The “Deal”
Inner Work and Horse-Trading with Your Subconscious
There are all kinds of reasons for getting involved with energy healing practices, and most all of us start naïvely. Inevitably, there comes a need to examine the stories we are telling ourselves about why we’re doing inner work in the first place. Some of those stories are more durable than others. Among the most short-lived motivations are the desire to get high, “fix” our ailments, a desire to leap-frog over difficult inner processes, and the desire to become a spiritually superior being. All of these schemes tend to fizzle out over time. Among the best, most durable motivations are a natural curiosity and a willingness to align with the forces at work below the surface of our lives and to change.
Energywork — the knowledgable and purposeful use of your energy field for healing and personal development — is one of the tools of inner work, alongside more traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, inner inquiry, prayer, and depth psychotherapy. Skillfully used, practices that make use of your energy centers and points, streams and flows of energy in and around your body, create a doorway into your psycho-spiritual life. Even as these practices bring up echoes of things past, they also have a general tendency to take your consciousness into places where it has not gone before. This can become challenging. At certain junctures, serious…
