“Tend to your vital heart and all that you worry about will be solved.”
Rumi
Career and workplace success can naturally conflict with a person’s desire for inner peace. What if you knew that a 10 to 20 minute gentle self-care practice could support you in healing from major health challenges, help you manage stress, move through grief and pain, and deepen your spiritual connection?
Therapeutic Touch® does just that. Stressed-out executives, veterans, childhood trauma survivors, people living with cancer or chronic illness, and dealing with aches, pains, anxiety, depression and daily stress have all been surprised by the powerful shifts they experience when they practice or receive Therapeutic Touch – a simple and straight-forward self-care and healing practice to help you restore your balance and reclaim your power.
I first discovered Therapeutic Touch in 2002 when I resolved to heal myself after having “crashed” with an auto-immune crisis from chronic over-extension in a fast-paced executive environment. I feel truly blessed with having had the good fortune to become a Therapeutic Touch practitioner and teacher – such a simple and elegant energy field healing modality, often referred to as mindfulness practice or meditation in action.
“All healing is self healing”
D. Krieger, RN. Phd
Once you realize and accept that all healing is self-healing, self-care principles and practices become a fundamental priority – “You can’t give from an empty cup!”
By helping others we can learn, sometimes slowly, how best to help ourselves. The Therapeutic Touch practitioner often discovers that they feel better after having offered a healing session to help a client, friend or family member alleviate stress, pain, anxiety or grief (suffering of any kind) and enjoy more relaxation and inner peace.
The Healing Journey – 9 Steps towards Wholeness
The principles reflected in the following 9 stages can be applied to help heal our relationship with our bodies, with ourselves, with others, our careers, finances, our workplaces, and the natural world.
Tools learned to address one aspect may serve a different function in addressing another. The important point is to start. The path, when fully committed, will guide you step by step. Coaching support can help. All that’s needed is a willing openness, self-honesty, trust in the process and accountability for action commitments you make to yourself.
- Learning to manage relationship to pain – Over time and with training, the healee learns to direct their consciousness to turn the pain on or off much like in using a dimmer switch.
- Accepting your power to heal – The beliefs we hold shape and limit what we imagine possible. Accepting our power to heal means changing our beliefs and giving ourselves permission to accept the possibility that we can heal ourselves and commit to participating in the healing process. This step enhances awareness of the healee’s own authentic needs and provides insight into personal motives, drives and patterns of behaviour.
- Releasing old, unhelpful stories – The story we tell ourselves about ourselves and our situation is what shapes our self-identity and keeps us stuck. Recognizing that we have the power to change the story we can begin to accept responsibility for ourselves and choose to let go of the stories and beliefs we no longer want. By letting go of old unhelpful stories we de-clutter our minds and create a safe, empty inner space for new possibilities to emerge.
- Creating healing intention –This shift towards Self-responsibility is a shift towards Self-empowerment that provides us with a new source of energy and inspiration to support the healing process – the greater the belief in the possibility for healing, the greater the life force energy available to us! The enhanced energy helps us create healing intention and clarify authentic goals to accelerate the healing process. Self-observation, introspection and Self knowledge facilitates this process.
- Opening to new possibilities – Allowing for new possibilities of healing and wellness is the beginning of a process of transformation and regeneration. When we are open to change – open to the possibilities – we give ourselves and the universe permission to interact in a new more playful and more intentional way. What we can imagine possible and our expectations of the future influence our experience while we realize that the outcome is beyond our control, we accept ourselves more fully.
- Rewriting/changing our story – To write a new script for ourselves, we must first know who we are. Self-observation, introspection and reflection without judgment give us the insight and realization we need to sort fact from fiction that is built on fear, shame and vulnerabilities. We begin to discern and distinguish other people’s influences and values we’ve adopted without thinking from our own, reclaim our energy, rebalance our lives and acknowledge and embrace our values and unique strengths. This realization helps us transform our understanding of ourselves from one of victim to self-empowered co-creator on a journey to a new way of being. In the process, we embrace who we are now and get clear on who we want to become. The old unhelpful stories we have been living by simply fall away.
- Making Better Choices – Getting clear and deeply connected with our authentic “Inner Self”, we develop a new sense or awareness of community, and become increasingly aware of what is working for us and why. The new-found sense of self-knowledge creates an enhanced sense of inner peace, hope, faith and confidence and helps us make better, self-empowered choices.
- Envisioning a healthy and inspired Life – Feelings of empowerment enable us to create a compelling vision worth aspiring to. To ground the vision in our values is to embody it. Embodying the vision is the first step to manifesting it as a reality. We are what we feel. We embody this vision by allowing ourselves to feel what we want to experience – the promise that the vision offers, as if already realized.
- Wholeness and balance is a destination – A quality of experience and elusive state in a dynamic and ever-changing environment available to us in every moment, that may be achieved through intentional conscious living.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
Rumi
It will not lead you astray.”
The 9 steps towards wholeness is a life-changing healing journey coaching facilitates.
About Julia von Flotow
