In our healing classes this month, the students and I are exploring the concept of bridging. Bridging, or reconnecting, is a common tool we all use as healers, even if we have different names for it.
Bridging is about restoring wholeness by healing divisions or disconnections between one part of the wholeness and another.
As healers, we meditate, bringing opposed energies together in a harmonious way. We bridge gaps, completing energetic circuits and restoring flow. We identify conflicting values/perspectives held by our clients, and we help these aspects of self work together cooperatively rather than fighting against one another. An ‘aspect of self’ might be an intangible value/perspective, but because everything is connected, it also has an embodied or physical expression. To bridge a logic/intuition or mind/heart split, for example, a healer might place one hand on the client’s heart and the other on their head, or one hand on their solar plexus chakra and the other on their heart chakra.
By placing our hands of the parts of a person that are disconnected from one another, we bring them together. Energy flows between our hands, though the field, with our own body functioning as a conduit and earth, completing a circuit of flow. When parts of a client have become opposed to one another, flow is impeded through their aura: one area stops communicating with another and a chasm or wall separates the two in space.
It is healthy to have some degree of separation within our wholeness. We certainly don’t have to be one homogenous lump, with each spark indistinguishable from the next. Wholeness arises when the different parts that compose us recognise and express their individuality in a complimentary manner. We can have diversity without losing unity; our differences can bring us together in ways that help all parties grow rather than being cause for war and antipathy.
What, after all, is the heart without the mind, or the mind without the heart, but a limping, half-formed, lopsided incompletion? Wholeness arises from harmonised opposites off-setting and balancing one another.
In psychic healing work, we can use story-telling, imagery and language to repair divisions within our clients. Story-telling often begins with the client telling a story that expresses the division or lack of wholeness they are experiencing. A story like: “My husband and I don’t understand each other, so we don’t talk any more (even though we are still married and living together)” will usually reflect corresponding internal shut-downs within the client’s psyche. You can almost guarantee that this external state of affairs between wife and husband is either causing, or is a symptom of, severed communication lines within the client’s own aura.
Restoring the client’s ability to listen to and understand themselves will ultimately help to resolve the external deadlock between themselves and another person. The therapeutic story-telling in a situation like the one described about between husband and wife explores various responses to the deadlock by internalising it (interpersonal psychology) and/or handing it over to Spirit and inviting mythical/transpersonal responses.
When using the interpersonal approach, the wife is asked to think about the character or role her husband is playing in her life and then search for that character within herself and start making friends with it. Becoming friends with the aspect of self being reflected back to you by someone you are in conflict with won’t necessarily repair the relationship itself, but it will help you grow, move on and get unstuck. When we resolve internal conflict, the negative emotional charge we are investing in our external relationships dissolves, freeing us up to take the relationship in a healthier direction or end it all together.
When using the transpersonal approach to story-telling as a bridging device, we might convey a reconciliation story from a spirit guide, a past life or an alternative reality, opening the client’s psyche up to new possibilities. Some of the bridging imagery in these stories might include bridges, rainbows, pathways, doorways, people embracing/merging or kissing, hands coming together in friendship, people smiling at each other, teamwork e.g. building things or problem-solving together, blockages and impediments being removed, mirrors reflecting similarities, walls crumbling, truces being declared, gift and/or compliment exchange, etc.
Bridging can also be facilitated using language. Saying “I have the courage to be vulnerable” (and looking for evidence of this in your life), can help you link two concepts or moods that you have tended to keep very much separate. Before bridging these concepts together we say “I can be vulnerable OR courageous/strong, but not both at the same time because they don’t go together”. After bridging them together we start to believe we can embody both states at the same time in a balanced and harmonious way.
If psychic surgery on the structural aura is a healer’s forte, they might restore wholeness by stitching wounds back together, restoring/restringing broken energy lines, rewiring broken wires, reweaving sections of the aura, darning patches into holes, and so on.
Blessings and love
Om