In this article, Catherine Agostini-Salembier shares how to find inner harmony through the healing of the four levels of being, in the land of Bali.
Bali, the blessed island of the gods, is a true garden island.
In Bali, the sacred is everywhere. On a street corner, in front of a house or a hotel, at the entrance of a village, or on the dashboard of a bus, altars dedicated to divinities, ancestors, or nature bear witness to the spirituality of the Balinese people. The island’s temples—of which there are more than 2,000!—and sanctuaries are places of pilgrimage and ritual celebrations all year long. Bali, the blessed island of the Gods, is imbued with an unparalleled celestial energy that invites the healing of the four levels of being in order to experience balance and harmony.
The Healing of the Mental Level
Clarifying and healing the mental level
To experience balance, unification, and well-being in our lives, the mental level must SUPPORT and harmonize with the other aspects of existence.
Believing, for example, that our physical body is inferior to our spiritual dimension and does not deserve our attention and care, keeps us in a mental attitude that will lead to conflict. But we can re-educate ourselves so that the entire system balances and harmonizes.
The mental level includes:
- Intellect
- Ideas
- Beliefs
Becoming aware of our thought patterns and underlying belief systems is essential. It is paramount to consciously choose our beliefs, values, and philosophies that will support our conscious evolution.
We have all been imbued with certain beliefs and attitudes towards the world through our early influences from family, school, religion, our culture, and our own life experiences.
Some of these beliefs remain unconscious. It’s as if we are looking at the world with tinted glasses that we don’t realize we’re wearing. We believe the world has only this one color.
By becoming aware of the lenses we are wearing, we can choose to take them off and see the world quite differently.
It is by becoming aware of our fundamental beliefs that we can more consciously choose our ideas, attitudes, and expectations.
Deepak Chopra illustrates how our beliefs govern our lives in the following way:
During the training of baby elephants in India, one of the animal’s back legs is tied to a tree. The animal quickly becomes accustomed to the chain and no longer tries to break free. The trainer then reduces the size of the chain. The animal is so conditioned by this restraint that a simple rope is enough. It is quite obvious that it is not the rope that holds it back, but the BELIEF that it is constrained.
Just like the elephant, our belief system colors our experience of the world, and we tend to interpret and recreate the world by referring back to the basic beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, and life in general. With maturity, new perspectives can challenge our beliefs.
The idea is to become aware of our basic beliefs and let go of old ideas that have become LIMITING, while keeping those that continue to serve us, and adding new ones to root that will SUPPORT us and allow for more EXPANSION, DEPTH, and POWER.
The Healing of the Emotional Level
Our emotions are similar to the weather, changing and sensitive to our entire range of moods.
Learn to experience joy and sadness just as we appreciate the beauty of a sunny day and that of a stormy one. Our emotions correspond to the movement of vital energy within us. By not fully experiencing our emotions, the vital energy associated with these feelings does not circulate and gets stuck in the body, leading to problems at all levels.
We are often fearful and uncomfortable with the prospect of doing deep emotional healing work. We are afraid of reawakening old pains and perhaps being overwhelmed by them. What is the point of paying attention to unresolved emotional problems and uncomfortable feelings?
Effective emotional healing will free us from having to carry that pain with us everywhere we go for the rest of our lives.
We live in a culture that does not value the world of emotions. We are afraid of our emotions, these unpredictable, irrational, dangerous feelings that we try to control. We have learned, to varying degrees, to deny and hide our feelings, even from ourselves, and to only reveal to the world what seems safe, which often does not correspond to our emotional nature.
The attitudes we have been taught are deeply rooted in our psyche.
We are often taught not to feel any emotion too intensely in order to remain in control. Our society censors certain emotions, such as fear, grief, sadness, anger, or despair. While most of us have learned to suppress our feelings, some let themselves be overwhelmed by their emotions and have difficulty maintaining emotional balance.
So how can we welcome and experience our emotions in a healthy way?
The Healing of the Physical Level
Doesn’t our overall well-being depend on our ability to take care of ourselves physically?
Our cultural lifestyle has become increasingly sedentary and less and less natural. We often live such busy and stressful lives that we demand our bodies to exceed their natural energy levels, resorting to different substances to keep up with this artificial pace. To a large extent, we have become disconnected from the feelings and needs of our physical being.
Our attitude towards nature and our own bodies has been one of conquest and control rather than respect, recognition, and cooperation.
Moreover, the body is often seen as inferior to the mind and spirit. The physical body is then ignored or disparaged.
Our scientific tradition has taught us to focus on the external causes and remedies of disease and to disregard the more subtle, internal causes and the healing process. We see ourselves as “victims” of illness, and we feel helpless, with little power and responsibility for our health. As a result, we have become overly dependent on external authorities, surrendering our decision-making power to the hands of doctors.
We remain deaf to our body’s signals. Let’s learn to listen to them.
The Healing of the Spiritual Level
Connecting with our essential self, that entity full of wisdom and love.
To experience a feeling of security, trust, and fulfillment. Experiencing unity is the key to healing the spiritual level.
In this modern Western world, we can feel a deep separation from our spiritual source. Our culture, in its pursuit of intellectual and physical development, seems to have lost its way to the spiritual dimension of life.
As individuals, when we are separated from our essential being and the universal spirit, we feel EMPTY, LOST, and ALONE. We no longer have a sense of belonging to the universe. Our lives are stripped of their meaning.
We then unconsciously try to fill this inner void by turning outward in an attempt to “fill ourselves” and avoid the pain.
Collectively speaking, the problems of our world reflect the personal problems and conflicts we face.
Since the collective consciousness is made up of individuals, we can only truly solve them when we, as individuals, take responsibility for healing ourselves at the deepest levels. We cannot hope for meaningful and effective solutions if we are not willing to do our own healing work.
This work of developing consciousness is a challenge.
While seeking external solutions can be part of the problem-solving process, healing can only come from within.
By Catherine Agostini-Salembier.
N.B: Discover Catherine’s upcoming guided trips (by clicking here), and our upcoming trips to Bali (by clicking here).
