By Jason Jinen Shulman
Surprisingly, to talk about Integrated Kabbalistic Healing, I’d like to quote from a Buddhist Sutra called the Flower Ornament Scripture:
When enlightening beings expound the Teaching to sentient beings in this way, they practice it themselves. They undertake all practices without laziness, never regressing in what they do, with indomitable courage and energy, not grasping or rejecting all virtues, but able to fulfill all aspects of knowledge-thus they can purify the transcendent practice of vigor.
It’s a lot to ask: We don’t want to mythologize our lives and pretend to be more perfect, more committed, more awakened or God-surrendered than we are. And yet, we can go through these few lines and find in them a kind of structure and description of what it means to be an Integrated Kabbalistic Healing healer. We can read in this sutra a set of instructions on how to grow into our own fabric, into the already-present design of own souls; to begin to participate in the reason we were made; to live the life we were meant to live; to find true joy. We can read within these lines the nondual basis of Integrated Kabbalistic Healing, where the actual practice of this work heals both the person being healed and the healer him or herself.
Integrated Kabbalistic Healing, which I developed from my lifetime of inquiry into the nature of reality, the nature of suffering and my questions about what it means to be a healed human being, is built on the premise that the greatest healing we can do-whether it is of the body, emotions, or spirit-is the healing of our limited view of what it means to be human. Integrated Kabbalistic Healing-we’ll call it “IKH”-is built on the truth that all of our problems have a single origin and that addressing that origin in subtle and sophisticated ways, is what allows the body, mind, and spirit to heal to the extent it is able to do that.
As a child, I was interested in life and death. My earliest memories of thinking involve trying to figure out the notion of infinity. Whether it was the vast distances between galaxies, or the unknowable universe of death, my imagination was captured by trying to find out why we’re here and where we were going.
Add to that the sufferings caused by an imperfect world and an imperfect upbringing, by the time I was seventeen, I was deeply involved in yoga, Zen meditation, and the philosophy of both theistic religions such as my birth religion-Judaism-and my found religions, principally Buddhism. My sense was always that the views of reality that both of these paths offered had to be, must be, one and the same thing.
Though I continued my spiritual and psychological studies from an early age right into my twenties and thirties, I had no interest in either being a healer or creating a new healing paradigm. This disinterest however, was not to be. The universe had other ideas, and presented them in the form of an illness that left me undefended and weakened for seven years. It was during that time that I began to study healing, applying all of my philosophical learning to the task.
At first, I learned other people’s form of healing and while I was successful with them, and was grateful for the teachings, my own spiritual path and my increasing understanding of how I could use my own personal suffering to heal, continued to draw my attention.
Having studied Judaism as a child, in my teens and twenties I concentrated on Eastern paths. I learned yoga and became a yoga teacher. I studied Zen and had an intense, committed sitting practice for many years. I studied advaita and found teachers like Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna. I studied western psychological approaches to healing and entered a life-long relationship with therapy.
All of these approaches helped me become more whole, and perhaps because of that, though I still suffered the slings and arrows of being alive, I began to go back to investigate the mystical aspects of my birth religion.
I had always known about Kabbalah but it never captured me. I found it erudite, somewhat abstract and intellectual. I was interested in decreasing my own suffering and through my healership, the suffering of other people, and I could not fathom how Kabbalah could help that happen.
Then, one day in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a voice spoke to me. It didn’t exactly speak, and it wasn’t exactly heard. It was a revelation given to me, if you will, about how to view kabbalistic writing in a way that opened them all up to me so that they laid out clearly and sang with a clear and penetrating voice.
It was not as if the path of healing I went on to invent and discover was laid out for me: Instead, an approach to learning was laid out, as well as the end result. In other words, I saw the end clearly, as clearly as I see the screen of the computer I am typing these words on. I then had to walk the path toward that end, which took many years. In fact, I’m still walking. What emerged was a fully integrated path of healing based upon ancient sources, and own explorations.
People often ask me, what is the difference between other forms of healing and IKH? Really, it comes down to a few important principals. In energy healing, the healer channels some sort of energy or works with the subtle energy system of the client. This involves things like auric layers, chakra systems and the like.
IKH does not deal with the energy system directly. Instead, in IKH, the healer is holding different states of consciousness which invite different relationships with reality itself, whether we call this reality “God,” or “awakening,” or whatever. These states of consciousness cannot be “learned” exactly. The student goes through a rigorous process of self-discovery in order to be able to cleave to these states. In going through this training, the student is transformed and the transformative process itself is the learning.
For example, in the first year of training in IKH, the student learns about their historical wounding in a new and fresh way. Through this, they are able to become less reactive to the world and begin to see how to be present with these states of unity. In the second year, the student continues to learn about themselves but adds the first kabbalistic healings and begins to learn about the diagnostic process, an exquisite process of intimacy that allows the healer to both know which of the many kabbalistic healings are the ones that are appropriate while increasing the amount of relationship and freedom between healer and client. In this way, through years three and four…and beyond, since this is a path of healing that lasts a lifetime, the work goes on. At no time does IKH become formulaic. Through the integrity of the healer and the efficacy of the diagnostic process, the healing event is created anew each time the healer and healee sit down together.
In A Society of Souls, people remain Jews, Christians and Moslems and Buddhists. They remain doctors, nurses, massage therapists, psychotherapists, teachers and attorneys. IKH, even as a life path, is no impediment to, but rather enhances, more traditional paths and roles.
However, the technical details of IKH are less important than their reason for being. More important is the understanding that what I was about to present to the world could not be done by people who were not willing to make changes in their lives. There are many ways to re-write that sentence. We could say that IKH healings could only be done by people who allowed themselves to be transformed by the very healing journey they themselves were on. That IKH could not be done as a technique alone. That the healer had to truly learn what the Now was: that place that did not reject anything, past, present or future.
One of the things I understood in that flash in the mountains, was that the basis for kabbalah was the exploration of the essential characteristic of this universe: relationship. Kabbalah was not an abstruse, abstract teaching. Quite the contrary! The received aspect of the kabbalistic teachings from time immemorial were about how the universe is put together. Why everything from salt to water exists because things are in relationship with each other. Kabbalah was also about the ultimate relationship: the one between a man or woman and God. In fact, becoming a little more Buddhist for a moment, between all sentient beings and Reality.
So for the student of IKH, the study of IKH is the study of the self. The interesting and amazing thing is that as we study the self, the self changes! That is, when done correctly, and in a masterful setting, the inquiry into reality or God, or awakening or enlightenment-it doesn’t matter which word you use-changes “the who” who is inquiring.
Students who go through the school start with their own selves as the laboratory they will deeply explore. By this deep study, they not only succeed in healing some of their own historical pain, but in doing that, reduce the amount of psychological projection and transference they visit upon the world, thus allowing themselves to see reality clearly.
This is an amazing and awe-inspiring thing. Imagine having a healing path that heals the healer so that the healer can see the world more in the way it was truly made. This means along with seeing personal suffering and suffering of others more clearly, God, the Real, whatever you’d like to call it, becomes a constant Presence, a companion, if you like, along the path of wholeness.
Through IKH, we get to see and participate in the Real, not because we have found a secret location, but because we have become real.
Because of the hard work, the enlivening work, the student puts in, they come to realize that IKH is a nondual approach. The healer always gets healed along with the client. Without merging in a neurotic way, the true connection between ourselves and the world becomes apparent. The single origin of all things becomes a living experience.
In a sense, we could say that IKH-which does not deal with energy systems, charkas, auras or the like-is a healing of fractured consciousness, which is responsible for fracturing on other levels of being. So in IKH, we are seated in a place that is the factory in which energy and the like are made. We are at the deepest level of creativity, the same creativity that the Divine Spirit used to make the world.
If our school could be said to have a motto or saying, it would be that helpers and guides to other people must practice themselves; must be involved on a daily basis in healing themselves. To that end, we offer several modalities that are available to students in A Society of Souls: IKH, the Work of Return, a self-healing modality based on the kindness of the Great Mother; Impersonal Movement, our most advanced work, which gives the practitioner a physical understanding of the unitive state and most recently the MAGI Process, a way of working with personal and global conflict and change. This last work is available to all for free and can be found on the internet at www.magiprocess.com
If you truly want to help others, you need to walk the walk and not only talk the talk. This simple equation is often touted but not often realized.
Not all therapists work on their own mental health or work to have deep insight into their own psyches. Not all doctors practice what they preach regarding maintaining good health. Not all politicians have their constituents’ best interests first and foremost. The list goes on.
In A Society of Souls however, this dictum has always been first and foremost: unless we change we cannot teach others to change. Unless we develop a kind heart toward ourselves, we cannot guide others to the same state. Only to the extent we are involved in healing our own body, mind and soul can we help others do the same.
My interest has always been very practical: I’ve wanted people to awaken to their true nature-to find God, if you will-and then, instead of turning that understanding back into the next Zen center or ashram, have a job! A job that uses our enlightenment and spreads it to others! A job, the practice of which, deepens our own connection to sanity, to health, to surrender to God. A job that allows us to be great and humble, the best of what it means to be a human.
Now, as IKH is beginning to spread around the world, I have high hopes. Daily, I speak to people whose lives have been changed by the study and practice of IKH. I don’t know what the tipping point is or whether there will be a tipping point where there is more sanity in the world than insanity; where there is more healing than disease. I only know that step by step, enlightening beings proceed with vigor, stepping on each stone that takes them across the river.
Since my job now is to transmit this work to newly trained healers, graduates and future teachers, I thought it would be appropriate to end with a few words from one of them. The proof of any work is always found in the second generation, those who take the founder’s work and make it their own… T
HE INNER JOURNEY OF INTEGRATED KABBALISTIC HEALING
A student’s story - Sharadha Bain
It is now ten years since I had my first IKH healing. I remember that first session very clearly – the anxiety and uncertainty about what would occur, the hope and desperate longing for relief from my suffering, accompanied by disbelief that the respite I sought was possible. Until that point, a dark cloud of melancholy hung over each day and a deep-rooted feeling of inadequacy left me with a sense of being fatally flawed. In the self-absorption of my misery, it seemed as though the rest of humanity enjoyed a sunny clime of joy and pleasure, while I was forever marooned in a little island where my sadness rained down everyday. It is poignant to reconnect with the suffering of that younger woman.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped thinking so badly about myself, but I distinctly recall standing in my living room one afternoon several months later and noticing, to my astonishment, that life felt pretty good. I had a circle of close friends, I had reconnected with my estranged father, I was involved in several exciting projects and now saw myself as a leader with a gift for sensing new creative possibilities. I had been gently lifted and placed in a whole other landscape, but the tectonic shift had occurred organically, without jarring my consciousness.
My transformation gathered apace when I began my own training as an IKH healer. At this point, I had already completed several years of training in a wide variety of healing modalities – from Reiki to Jin Shin Jyutsu. I had also completed an advanced training in energy healing. It was hard to imagine that there could be healing work more powerful than this. But I longed and thirsted for more - for a deeper connection to my own heart and the universal Heart. The work at A Society of Souls was indeed the answer I’d been looking for all my life.
I was living in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates when I began my training in Integrated Kabbalistic Healing. Two years into the training, our family, including our three dogs, moved to France; eight months later, we relocated once more to Scotland. The outer journey, in all its logistical complexity, was eclipsed by the intricacy and richness, magic and mystery of the inner journey. The long flights seemed a small price to pay in this most important of pilgrimages to the source of my own being.
I had entered the programme feeling anxious about my minimal knowledge of kabbalah – it turned out to never be an issue. The IKH paradigm, mystical, luminous and spacious, embraces all of the world’s sacred traditions. Raised in an orthodox Hindu family, I yet felt completely at home engaging with Jason’s teachings.
During the four year programme, a rich palette of over 16 healings are taught. Three of these are taught during the fourth post-graduate year of study. All of the healings were created by Jason, based on his understanding of the holographic map of consciousness described and hinted at in the ancient kabbalistic texts. This map, at once cosmological and personal, allows the creation of a form of healing that is prior to energy. The IKH healings bear no resemblance to any other modality I have ever encountered in over two decades on the workshop circuit.
The student’s training comprises not only the healings themselves, but a subtle and profound diagnostic process which the client experiences as an intimate and profoundly kind dialogue exploring the nature and origin of his/her suffering. As the healer listens with a non-conceptual open-heartedness, there is a felt sense of dropping through layers of reality to land at the root cause. All through this process, the healer is connected to and aware of the kabbalistic Tree of Life and its connection to the client’s return to wholeness and health.
The healing offers the client an experience of the rectified relationship between aspects of the Tree that were split off during childhood or subsequently in adult life. Whether the client comes seeking relief from physical illness, or emotional and mental pain, or simply a longing to grow spiritually, there is immense transformation because we are working at such a foundational level of Reality.
IKH is as much art as technique and most practitioners experience the healings as highly creative. There is a profound warmth and kindness inherent in this path that holds both client and healer. In the unified view that Jason teaches, the healer is not separate from the one who is suffering, the one who seeks wholeness is already whole, and apparent opposites such as anguish and joy are held closely together in order to re-establish the core of a healthy life.
In the first year of training the student prepares their mind, body and spirit in order to enter into relationship with these healings. This process of self-transformation, which is not separate in any way from helping others, allows the student to concentrate on the actual healings themselves in years two and three.
The fourth year of training introduces the student to Impersonal Movement, a moving meditation that offers a living experience of the awakened or non-dual state. This is a pre-requisite to learning the three most advanced healings of the school. These are used with respect and awe, for they can be immediately life-changing, holding the possibility of shifting reality for the client.
As I sit with clients in session, I experience great creative freedom and pleasure in the journey we undertake together. The fragrance of freshness wafts through each interaction by the very nature of the diagnostic process itself, which cuts through the conceptual mind to arrive at the intelligence of the heart. And best of all, each day of work reinforces the reality of Oneness, with the healings working equally on my clients and myself.
My five years of training with ASOS have given me many powerful spiritual practices that are an integral part of my daily life; yet, the cornerstone of every teaching has been how to have an ongoing relationship with God moment by moment, right in the midst of my own blessedly ordinary and amazing life. - End -
For more information about Jason Shulman and Integrated Kabbalistic Healing, please contact
A Society of Souls:
Tel: 908-236-0543, or visit www.societyofsouls.com
|
