Letting Go – Day 27
JG: After that has broken down, how does that change a person’s life or health?
FM: It changes a person’s life entirely; you never look at life the same. I think that it depends on the strength of personality, strength of constitution, how much consciousness or coherence that person has in their body-mind – in order to integrate that. So for some people, the healing process (basically I think of healing as accepting that new authentic sense of self that has emerged through this process) and our ability to accept who we are, who we really, truly are, is going to depend on how much conscious energy that person is going to be able to draw in.
JG: Have you seen people go through a number of catharses before healing, or do they sometimes never get there?
F: Catharsis has a big energy behind it. There’s no such thing as an external definition for one person, so it’s entirely self-relevant, self-experiential process. I see catharsis all the time in my practice, because somebody has a massive shift and for them, that experience of moving into a more accepting, open, authentic place is so enormous that you could never describe it to someone else because it’s purely experiential. Somebody else may have the experience of what we would consider a really traumatic crisis, a big loss of a whole lot of concepts of self, so when someone experiences the loss of the physical self, so they go from being an active, mobile person in their youth to being a quadriplegic, that feels very traumatic, for all of us, culturally, because it really reflects our own fear of restriction of life energy. This would probably be culturally defined as big catharsis, or big loss of concepts of self but it’s relevant, it’s experiential. For that person, they may now feel more in line with their authentic self. … We can’t point out other people’s catharsis, other peoples’ experience of the revealing of authentic selves. That’s something we can only know in ourselves.
