Articles & Meditations

DEEP-HEART HEALING: Pathways to Intuitive Healing

 

Chapter 1: Wherein Lies True Happiness?

(This is the first chapter of his forthcoming book by Steven Distefano)

 

At the age of 24, in July of 1968, I entered the Trappist Abbey

of Our Lady of Gethsemani. I would say that I was not happy for many years of my life. Being touched by Christian mystical poetry awakened a place of deep happiness within me and led me to search wherein this happiness could be found. As the Spirit always connects us with what we need, I was guided to a magazine that had a list of religious orders. As I read over this it led to my deciding to enter monastic life. The sense I had when I entered

this abbey was that I had exhausted all the avenues of finding happiness in this culture and that somehow happiness lay within the monastic walls.

 

As I made solemn profession and continued on I gradually become very much immersed in the East/West meeting point. It was the insights coming forth in the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism, especially among Monastics in the 1980’s that captured my attention. Buddhist monks from The Dalai Lama’s order visited our monastery on several occasions and I had the opportunity to dialogue with them. In July of 1996, there was a meeting with monks and nuns from all over the world, which also included the presence of The Dalai Lama. For a week, monks and nuns gave presentations about deep issues we face – violence, lack of respect for human rights, etc. After each presentation there would follow an open discussion among the group.  Many questions were

raised about how we can be a positive force in such distressful circumstances.  It was a profound experience for me to be able

to listen to these talks and exchanges.

 

Reflecting on this experience what comes to mind is a statement on religious dialogue I recall from monastic days: “All religions seek to deal with the deepest questions of humankind such as: Wherein lies true happiness? What is the cause of our sorrows? What is the meaning of our life on earth and of our life beyond death?”  Thomas Merton, a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, was very well known in the dialogue taking place between East and West in the 1960’s before his tragic death in Bangkok, December 10, 1968. He was giving talks and meeting with His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama and with monks and nuns in Bangkok at this time. He was accidentally electrocuted when he touched a fan that was short circuited after taking a shower.

 
In 1980, I attended the first Christian Buddhist conference held at Naropa in Boulder Colorado. His Holiness, The Dalai Lama stood up to address us: “I am nobody special. Like you I am a human being. As human beings we desire happiness.” He then went on to say how afflictive emotions are the cause of suffering, of how necessary it is to become aware of these.  He mentioned the fact that many people are not aware of the negative emotions they carry and that they think they are happy and are emulated by others, but that really this is not the case. True happiness, he said, lies in cultivating Bodhicitta (enlightened mind-heart), the wish that all beings be free of suffering and realize true happiness. And he said that unless our work is motivated by this aspiration it cannot really be efficacious. As shall be seen later in this book this motivation becomes the primary focus in healing inner pain, developing compassion, and accessing higher guidance for our personal good and the good of others.

 

While I was a monk, I participated in facilitating Christian/Zen retreats for seven years with a Zen Master from the Kwan Um School of Zen. Also I was well acquainted with the theology and spiritual practices of Western Christianity living the Benedictine life within The Trappist order to which I belonged. Yet, even though

I had this training, I realized there was something in me that

was not at peace and I didn’t know why. And as I said at the beginning of this chapter, The Spirit always has a way of

bringing us what we need.

 

In the last five years of monastic life that something for me was Reiki and the work of Hanna Kroeger. Reiki, which is very well known throughout the world today, is a way of awakening and becoming attuned to The Divine, The Supreme Spirit and being able to allow its enlightening, healing energies to bless oneself and others. It is not so much based on believing a certain set of beliefs, but is very experiential in character. It is more like a way of experiencing The Divine.

 

I was drawn to Hanna Kroeger through the encounter with a person who followed her. What strongly attracted me to her way was that she developed a teaching that enables you to discern

the seven spiritual causes and the seven physical causes of disease. Disease here means, above all — inner "dis-ease" with self. The seven physical causes are such things as poor diet, congestion of organs and congestion of systems of the body. The seven spiritual causes refer to such things as negative thought forms, childhood traumas, etc., that affect us in the present. Very often it is the seven spiritual causes that manifest in the body and that are the primary cause of physical illness.

 

In 1999 I took a leave of absence from monastic life to study Hanna Kroeger’s work. After about a year I returned to monastic life and 5 months later it became clear to me that I needed to dispense my monastic vows and devote my search to healing work. In 2001,

I left to begin this long search, which involved my entering an intimate relationship and learning lessons that often only suffering brought forth in such a relationship can teach. The difficulties encountered in this relationship led me to a very gifted soul therapist who had personally followed Virginia Satir, a very well known family therapist who died in 1988. It took 4 years of deep intensive work with this gifted soul to come to a place of wholeness and integration that made it possible to express what I had learned. It was in this long period that the wisdom learned in monastic life combined with the insights learned in Hanna’s school were brought together to form Deep-Heart Healing.

 

The basic insights that form Deep-Heart Healing are simple. We

all yearn for intimacy — to experience being loved and loving, to experience loving and being loved. Virginia Satir expressed this very well: “Every child is born with a song in its heart, I only want to be loved, I only want to be loved.” Especially during the first five years this yearning in many of us is often not realized. We can suffer deeply from the heavy intergenerational weight our parents pass down to us. Why wounding can be so deep in this period is that we do not have the developed consciousness to integrate emotional overloads. We often have to bury experiences of neglect and abuse that happened to us, or that we witnessed happening to other members in our family of origin. Buried pain, grief, fear experienced in our quest for intimacy at this early period stay with us and surface in our later quest for intimacy and often influence

us much, much more than we are aware.

 

If our quest for intimacy is to be realized, what is most important is discovering The Truth that can set us free. For early conditioning often leads us to believe a lie about our self. As a developing child we will do anything to get love, even if this means making the family system good and ourselves bad. Generally, we cannot go against the source we depend on at this time. The way a child’s mind works is to think, “I am not getting the love I need here, therefore I must be bad.” When we bond with our parent’s, other members of our family system, we bond with their energies, whatever these energies may be.  What is so needed is to first awaken to The Truth of who we are.

 

If we want to begin to know who we really are, we need to look

at what the enlightened beings of humanity, such as Jesus and Buddha, have proclaimed about themselves and also about each one of us. Both Jesus and Buddha awoke to the knowing of themselves as expressions of The Absolute, the ground reality of life. And they say this is true of each of us and that as we awaken to this inner ground, it radiates - manifests through us as love, compassion and wisdom that wills the good of all. This is what is most intimate and personal to us. And as we awaken to this, it is this awareness that will guide us for the highest good in our intimate relationships with others, in the path of love and service we are called to on earth.

 

The entire foundation for Deep-Heart Healing is the fact that we can all awaken to this deepest truth of our existence and that we can live in the awareness of this. It is the consciousness of a Love that harms no one, that excludes no one, that wills only goodness to all beings. The deepest need of humanity today is this awakening and serving the good of all from this enlightened consciousness. This is the source of true happiness. Black Elk, the well known mystic and medicine man, said: “Nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the Sacred Power of the World lives and moves.” In each moment, our being, every person, all creatures, all of creation comes forth from the sacred power of the world that is Love. We each and all together are the radiant image of this Love, The Divine, Supreme Spirit, or any other name we choose to signify the Ultimate Reality. Deep within us lies a radiant core of goodness, beauty and truth that is the essence of who we are.

 

If any one of us does not perceive, sense and manifest this deep radiant image that we are, it is very often, as has been said, because this reality has been obscured by painful memories begun in childhood. Because they were never able to be processed to peace they have been carried forward and have impacted our life.

 

It can also be the rules, the “shoulds” of the family system, our society at large that create inner disharmony, wherein we don’t really feel at peace with our self. Yet, we often settle for this because we can’t see any other way we could be.

 

So always, to awaken to our deepest truth, to develop and cultivate our spiritual practice wherein we abide in the Deep-Heart of our true self is what is most necessary. In this way we can experience that the deep core of radiant love within us, in communion with all, liberates us from imposed conditioning of the past, how ever deep and insurmountable it may seem. This then empowers us to be able to choose freely how we see a situation, how we feel about it and how we are going to behave with respect to it. By living from the Deep Heart, we can develop practical guidance as to what is in harmony with our true self in our life choices. As we learn the art of making enlightened choices, of doing only what is faithful to our essence, we grow in freedom to love for the good of all. This book is, above all, a practical book that offers spiritual practices and meditations to help facilitate this realization.

 

It is my wish, that any who read this book might be helped

to realize the highest path of love and service to which they

are called.

 

At the end of this chapter I have offered a meditation that evolved over years of practice that I have found meets my deepest need. Each of us must find what fits for us. Meditation as understood in the great spiritual traditions is always about awakening to The Ultimate Reality, present in the inmost depths of our being and

of every being. As we awaken to this deepest consciousness it always manifests as devotion to fellow beings in loving and compassionate service.