This channeled message from the Buddha describes how to align the MIND to SPIRIT when you experience PAIN in the physical senses.
“When shot by an arrow of pain,
A stupid person makes matters worse
By piling mental anguish on top of it,
As if shot by two arrows.
However, a wise person feels the sting
Of one arrow alone.”
Direct words of the Buddha from the Pali Canon, Samyutta Nikaya 36.6, Sallatha Sutta
“My friends, it is painful to have a body. Pain and suffering in the body is inevitable. It may surprise you when I say that the cause of this pain is the thoughts and habits in your mind. The emotions that you harbor in your mind, such as anger, hatred, fear, selfish greed, etc., are a root cause of disease. Illness and disease are primarily caused internally by your lower tendencies, accumulated thoughts, emotions, and impressions that separate you from SPIRIT. Your habits, your beliefs, what you love or hate, what you like or dislike, what you cling to, what angers or disappoints you—it all adds up. You can live in a cave and retire from the world. However, you will still be subject to the negative tendencies within yourself, until you dissolve them by training your mind. Everything is connected SPIRIT. There is no escape. Except to be free.
Pain happens in the mind. Pain may be the body’s way of directing your attention to a particular area. Do you resist the pain? Or do you just observe it? If you complain about it, you will only make the pain feel more intense. The verse at the top of the page illustrates how an untrained person when shot by an arrow might resist the pain. They may feel sadness, they may whine and become upset. Thus, this person actually feels two pains. It is as if they have been shot with two arrows, first the physical, and then the mental anguish. Buddhism can’t give you relief from pain. However, it can give you the mental discipline to eliminate the unnecessary emotional response to pain that causes even more unhappiness.
On the other hand, when a person with a wise or trained mind feels pain, they simply observe it without complaint, sorrow, or grief. They do not resist or become upset. So, a wise person feels only one pain—the physical, but not the mental pain. This is an example of a clear mind. Mental equanimity and being non-reactive in all situations will spare you enormous pain.
Think about it. If your thoughts, emotions, and habits cause disease, then it follows that healing those thoughts, emotions, and habits can also cure disease. Positive well-being, physical balance, and mental clarity are inside you as well. They come from the mind. These qualities go hand in hand with happiness.
You Are Much More Than You Think
You live in a field of energies. It starts with your birth, your parents, your family life. But it is so much bigger. You also carry your parents’ history, and their parents’ and grandparents’ history all the way back through time. You carry impressions from your childhood, from your past lives, from all of humanity, from all of life. Even the particles of which your body is made come from the far corners of outer space. You carry all these deep impressions in your body-mind.
The field of energy is all around you. You drink it in every day. Your food, water, air, emotional environment, and even the ancient chain of human thoughts are infused with energy. Most people agree that contaminated food, air, and water can undermine your health. But equally, greed, fear, selfishness, limited thought forms, your environment, your family, your associates, the people around you, and the products you use can also harm your health. These are all connected in the field. It’s like living in a soup of energy pushing and pulling you this way and that. However, when you meditate quietly every day, it is possible to calm the mind to be immune to the divisive influences in yourself and the people and events around you.
Your suffering is primarily rooted in the thousands of old negative impressions and inner tendencies that drag you down. Although you can blame your parents or your grandparents, it has very little to do with them. They are just a part of the chain of human existence, the cycle of myriad causes and effects, a small part of the impressions from this life and previous lives, if you will. I am discussing this now because many of you have false concepts of the nature of reality. Generally, I do not speculate, as I consider these questions about the past and future impossible to answer and useless to debate. That is why in my time I refused to answer questions about unknowable things. It is better to focus on freeing yourself from this cycle of suffering.
Mindful Healing Is Your Birthright
Most of you have no concept of how to heal yourselves. Yet healing your own body can happen continuously when you use your conscious breath to bring energy into your body and direct it to specific areas. Use conscious breathing to fill and clean your system with positive nourishment, allowing the old habits and negative qualities to dissolve and be removed. This is a natural process when you are aware. By using mindful breathing, you can enhance the beneficial qualities of your movement to bring physical vitality to each area. Your transformation can bring deep change as old negative thoughts surface from inside you. Your work also helps to release them from the common mind and the people around you. The process of clearing base habits is not particularly pleasant. However, it leads to real health and happiness, which is your human birthright. A disease of any name is just a manifestation of this fundamental field of energy that you carry. Of course, your energetic field is also filled with beautiful joy and wisdom. You carry many wonderful habits and tendencies as well.
A child who grows up in an emotionally abusive home environment will develop more slowly, showing less vitality, less intelligence, and less physical health than a child in a happy household. This child carries a heavy burden, not only from the immediate experience, but also from their parents and the distant past. Yet no matter the negative circumstances, such a person can change their thoughts and heal themselves without exception. People right in front of you who have suffered in the past and successfully healed themselves often give the best living examples of this wisdom and mental discipline. Know that everyone feels some kind of suffering and pain. You can always help others to lighten their load by mindfully observing them and assisting when possible.
Many modern chronic illnesses are caused by unconsciously abusing your physical body with toxic foods, unclean water, and poisons in the air. You can study the physical inputs all day, but it is even more difficult to clear the negative energetic qualities in them. Your first step is to observe how you feel after taking in food, air, or water that contains the energy of selfishness, greed, mindlessness, or intention to control. The products you use are often accompanied by claims of health. Just listen to the motivation behind these advertisements, and do not be taken in by those who have a selfish interest. Listen primarily to your body’s response. Think independently and research your products for yourself. You can heal yourself and prevent most diseases by judiciously selecting your food, water, air, movement, being mindful of the company you keep, and by observing your thoughts.
The Body and Mind Carry a Burden of Time
Your physical human life is subject to time. However, your energy body encompasses all of time. Since your body-mind contains all of time, in a sense, part of you is free from the limitation of time. Cycles in time, and cycles within cycles, have been orbiting through the galaxy for eons. Through good times and bad times, up, down, and around. Right now, human consciousness is rising on the earth. This multiple cycle process takes many thousands of years.
The human body is capable of living much longer than you think. Ancient Ayurvedic records are still accessible, showing evidence of long planetary cycles and of humans enjoying lifetimes that lasted for thousands of years. This fact is also documented in your Bible. You might ask, how is this possible? A heavy accumulation, an almost infinite backlog, of beliefs, negative emotions, and self-defeating thoughts that each of you carry forward in time has caused shorter and shorter lifetimes. You might think this is very sad. However, these cycles of time are a sacred part of the universe. They cannot be changed. Hence, this century, and the time and place in which you now live is also sacred and unique. Your job, your only job, is to make the most of your opportunity to live right now. To live in the present moment.
Humans have a relatively brief lifetime, and therefore, a short memory. As a result, much wisdom tends to be forgotten over time. Modern scientists have not yet discovered much of this knowledge, or perhaps they do not wish to accept it. You are so fortunate to live in these times, and to have ways of writing to record things. In my time, the monks had to memorize each verse to preserve the teachings. That is how my words were remembered and finally written down hundreds of years after my death.
Your Six Senses Include the Mind
I taught about the six senses. You have eyes, ears, nose, taste, and touch. In our teaching, we also included the mind as a sense organ. What is the mind? Where does the mind reside? Does it reside in the brain? Yes. Does it reside in the heart? Yes. Is the mind in the body? Yes. Is it outside the body? Yes. The mind is everywhere, both inside and outside your body. Your mind links everything together. That makes your mind very powerful.
When a thought comes into your mind, where does it come from? It comes from the integration of all of you, and it is everywhere. The mind comes first, and the body follows. That is why I teach that to heal your body, you should first heal your mind. The mind is also in your brain, but the brain is not synonymous with the mind. The mind is everywhere. When your brain is working well, chances are you are alive, and many parts of you are communicating with each other. Therefore, the highest intelligence means you are integrating all levels of yourself in body, mind, and spirit. This is true intelligence. It manifests uniquely in every individual and defies measurement.
Dissecting the Parts vs. Viewing the Whole
In the past, your science has sometimes had the tendency to divide things into their component parts and study each part independently in isolation. There is value to this; however, the approach is incomplete. You cannot forget the unity of all parts. One part always affects the others in unknown ways. What does that mean for your actions? It means you can trust your path and know that your actions can have an effect on the chain of cause-and-effect in the world. Like the metaphor, the flapping wings of a tiny butterfly can cause a hurricane in a distant place, a very small change in initial conditions can create a significantly different outcome. You can never know the entirety of the future results your thoughts and actions may set in motion. Everything you do and all that you think have an effect on the whole.
It is quite difficult for doctors, as capable as they are, to determine the myriad causes of any disease and find solutions after long-term exposure. As a result, they may tend to focus on expedient solutions to make a person more comfortable right away, to mask the symptoms, or offer substances to alleviate pain.
Many times, a person goes to the doctor with a discomfort and receives a diagnosis. At first, they may feel enormous relief to have a name and explanation for the issue, and to receive medicine to take. However, over time, these people often end up being completely disappointed and disillusioned with the process. Why? It is because names and diagnoses are by definition a partial explanation, a human thought form that cannot take into account the multiple causes both physical and energetic. A superficial diagnosis and remedy can never effectively heal the real root of the pain and disease. This happens again and again. It is unfortunate, because the patient may take on a burden of identifying emotionally with the named disease. Even worse, they may stop researching other possible causes and beneficial remedies, so they may never have the whole picture. The fact is, to heal most chronic illnesses requires a fundamental change in thoughts, foods, and lifestyle habits. Likewise, most diseases can be prevented in the first place by observing and modifying these same factors.
Mindful Self-Observation, Key to Freedom
Mindfulness means you notice with conscious awareness and care. When your mind is relaxed and balanced, you can more easily see through the mirage of the senses. Mindful meditation and residing in the quiet is your key to freedom. It helps you to see through illusion, to be immune to efforts to control and divide, less distracted by temporal issues.
Observe your mind, notice your thoughts. Learn how to stop a negative thought in its tracks. Use step-by-step mindfulness to purify your mind. Deep asking and prayer can keep you on track. Find a teacher that you trust, at least for a time. Remember you are always free and powerful in the teacher-student relationship.
The Power of Silence
One of your greatest health resources is to go into the Infinite Quiet. This is a major key to freedom. Meditate on the deep and boundless silence. In this lies the possibility of a tiny shift that creates a radical change, a one-pointed power in the infinite present moment. And somehow when you open your eyes, you are different. You allowed the quiet to penetrate into your cells, into your mind, so you are not the same person ever again. Somehow an unexplainable quantum shift takes place in you. In that deep quiet, you will find solutions to all your problems. You will find physical healing and inspiration that will surprise and amaze you. The quieter you can get, the more powerful it is. Quiet mindfulness in the infinite present moment can heal anything.
Bring life, inspiration, joy, peace, harmony into your thoughts and your body functions. When you are feeling poorly, use mindful breathing to bring life into that area of your body. Ultimately the body will die, and all your good works, your harmonious actions will carry forward into the future as the cycle of existence goes on. Know that you are here in this life for a reason. There is something for you to learn, something important for you to offer to the chain of cause and effect, to people and events. Please find it and make it wonderful. Make it powerful. And in your path, I wish you well.”
Srijana, aka Jane Barthelemy is a medical intuitive, author, and healer. She has practiced Tibetan Buddhist meditation for over five decades, residing in the Rudrananda Ashram in the USA for 35 years. She practices cranial osteopathy, Acunect, and BodyTalk – an infusion of intuitive Chinese, and Ayurvedic wisdom. She is trained in Qigong, Taichi, Daoist sexuality, and Kundalini activation. Her medical Qigong training is with Mantak Chia, Khamto Lee, Daniel Villasenor, Zhongxian Wu, Dr. Ka’imi Pilipovich, Franco Mescola, Richard Leirer, and Lam Kam Chueng. She has her BS in Italian Opera and MBA in financial management. Her two paradigm-changing cookbooks show how to build health with unprocessed foods. Her upcoming books include: “Heal Your Past Lives”, and “Buddha Speaks – Channeled Passages from the Master”. She is on the faculty of NewEarth University and LearnDesk. Her websites are FiveSeasonsMedicine.com and JanesHealthyKitchen.com. Srijana lives in Bhutan with her Bhutanese husband, D. Thinley.