Please note that following the Healing Journal is the Prayer Journal. If your interest is purely in a devotion to channeling grace for healing, feel free to go directly to the Prayer Journal. May I encourage you, however, to review the Healing Journal for your personal use, even if you are not confronting a serious, chronic, or acute disease, because we are all in need of healing on some level. Also, some changes, edits, and additions will be introduced into both the Healing and the Prayer Journals on a regular basis.
Thank you and I hope you find these to be supportive for your journey, whatever that may be,
Caroline
THE HEALING JOURNAL - Month of: Are you in need of personal healing? Yes/No If yes, please identify your health challenge: Are you praying for the healing of another individual? If yes, please use this form to evaluate his/her healing progress as best as you can. 1.EVALUATING YOUR HEALTH: Once you begin to pray for healing, the healing process begins. Teresa of Avila taught – and with great wisdom – that you must look for God in the small details of your life rather than in the grand and dramatic events. That is a wise jewel to keep near your mind and heart on your healing journey, whether this journey is personal or one in which you are praying for the healing of others and our global village. And of course, you can pray for both yourself and others. The list of questions was created with that wisdom in mind – to direct you to appreciate healing at the micro-details of your life. Learning to include all areas of your life in your healing teaches you to recognize that the grace of healing penetrates into every fragment and follicle of your life, saturating your thoughts, your actions, how you see the world, how you cope with your problems, how you engage in your relationships to the diminishing of pain in your physical body. Grace heals what needs to be healed. The power of a much greater wisdom directs this grace in terms of priorities, thus the wisdom: your pray for the grace of healing and then release it unconditionally to do its work. (Please note that if healing work is not meant to be a substitution for allopathic medication). With that perspective in mind, please reflect on the following questions that apply to your healing process:
Did you notice any changes in the following areas of your health:
- Any improvement in pain or physical stiffness?
- Any improvement in headaches?
- Any reduction in inflammation anywhere in the body?
- Any reduction in arthritic swelling and stiffness?
- Any improvement in breathing?
- Any improvement in overall physical movements?
- Any lessening of dizziness?
- Any change in panic attacks?
- Any improvement with asthma or allergies?
- Any improvement in your immune system?
- Add your individual notes:
- Any improvement in the healing of a specific disease: please describe
Please describe an increase of any symptoms or areas of discomfort:
PHYSICAL HEALTH HABITS: Everyone knows that your physical lifestyle habits play a core role in your health. While prayer and grace are profound cosmic forces of transformation, you must help your own healing process as much as you can. You are responsible for all that you can personally do for yourself: you build your boat and heaven calms the seas. With that in mind, please review the following questions:
- Have you exercised regularly this month? How much? If not, why not?
- Are you overweight? If so, have you been following a rigorous nutrition program this month? If not, what do you tell yourself as your reasons to avoid eating for your health?
- Are you an addict to a substance? Which one? What is the status of your addiction this month? Are you still working on “intending to release my addiction” this month? What reason do you give yourself for not quitting? (Feel free to tell the truth – ie, ‘I don’t want to quit.’)
- Name other physical habits that are interfering with your healing (and continue to interfere each month):
INTERIOR HEALING: Healing takes many forms. While we tend to focus on identifying improvements in the actual illness or chronic condition in the physical body, as you well know, pain and suffering exists at the emotional, psychological, psychic, mental, and spiritual expressions of your life. Each of these is profoundly influenced by the power of grace and thus reviewing these areas of your life each month helps you to appreciate the delicate balance of forces that make you the complex soul you are.
Did you notice any positive improvements in the following areas of your inner life?
- Your attitude about your capacity to heal yourself?
- Your sense of optimism?
- Regarding matters of depression: Any improvement in coping with depression? What about feeling more courageous about confronting sources of depression and taking action to change a situation? If so, what situation have you changed this month?
- List issues related to depression that require healing, if any:
- Regarding matters of anger: Have you noticed any improvement in your ability to cope with anger? For example, have issues that usually angered you lessened a bit this month?
- List issues of anger that you know you need to work on in order to facilitate your healing:
- Regarding matters related to guilt: Have you noticed any healing occurring around any issues of guilt that you carry in your heart and memories? Describe:
- List issues of guilt that remain to be healed, if any:
- Is self-pity a struggle for you? If so, have you experienced any improvement in that mood? Describe:
- List how you see healing occur within your experience of self-pity:
- Regarding matters related to forgiveness: Describe any insights, dreams, conversations, or other experiences you had this month that have facilitated an essential act of forgiveness for you:
- List relationships in which forgiveness remains an issue, as the inability to forgive is an impediment to healing.
- Regarding matters of power and control: Power struggles drain you of your psychic and emotional stamina, drawing out your vital healing energies. Power struggles are rarely rational – they are emotional, irrational, anger-driven and in the end, your health pays the price. Some power struggles extend all the way back to childhood, with memories that still haunt a person. Others are on-going in present time, with children or spouses, friends, co-workers, or adversaries.
- Have you noticed any healings with any power struggles? Describe:
- List your power struggles that you know you are interfering you’re your health:
2. SETTING AN INTENTION:
List your healing intention for this month. Your goal, for example, might be as focused as to become more conscious of how you use anger to control others. In becoming more aware of this pattern, you then direct grace into the pattern. Teresa of Avila would call such a pattern a “reptile” and Carl Jung referred to this part of our nature as aspects of our shadow. To draw our shadow into the light, fragment by fragment, is at the core of our healing. This is but one example of so many. To develop the will to exercise more, or challenging your inner Saboteur archetype are others. Reflect on goals that bring healing into action for you, as that is the key to affecting your health. Healing must be more than just something you think about.
THE PRAYER JOURNAL
EVALUATING YOUR PRAYER PRACTICE:
Connecting to individuals around the world through prayer in order to channel grace and to receive grace for healing is the main purpose of our healing work. It takes a bit of imagination to comprehend that you are threading the grace coming through your soul to the souls of thousands of other people – thousands! – who have joined the CMED Healing Work. We are all over the world. I have told people to put up a map with pins in it of places where members of our healing network live, just so we can all truly appreciate that somewhere now in this world, at least a group of us are constantly in prayer – even if only for two minutes.
Your personal practice is so very important that this small journal serves as how I would chat with you each month, if I was your spiritual director. My goal would be to help make the presence and power of grace more real for you and to help you with whatever spiritual awakenings began to occur within you, as a result of this work.
In spite of how much prayer is a part of all cultures, still a surprising number of people are uncomfortable with prayer or unfamiliar with how to pray or what prayers to say. The idea of meditation, or sitting in stillness, or relaxing to tranquil music, has – for better or worse – become a substitute for prayer for many people but the fact is, those actions do not substitute for prayer, which is the practice of acknowledging through inner dialogue that there is a source of creation much greater than yourself that is intimately known to your soul. It is the action of prayer – of closing down your five senses through conscious inner reflection – that connects you to the power of eternal truths. It is these forces that give your soul perspective, wisdom, hope, optimism – expressions of grace that have the power to heal. Therefore, I encourage you to become comfortable with your own prayer practice, saying a prayer before channeling grace for your own healing. Remember, healing is not a phenomenon that the mind can initiate. The mind is but an instrument of the soul, just as is the heart. They are servants of the soul. Healing is a mystical experience, an experience in which the laws of nature and the forces of life are bent to accommodate your life – you or those you are praying for – because you have asked humbly for that grace. And that grace is delivered. Somehow, in this vast, seemingly endless universe, each of us is intimately known – and that is the greatest mystery of all – the absolute core of the mystical experience: to be known intimately by a force you cannot see, you cannot touch, you cannot describe, yet it envelops you completely.
- How much time did you devote to your practice each day?
- What changes, if any, are you noticing in your own spiritual life as a result of a daily devotion?
- The devotion of channeling healing grace to others can seem very vague one for days, if not weeks and months, and then suddenly you experience a profound mystical encounter with the force of grace directly that has a personally transforming effect. Or the power of grace begins to make itself known to you through dreams or other mystical experiences, such as experiencing profound tranquility that comes over you out of the clear blue. Any comments on your personal spiritual experiences?
- How many days each week were you unable to maintain your practice?
- List your reasons:
- Whether you are in need of healing or assisting in the healing of others, the psychic forces of doubt and distraction need to be continually challenged. It is often the case that as soon as a person begins to channel grace, he or she becomes extremely sleepy or they can no longer focus on the names of the individuals requiring prayers. It’s important that you know this drowsiness is very common. Most people have to work on building inner stamina in order to channel grace – that’s precisely why healers go through such rigorous initiations. The grace is extremely intense, even though you cannot see it, or touch it, or have a tactile sense of it. Yet, it envelopes you. Its presence is something your rational mind simply cannot measure or comprehend. You have to build up your stamina with breath work or some other form of activity so that you are alert when you do your healing practice.
- Has doubt entered into your mind during your healing prayers this month? (This is a question that is worth reviewing each month) If so, describe your experience or associations with “doubt” – that is, what makes you doubt that you can be healed or that someone else can be healed?
- Have you had any dreams of that hold profound symbolic or healing significance this month that you wish to share?
- Any personal comments that you wish to include:
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