Integrating Mindfulness and Energy Medicine: A Path to Profound Healing

I’ve been teaching mindfulness in schools and corporates for over 10 years, at times heart-opening and at others dispiriting, where this powerful path of awakening is seen as a mere

‘stress-management tool’. Advances in neuroscience have allowed for wider accessibility and adoption of meditative practice in a secular manner by institutions that would otherwise have felt it to be either too ephemeral or a threat to their religious or administrative governance. However, the impact of a regular practice of mindfulness reaches far beyond what the science is currently able to prove or what in these cases is generally acceptable to teach.

The deep self-awareness that arises allows us to observe our mind, to see our habits and patterns of thinking and feeling and being and begin to inquire into the places from where they actually stem. Ultimately, it leads to an understanding of who we are beyond our mind, beyond these patterns, to our eternal self. If we attempt to divorce mindfulness from this experience or ignore those aspects not yet ‘proven’ by neuroscience, we teach only half a practice.

The Andean medicine men and women of Peru embody a cosmology that approaches healing from four levels; the physical, our mental - emotional processes, the path of the soul and our connection to Spirit. It crosses three realms - the lower realms of the subconscious, where our personal and ancestral trauma lie, the middle realm of our current reality and its synchronicities, and the upper realms of the individual and collective superconscious, the time of our becoming.

The great sages implore us to “know thyself”. Without a strong self-awareness practice, we cannot possibly know ourselves, nor can we hear the gentle call of our soul, the whispered wisdom of our ancestors and the delicate flutter of the numinous world of Spirit. We are merely puppets on a string, lurching along without inquiring into the source of our patterned behaviour, fears and worries or understanding who we are without them. Mindfulness may thus carry us into in our journey back to wholeness: indeed we cannot heal ourselves or awaken to the enormous potential we carry without it.