Circle Up for Healing

According to the well-known Western European myth of Camelot, King Arthur gathered his knights at a circular table. He chose that particular table configuration to foster a sense of equality among his knights. He wanted to eliminate the head and foot of the more common rectangular table shape.

This inevitably produced tension between the ideal of social equality, as embodied in the round table, and the reality of the decidedly nonegalitarian political hierarchy that Arthur led as monarch. Unlike the circle, Camelot did not endure.

Today, we love to circle up for healing for the same reason Arthur did: the shape gives all participants equal standing. As Jean Shinoda Bolen writes in her book The Millionth Circle, “…a circle is nonhierarchical—this is what equality is like. This is how a culture behaves when it listens and learns from everyone in it.”

The circle puts into action our belief in the fundamental spiritual equality of all created souls. “When we circle, the lines of resistance disappear and we are in flow,” Meg pointed out. “When we stay in hierarchy, we stay in top-down authoritative lines of inquiry, and deep healing is not facilitated.”

Circle Up with Your Spirit

We agree. Healing is far more complete and powerful if we play an active role in it. So is our connection to spirit, to God. We do not fare well if we outsource it to others. We have made and are now trying to rectify two huge mistakes: First, we divorced healing from spirituality and tried to leave it solely in the domain of science. It’s a classic example of trying to live and function out of only one part of our being—in this case, the mental body. Something huge is missing from the purely scientific model of healing, as many scientists and physicians now acknowledge and are trying to change.

Second, and even more insidious and harmful, we outsourced our connection to God and spirituality to top-down hierarchies. Under these systems emerged a class of anointed or appointed priests, pastors, lamas, gurus, masters, and so on, who presumably possessed greater spiritual connections or “pull” than everyone else. Holding themselves out as closer to God, the Divine, or Nirvana (or
however each particular religion or faith expresses it), these spiritual overseers then insisted on mediating and dictating to the rest of us the conditions of our relationship with God/Source/Allah/Universal Mind (choose any comfortable label; we prefer the word God because it’s concise and to the point).

Beware of Grief Manipulators

There is an old saying along the lines that if we allow others to do something for us, eventually they will do something to us. Never has this proven truer than in spiritual matters. Think back to the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church around the globe. Other faiths are by no means immune from such travesties. For example, polygamist Warren Jeffs of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints will spend the rest of his days in prison for raping a 14-year-old child and facilitating more such rapes of underage girls.

And in 1993, 80-plus members of the Branch Davidians remained with David Koresh to perish in a fire near Waco, Texas. Similarly, more than 900 members of the People’s Temple obeyed the order of their leader, Jim Jones, to kill themselves in Guyana in 1978. Granted, these are extreme examples, but they are the logical outcome of handing over ultimate spiritual authority to anyone or anything other than ourselves, and then hoping to ride to Heaven or Nirvana or wherever on that person’s or institution’s ostensibly purified coattails.

Claim Your Spiritual Power

This is dangerous because it strips us of a great deal of our native spiritual power and transfers that power illegitimately outside of ourselves. Loss of personal power and authority is why parents allowed a church leader sexual access to their young daughters. It’s why boys and girls remained silent when parish priests sexually abused them. It’s why people stayed to die in the flames or drank the Kool-Aid that ended their physical bodies.

They gave their spiritual power and authority to someone outside of themselves and thus became vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
A wise rabbi once told his listeners that the Kingdom of God is within. Jesus was not referring to a physical structure like a church, a mosque, a temple, or an ashram. He was talking about what is within the self, inside the heart and spirit that truly defines who we are as physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual beings. Too many of us, even those who profess to be Christians, act as though we don’t believe him.

We look everywhere except within for a relationship or connection with the divine. In vesting our trust externally, we give over our power to the rabbi or the priest, the pastor or the imam, the lama or the guru, just as we have handed over healing authority to physicians or political authority to elected politicians.

Nurture Your Spirit

Tragically, and inevitably, some among them betray us. They cannot help it. They are human, just as we are, and despite all pretensions to the contrary, they don’t know anything more about the divine or healing or running a country than the rest of us, and they are no better connected or more insightful than we.

No person and no institution has the right or authority to stand between us or define our relationship (or lack thereof) with God/Source/Divine/Universe. No one.

Our relationship with God (or whatever you wish to call it) is one of the most critical relationships we will ever have. It is far too central to our well-being and wholeness to vest it in someone else’s jurisdiction. It is ours alone to nurture and grow, although we are certainly free to seek out help and advice along the way. That’s why God didn’t stop with Adam in fleshing out creation. We are here to help each other, not step on each other’s spiritual toes or order each other’s spiritual business. It just so happens that the afterlife healing circle is a moving and beautiful way to help others in need.

Copyright © 2015 Candace L. Talmadge and Jana L. Simons from The Afterlife Healing Circle published by New Page Books, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser

Read more from Candace and Jana: https://www.opentohope.com/soul-senses-can-help-with-grief/