A Souls...

A Soul’s Prescription for healing Submitted by Mary Anne Costerella, MA, LADC, Licensed Psychotherapist, Owner of Interiors: Psychospiritual Health Therapies, LLC.

If your automobile has an oil leak, would you continually add oil to the engine and ignore the cracked interiors? Perhaps your PC is running sub speed, would your long term solution include additional RAM instead of a new processor? IF a cancerous growth “set up house” in your physical body, would you accept conventional chemotherapy treatments and refuse the surgical removal of the tumor?

These questions may appear to tease at the obvious. However, the escalating rates of physiological, psychological, and spiritual dis-ease (lack of ease) indicate that the 2002 brand of human being avoids the process and healthy discharge of emotional and spiritual pain, thus causing plumbing failures of the heart and soul. This “clogging” of spiritual arteries backwashes and develops into unhealthy behaviors such as addiction, aggression, infidelity, isolation, homicide, suicide, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The repetitive reliance on these soul-destructive remedies results in chronic emotional diseases such as depression, anxiety, and toxic grief syndrome which eventually affect and destroy physical wellness.

Parents of young children understand the healing process when they resist the urge to band-aid a superficial skin wound and respond, “Let the air heal it.” This historically familiar phrase informs the child that an artificial cover-up only prolongs healing and the body is intended to rely on its own interior knowledge to heal itself.

Why have adults forgotten the simple truth that human beings heal from the “inside out?” Cultural amnesia has caused us to forget the inherent intelligence of our human and spiritual containers, the Body and Soul. Rather, we have come to depend on healthcare solutions which treat malignancies and bankruptcies of the heart and soul with band-aids for the mind and behavior. Anxiety, depression, and addiction often result from a failure to grieve fully the necessary losses of life. Addiction is therapy for toxic grief because it is an attempt to treat depression with repeated transient effects of mood altering substances and processes.

Although emotional pain offers significant opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth, people do not want to “sit” with the pain of grief – their own or another’s. Grief necessitates process and release, not permission of self or others to enter the internal abyss and remain present for the confrontation and discharge of feelings. Toxic grief occurs when we disallow ourselves connection with our hearts where grief resides. We buffer ourselves with drink, drug, work, shopping, exercise, food, gambling, and a frenetic compulsion for busyness in an intentional and addictive effort to escape self. Therefore, the wound is denied visibility and emotional oozing time necessary for healing to occur.

Conventional healthcare also reinforces this dilemma by ignoring the interior wound and complying with the child’s band-aid request; it reverses the healing process and treats the symptoms with topical medications – anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, or short-term behavioral care such as walks, reading, or listening to music. Doctors are trained to treat end results rather than underlying causes; psychopharmacology (medication therapy) does not treat the heart; it treats only the behaviors of grief such as crying and sleeplessness. These behaviors are the voice of the soul and belong to its prescription for healing; we cannot numb the heart and expect it to heal! The heart muscle must remain soft, supple, and open to the process of life. Grief ebbs and flows paralleling Life.

Scientific study invades this natural process, neutralizing and deadening the ebb and flow. It encourages the belief that human beings are not responsible for their interior indigestion by reporting that emotional imbalances are not the result of faulty human garbage disposal symptoms but, rather are born from chemically imbalanced brains which can be rectified with the help of a variety of multi-colored pill forms. One must consider whether we are contra-evolving by disassociating from our humanity through the exaltation of the brain and denial of the human spirit. Are recitivism rates for addiction and emotional illness climbing partially because the treatment system is an enabler rather than a healer?

Psychology is defined as the study of the psyche which means soul. Soul has been abandoned by scientific healers causing the individual energy system, the human being, to lose power. Current treatment trends must take a proverbial page from history and begin to focus on reconnection to the authentic power source – the heart and soul. If this power source is depleted because of spiritual/emotional overload, behaviors become dysfunctional. The head to heart connection is the engine of your human vehicle for this Life journey. Human behavior will not heal and evolve if the heart is denied “air” time.

The body is the house for the mind, emotions, and spirit. Facials, massage, manicures, Yoga, Reiki, colonic cleansing are supportive healing techniques for the exterior of our human house. However, the transition of house to home emerges only when we attend to beautifying the interior with time, attention, maintenance, and love. 2003 challenges us to enter the labyrinth and balance the connection; Head and Body with Heart and Soul.