt, God guides and supports us into becoming individuals who have the resources to walk through that pain and leave it behind. Difficult events often reveal the painful beliefs and decisions we have previously made in our lives that are contributing to our problems today. As we walk with God through these situations, we release the things that don't serve us or really matter and discover new and more fulfilling ways of living.
Modern research has told us that one of the most important factors in people recovering from life-threatening illnesses and traumatic situations is their ability to reinvent themselves. Yet, we often want to hurry up and get better or get over this arguement so we can get back into the lives that made us sick or led us to the unhappiness in the first place.
Life is not about things and events going any one way. Life is about experiencing the fullness that is available to us, regardless of what happens. When we turn from the outside to the inside, we accept that growth is a natural part of our existence and that the events of our lives are the catalysts for that growth. We start to realize that difficult things don't happen to us because something went wrong. Rather, it is because we are not finished growing yet! The next concept to grasp that may be a little more difficult is that we don't really know what we are growing into and so we don't know what experiences are needed to catalyze that transformation. Once we can accept these two ideas, we can stop resisting the things that hurt and begin traveling on a path that not only leads to healing, but also nurtures and enlightens us.
I work with spiritual development, physical illness, emotional pain, relationship issues, sexual trauma, career challenges, substance abuse and chronic pain. My teachers have taught me that God's love is right there for us and that we just need to open and let that love in. I have seen that healing does not have to take years as many traditional therapies believe.
Who are the Sufis?
The Sufi practitioner aspires to live a clean, moderate and balanced life, following spiritual laws and divine guidance, in order to bring healing and goodness to all people.
Most often referred to as the “spiritual path of the heart", the Sufi deeply aspires to achieve intimacy and proximity with the “Beloved” who is the Creator and unity with the Creation.
Through a well-defined and insightful path of healing and spiritual transformation, the traveler on the Sufi way gradually releases self-limiting identities and increasingly carries the divine qualities of compassion, peace and love for all people without separation.
Please know that each and every one of you on my subscriber list is in my daily prayers.
Blessings, Dr Patricia Rahma Felici
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