Heal To Become Whole

To pursue meditative bliss without healing the wounds of the heart is going nowhere in a hurry, muses.

- Bhaavin Shah

As a friend of mine puts it, the spiritual world involves two perpendicular trajectories: transformation and transcendence. The former is horizontal, the latter is vertical. All healing modalities belong to the former. All meditation movements belong to the latter.

To put it simply, transformation is about resolving yourself; transcendence is about going beyond yourself. It is possible to be transformed without having transcended yet, and also vice versa. Both these states are valid as long as one doesn’t pitch one’s tent there. The art lies in reconciling the two journeys, though they may sometimes seem antihetical. Says John Welwood, a Buddhist practitioner and psychotherapist: ‘We are not just humans learning to become Buddhas but also Buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human’. So, the journey involves two often paradoxical dimensions - waking up as well as growing up.

Transcendence without transformation

What happens when you transcend but do not transform, when you wake up but do not grow up? We have heard of many realised masters who were later found to have feet of clay. We also often meet many spiritual practitioners who are peaceful in their heads, but callous in their hearts. Ever wondered why the dissonance? Here is the reason.

The all-important trinity that most spiritual practitioners talk about is that of body, mind and spirit. We leave the ‘heart’ out from the scheme of things and that’s a major mistake. All types of yoga – be it raja yoga, ashtanga yoga or hatha yoga - also seem to be guilty of that. Some spiritual traditions have also hap- pily left the body and the mind out.

East Vs West