From (Energy) Healing to Enlightenment
How (energy) healing supports moving beyond the ego, towards true freedom.
Disclaimer: This is an intensely spiritual blog. You don’t need to have a spiritual orientation to profit from energy healing. Energy healing helps to dissolve patterns and blocks, and only if you are interested in doing so, it can put you on a spiritual path.
Healing can be about much more than resolving personal problems. It can become a path of consciously living out your karma, your tendencies and your desires, leading you towards spiritual awakening and, with grace and dedication, to enlightenment. Here’s how:
Energy healing and meditation are both energy transmutation practices
Energy healing and meditation are both practices of energetic transformation. Whereas shamanic energy healing seeks to free the person from struggles and blocks through clearing out the imprints in their energy field, meditation seeks to do the same, but without the help of a healer, through concentrated sensing and observing of these imprints (contracted energies) till they dissolve.
The latter process of course takes much longer, if successful at all, and is severely hampered because the very patterns that one seeks to dissolve, are the patterns that make a person want to avoid meditating or going within with consistency and powerful concentration (e.g., addictions, avoidance, lack of wisdom leading to boredom with esoteric stuff, disorders, chaotic lifestyle).
In Vipassana meditation (a core, ancient Buddhist meditation practice), this process of what in shamanic energy healing is called ‘clearing imprints’ involves observing bodily sensations with equanimity until the underlying samskaras, the energetic impressions that condition responses and tendencies (in shamanic words, the imprints), begin to dissolve. Upon concentrated and sustained observation sensations that feel dense, heavy, or ‘solid’ start changing into subtle, changing movements of energy. At some point they dissolve and can go from dense (e.g. feeling heavy or feeling like ‘you are big wall’) to light (e.g., feeling pins and needles or a lot of tiny points, like flickering stars). The dissolution of the dense samskara/ imprint through meditative observation then leads to the dissolution of the (mental, emotional, behavioural) pattern in real life.
In this way, energy healing introduces us to the process of energy alchemy, albeit in a more indirect way (since we delegate the process to the healer): experiencing how our dense energies are transmuted into lighter ones, and how that leads to personal change and higher states of consciousness.
2. ‘Cleaning out your house’ in order to dedicate yourself to enlightenment
Meditation, purity, and discipline are wonderful practices, but too much noise from our patterns, tendencies, and desires (still wanting to live out earthly experiences) can get in the way of an effective and authentic pursuit of enlightenment. I believe we are here to contribute in a healthy way through our dharma (personal path) as well as get a bit ‘dirty’ by responsibly living out our tendencies (karma). By consciously exploring our urges ànd fulfilling our earthly responsibilities we reach a point that we can move our attention beyond them towards the next thing until we’re ‘done done’ and want to focus on realizing the true Self.
If you still have a talented artist, committed athlete, hopeless romantic, playboy/girl, party boy/girl, addict, status-driven professional, thrill-seeker, people-pleaser, social butterfly, freedom-loving adventurer, wealthy entrepreneur, perfectionist, world-traveler, devoted parent within you, you cannot meditate that away. It needs to be lived out. The difference between getting carried away by these desires, ambitions and tendencies and exploring them spiritually is that, in the latter case, you carry an inner knowing that you are engaging in these experiences until they are out of your system, and that they are not who you really are.
Interestingly, when you start engaging consciously in ‘sinful’ pursuits (easy pleasure), ‘adventures’ (novelty and exploration), or ‘earthly’ pursuits (material possessions, status, and physical experiences), they may no longer feel as pleasurable as they once did. You sense that something is ‘off’, yet you still feel drawn to these experiences because the tendencies and desires are still there: goal-setting, games, ego boosts, winning, getting high, manipulations, indulgence, travels, events, communal living that prevents true introspection, self-obsession, fantasies etc. etc.
When you combine this process with energy healing that works on the imprints behind these desires, something interesting happens. You may continue to pursue the same experiences, but increasingly recognize that they are not actually that fun or fulfilling.
That is good news for bad habits, but it also works that way (if you choose to clear those imprints too) on worldly pursuits. Slowly slowly feeding the ego will stop making you feel positively, and wins (even big ones, even genuinely admirable ones) eventually stop satisfying you in the way you expected them to. Energy healing can accelerate this process, almost like a turbo-purge: tendencies and desires may temporarily intensify as they come to the surface, allowing you to fully live through them, while increasing your capacity to really feel that it’s empty and even painful, so you can eventually release them. You can then move on to the next tendency, explore it consciously, and continue the process until the ego's wants no longer pull you outward.
But this process is not only about desires and pleasure; it is also about responsibility. If there are earthly responsibilities you are avoiding, or lessons you still need to learn, these too can stand between you and the dedication to turn inward. Energy healing can address the imprints and blocks that keep you stuck, helping you move more quickly towards taking responsibility, fulfilling your obligations, and completing the earthly learning that is yours to do.
When your responsibilities are sufficiently in place and your longings have been lived out, you become more available for the endgame: dismantling the fake self and living fully in the now. On the one hand you are not distracted by unhandled responsibilities, and on the other hand, you are not forcing yourself to be pure, disciplined, or desireless, because you have explored what you needed to explore, learned what you needed to learn, and are finally ready to turn your attention towards what lies beyond it all.
My personal experience with this
I realized that we’re meant to live out our karma instead of suppress it with discipline, through my healing sessions with my shaman. Whenever I wanted to get rid of a pattern, it would dramatically amplify after the sessions, as if the karma behind it was ‘running out’, but in a quicker and more intense way than if i’d let it ‘run out’ on my own, allowing me to free myself of it (which might have taken much longer or never happened at all if not approached this way).
In the past, whenever I was unhappy with a pattern, I would try to suppress it through discipline, only to find that it always came back. This taught me that, on the one hand, I need to consciously intend to free myself from something and engage in healing practices to address it, while, on the other hand, allowing it to run its course and leave my system naturally. I began to see these intense, ‘running out’ experiences, although impractical, not as setbacks, but as a necessary price to pay to get to freedom quicker.
I believe we can take a certain chapter of life (whether issues, patterns, ambitions, relationships, desires) and remove the blocks that prevent us from living that particular chapter out fully, while simultaneously releasing the patterns that might keep us stuck there or cause harm to others. Then we go and live it out fully, consciously, and with the endgame in mind: to outgrow it.
This is how I choose to live my life: healing and transforming one chapter at a time, living it out fully, and moving on to the next until nothing remains that pulls me outward. I want to experience life fully while keeping enlightenment as my North Star, until the desire to discover what lies beyond all earthly experience becomes stronger than the desire to experience anything else. That makes my orientation in this life, spiritual.
3. Energy Healing as a consciousness expanding mechanism and tool to release the final attachment: the ego
Energy healing, if intentionally pursued this way, can become a process of dismantling ourselves, layer by layer, peeling away the imprints of the patterns, thoughts, emotions and behaviours that shape our experience of who we are. As we release these layers, we begin to understand experientially that we are not our thoughts, emotions, tendencies, or even our body. Since we’ve succeeded and have experiential proof that they are all mutable, we learn to disidentify from what we once took to be ourselves.
Eventually, this understanding leads us to question our most fundamental belief: that we are our personality and our body. What if this belief, too, is simply an imprint, an ‘energetic contraction’, we can observe with detachment? And what if, just like our other patterns and thoughts, can be dissolved?
Through energy healing and meditation, we can begin to loosen even this deepest layer of identification. The personality and body remain, but we no longer mistake it for our fundamental nature.
In this sense, healing becomes more than a way to transform ourselves; it becomes a way to get in the habit of seeing through illusions of who we believe ourselves to be. Layer by layer, we release the ideas about ourselves until we can experience what remains beyond our thoughts, emotions, body, and personality, not as an intellectual concept, but as direct experience.
If you feel you’d like support with clearing your imprints, you can reach out to me. I work as a shamanic energy healer and help people overcome deep patterns in a direct, experiential way.
