Many of our prayers ask for healing. In way or another, healing is all we ever ask for.  On some level, most problems can be deduced to a kind of illness. It may be physical, or emotional. Perhaps the disorder is financial or collective. Whatever the manifestation of illness, it’s source almost always seems to be fear.

Fear interferes with all things good. When I act based on fear, I often receive some version of that which I feared. For fear is a form of prayer which, like all prayer, brings to us the object of our anxiety. Choose not, then, based on a fear.

Even when we don’t act on our fears, they serve to block the solutions which we seek in prayer. Fear interferes energetically with healing, since it is a prayer in the negative. Healing, then, is the surrender of all fears. It’s to get out of my own way. This is the first step in any worthwhile prayer. It creates an open space into which we may entertain the healing nature of reality.

Fear is of time. The mind, trained in the annals of time, almost always dwells on some past trauma or some fantasy of the future. Incidents and accidents from the past seem to justify our fears, which we then predict will repeat in our future. Focused almost exclusively on our fears, we leapfrog over the present moment, denying that what we are afraid of doesn’t exist in this instant of time we call the present. To relinquish our ideas of time, then, is the second prerequisite of an effective prayer. For so long as we believe that our prayers can only be answered in some future state, for just that long do we push the actuality of our request into a time which never arrives.

What if we were already healed? What if all that we wished for, deep in our hearts, was already granted us?

Healing consists in allowing that which already is to be. It is non-doing. It means acknowledging that which is, not changing something which isn’t into something which is. We fail to see that only our denial of health makes sickness possible. A change of awareness is all that is required for us to realize that we are already healed.

Our minds are so powerful that they have convinced us that we are sick, when really, we never have been.  Allowing that part of the miracle which I most perceive myself to be in need of to work; that’s all I need ‘do.’ Healing, then, is an ‘act’ of surrender. It is to permit a natural process to work itself out on whatever plane on which I believe sickness to exist. To pray is to relinquish the blocks to healing’s presence in my life, to surrender whatever form I have come to see its absence as taking. To heal – to pray – is an act of unlearning, not learning.

In the end, illness can only truly be treated with love.  Love, by its nature, is present everywhere, yet only in the present moment. For it is always now. It is in all places, yet always only here. For you are always here.

With these things said, there are lesser truths which have passed into this world with you, along with whatever forms your illnesses seem to take.

If an illness stays with us, perhaps it needs to. Maybe it has a message for us, some buried grievance, some interred grief which must be unearthed. That pain may have accompanied you into this world along with your birth, and so it may represent unfinished business. Or it may be illness that was created in some moment after your birth. In either case, it is from the past. This is why you must relinquish your belief in time if you want healing to occur. For sickness, like fear, is of time. Your belief in time creates it. When that old pain is dusted off and examined, your only course is to relinquish it. Once it is surrendered, the wholeness which it once concealed is reclaimed. Healing results. Consider, then, that all illness is temporary.

Most of us focus on the physical manifestation of an illness, and these are but symptoms. They should not be ignored, and the remedies of your era should be used fully. These may consist of procedures, of medicines, or of rites. The specific form which these nostrums take is unimportant as long as you believe in them. For all medicinal cures are placebos, requiring only faith. It is the trust in their efficacy which gives all cures their power to restore. For trust opposes fear, and expels all illness.

Yet to concentrate simply upon a medical cause is to pay attention only to a symptom. Medical conditions may have medical causes, but they can also be traced to psychological, emotional and metaphysical etiologies. This is because the cosmos itself has mental causes, and not merely physical origins. When these deeper, nonphysical causes are identified and abandoned, the surface manifestation will also resolve. For illness is both a message and a messenger. It has something to say to us.

To focus exclusively on a symptom and its physical roots is to focus on a fear. It is to place all our efforts on control: control of the symptom, control of the body. The body itself is but an emissary of the emotions and of the spirit. Spirit and its expression in feelings, being unbound, are anathema to control. The very constricting measures designed to accomplish healing, when focused on to the exclusion of all other measures, are also those measures which rein in spirit. These exclusively scientific methods of healing create blockages of energy. Constricted energy is, on a deeper level, the cause of illness in the first place. Many of your systems of healing recognize this.

To heal is to see yourself as already healed. It is to not interfere with an inevitable healing process. It is to place your attention on something else besides the sickness; not as a form of denial, but with the assurance that your condition has already been healed. To give too much heed to sickness is to concede energy to it in the form of attention. For the greater attention you pay to an illness, the more energy you feed it. This enlarges illness rather than cures. At the very least, to conceded attention and energy to illness will simply transform it into another bodily, mental or cultural expression. It will change form, but it will remain.

Throughout history and indeed, even before history began, every culture has had two types of healers: diagnosticians and treaters. Use these specialists, for they are also messengers and the interpreters of the messages which sickness seeks to convey. You may interpret the messages of illness yourself, yet illness may be there for reasons other than you consciously know, which is why the illness took the form it did in the first place. It is best, therefore, to invite in a third party whom you trust to render a second opinion.

Acknowledge that your nature extends beyond the boundaries of your skin. In fact, your nature is limitless because it is connected to the limitless. It is only your focus on the boundary itself—your biological form – which causes illness. For illness is a manifestation of your belief in limits, and especially in your belief that you are limited in extent. To heal, realize that the miracle of healing offered you is also limitless. Therefore, open yourself to that part of the miracle which you believe yourself to be in need of. Realize that the miracle of healing is nothing you can earn, but that it is given as an unexpected, unearned gift. It is yours because you, too, are part of an unbounded nature. All you need do is look out at the universe without fear to see that this true. To do this is simply to look upon the universe with love.

To recognize your limitless nature, you need relinquish your belief in the ultimate reality of your body, and in its ideas of pleasure and pain. The body, as boundary, is the symbol of limit, of finitude. It is the belief in spacetime which holds you back from healing and keeps illness in place. This is not to say you should deny your material existence, but only to acknowledge that your home is not here, and that you are more than the limit signified by your endings in time and space. For you are wayfarers here, and to see all conditions as temporary is to make yourselves aware that illness is also an impermanent state.

To acknowledge that healing has already occurred; that your prayers have already been answered; that only your belief in time and space stands in your way. For if you believe you can only be healed in the future, the time of your illness is prolonged by your belief.

You have been given all things from the foundation of the universe, for you are the universe, and what lies beyond it. The miracle passed with you when you were born into the world, and you carry it still, unchanged, in your hearts from the time of your births. It need only be acknowledged, and by your affirmation of its presence, it is summoned, and it heals that which was never diseased, but which only seemed to be, in time and space.

The satisfaction of any unmet need or desire is found within. Love stands behind all things, beneath all other desires you may entertain. You are loved beyond our comprehension, and it is only when this you forget that you focus on illness and seem to become sick.

Love alone heals. All other healers are its midwives. Healing is the light which emanates from you and from all things. It is the lamp by which you see the road to joy. Remember this, and all is well.

© 2021 by Michael C. Just