Healing with Bliss

by Susan Ni Rahilly

The powerful, transformational healing of Yoga, is the healing of the Bliss or the unconditional love and creative, positive energy of the Universe. There is nothing more healing in our existence as human beings.

With Yoga we heal by restoring balance to the bodymind and life.. . … today we understand so much about diseases: even dread diseases are epigenetic – an individual’s response to the world, and caused by three things: nutrition or malnutrition, elimination (or lack of) and toxicity, and of course, stress. And we understand that the way to healing and often complete cure, is with simple and effective lifestyle changes: with Yoga this is healing with Bliss, the positive energy of the Divine higher Consciousness which restores balance and health to the physical body, the vital body of the breath, the mind, thoughts and emotions and of course our energetic body.

Bliss, our personal bit of “heaven” that we’re born with, is the quality of energy of Divine Consciousness, your Source: pure and unconditional love, compassion, truth, creativity and intelligence. This blissful energetic quality is what I personally think we crave collectively as humanity and so it points the way to how we heal what I call “humanity’s heartbreak”.

As Yoga teachers we’re here to heal, by loving unconditionally, practising acceptance and helping others to get some reprieve and release from the stresses and strains of life today, and making that as simple as possible by guiding people to getting the space and time necessary to connect regularly with our own little bit of heaven that is always with us, our Bliss.

We do this in Meditation practice. We transcend our physical flesh body, our mundane minds, daily life and connect with our Source in Meditation. What is common, as far as I can tell as a teacher, is that the benefits of regular practice are profound. And the healing is sometimes simply astonishing! Healing which can be mental, emotional, physical, spiritual as the bodymind of a human being responds to regular practice: recreating ourselves energetically.

Meditation can be a maturing and transformational process as the meditator ceases to see her/himself as separate from everything and begins to experience harmony, balance and inner peace: qualities of our own Bliss.

I’m always conscious of men and their needs for spiritual, social and psychological health. They’re kind of “lost”, many of them seeking a new role in these shifting times in our human evolution. Finding access points to living consciously doesn’t alway come naturally to a man: although Meditation suits many men, deep self-nurturing can be an uncomfortable prospect!

The home Ayurvedic “Bliss Bath” however, has a deep tradition of masculine spiritual ritual in the tradition of regular mindbody care, bringing the sacred into a grounding self-care routine: making the Mindbody a more comfortable place for the Spirit to dwell, recognising and appreciating deeply sacred masculinity.

Skin, it’s cleanliness and care, were ritualised for an essential reason. Skin grounds you in your Mindbody. Skin is your connection with your Soul and the Divine. It is an integrally important part of your Yogic routine – uniting Mindbody Soul, your Divine Nature and Consciousness.

The “Bliss Bath” is a weekly Spiritual ritual. Inspired by the centuries old rituals in India which care very gently and regularly for the Mindbody . . . and which also prepare our bodyminds for Meditation and our Union with the Divine in practice. Deep self-care for the Self brings the Sacred into making the Mindbody a more comfortable place for the Spirit to dwell. This is a ritualised grounding, practised thro skin-body care, the Ayurvedic oil self-massage, practised prior to a weekly Meditation to prepare us for our Union with Consciousness and absorbing Bliss Essence: the ritual “bath”.

Perhaps the best way to write about this ritualisation of self-care is to give you inspiration with this precis from Indian Philosopher Krishnamurti’s biography: “ . . . as Brahmins . . . Ritual bathing preceded by an oil bath was a discipline closely followed.” The young K’s mother had a puja room for the gods in the house (where K was actually born, very rare in India), the rituals for devotional practice were observed . . . at a time in India when the South Indian man, woman and child, rich or poor, sat and slept on a mat on the floor, and when the joint family provided warmth and a sense of family rare in the West . . . **

Whether women or men, many of us are currently in need of regenerating ourselves through practice, by coming to terms with our lives and accepting what we all need to do next in our current chapter of world history: we heal and grow when we realise that we are evolving the Universe.