[:en]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:de]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:fr]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:es]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:ja]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:it]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:pb]It has been over twenty-five years since I asked my Zen teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, “How do you heal people?” When this question arrived I had been practicing Zen for quite a while and making a living practicing a gentle, but highly effective form of manual therapy known as Rolfing°. Understandably, I was quite interested in the nature of healing. “Who better to ask about healing,” I thought, “than Roshi?”
At the next sesshin (Zen retreat) I attended I resolved to ask Roshi my burning question during sanzen. To my great consternation as soon as I found myself in his presence, I utterly forgot m, question. The intensity of koan practice was simply so overwhelming and compelling that it obliterated all of my other concerns. No matter how hard I tried, sanzen after sanzen, I lost my question. I knew, of course, that sanzen was about koan practice. It was a profound opportunity to meet the Roshi where he was by manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source. It was not a time to be posing my questions and chatting with the Roshi about theoretical matters. But here I was, caught in the exasperating position of being possessed by a question that wouldn’t leave me alone and losing it when I was with the only person in my life I thought could answer it.
I continued with my best effort to answer my koan and at the same time to remember to ask my question when Roshi was finished instructing me. But my best effort got me nowhere. Finally, during the last sanzen of the retreat I somehow recovered my will and memory again and asked Roshi, “How do you heal people?” Without a moment’s thought, he answered, “Ahhh, Doctor, you must become one with them!”
BABY WISDOM
Although I had been practicing with Roshi long enough to have some notion of what he meant, I really didn’t begin to understand his answer until years later. When the meaning and experience of Roshi’s answer finally began to dawn on me, it was accompanied by a memory of an experience in which the wonder of oneness was first revealed to me. It was just a glimpse, however, and happened a few years before I began practicing Zen. Although I remembered it as a deeply moving experience, I certainly didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
I was in my last year of graduate school writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics. My wife had gone to work and it was my turn to take care of our infant daughter. She was particularly fussy that day, requiring a lot of attention and love. That afternoon she awoke from a fitful nap full of tears. As soon as I picked her up, she wrapped her little body around me and stopped crying. As I comforted her she immediately melted into me with such sweet open heartedness that I lost all sense of my self and completely dissolved into her. I was so moved by the depth of the boundless, unencumbered love and oneness in which we were embraced that my eyes filled with tears.
Years later and after countless sanzens with Roshi I came to understand more clearly the love that was revealed to me by the grace of my daughter. Prior to the birth of your self and beyond all boundaries, the unencumbered love that manifests when you drop your self permeates the entire cosmos. It sits at the Source of everything – you and me, our experience of time and space, and the contents of our world – and manifests when you thoroughly dissolve your self and become one with the Source. Babies are filled with this love because, like the Source, they have no self, will, or agenda to get in the way. Short of spending years doing zazen (Zen meditation), holding a baby is one of the sweetest and purest ways to get a felt sense of it.
HEALTH IS RETURNING TO ZERO
Contrary to a popular way of thinking, oneness with the Source is not some sort of peak experience that only shows up in extraordinary moments or as the result of years of relentless effort. Although most of us don’t realize it, we die to our self and become one with the Source, and then resurrect thousands of times a day. In the very first instant you perceive the people and things of your world, your self and the object of perception, your experience of space and time, all disappear into the unity and love of the Source. In the very next instant, faster than the blink of an eye, self and world, subject and object, and your experience of time and space, reappear. Also contrary to a popular interpretation of Buddhism, your mind does not create the world and its contents in some Kantian-like fashion. Rather you, the objects of your perception, your experience of space and time, and the contents of your world all arise and disappear together. All day long, day after day, you and your world die in love, resurrect in love, and are sustained in love. Zen meditation is not about willfully trying to get rid of the self – it is disappearing in love moment by moment, after all. Rather zazen is about contemplating the love and ever-ongoing self-begetting activity of death and resurrection that is the heart of everything.
This experience of oneness and unencumbered love is also at the center of healing. “Health,” Roshi once said, “is going to zero.” Zero is one of the many terms he uses to refer to unity with the Source. When you dissolve your self by returning to zero you simultaneously dissolve your conflicts and fixations. If you let go completely and experience what is called the great death, you will drop all your suffering and dis-ease and resurrect a new self that is free and at peace with the world. The great Zen teacher Hakiun made a similar point in his famous The Song of Zazen. He wrote, “Even those who have practiced it [zazen or zero] for just one sitting will see all their evil karma erased.” A person who truly experiences zero is also capable of manifesting the love of the Source in every thing she does, and, what comes the same thing, manifesting the wisdom that knows the activity of the Source.
Typically it takes years of Zen practice to grasp the full significance of your and the world’s death and resurrection. Coming to this understanding requires you to repeatedly burn away your conflicts and fixations in the fires of sesshin and daily zazen. Then at some point you will begin to manifest the freedom from dis-ease that inevitably results from this kind of practice and with it you will get inklings of what it means to say that health is returning to zero.
As it turns out, going to zero is also essential for the work of healing. The closer the healer is to zero as he does his work, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. The astonishing phenomenon that every healer must come to appreciate is that the more selfless, spacious, unencumbered his heart is, the more the client’s body willingly and eagerly communicates the secrets of its dis-ease to his hands and senses. The body actually shows where and what its problems are to the open-hearted healer. In order to hear what the body has to say, the healer must transcend the ken and confines of his ordinary, everyday ways of thinking and drop his self by returning to zero. Since zero is without will, guile, or agenda, the body instantly knows and trusts the healer who practices zero.
The body and the whole of our being participates in, or better, is this ocean of sentient feeling and when approached with an open reverential heart, immediately recognizes itself in the being of the healer. The intelligence of the body knows what it needs to be well and in the loving openness that arises in the unity of client and healer it reveals its problems. As far as the actual healing goes, the healer who practices zero allows the body’s intelligence to find its own way to health. Since he doesn’t willfully force the direction the healing takes or blindly apply formulaic protocols, the body more readily and easily gives up its dis-ease into the openness and love the healer manifests.
The practice of zero is not just about healing, however. It is about something much bigger. By transcending the fixations of ordinary thinking, ultimately the practice of zero makes it possible to experience the true nature of what is by means of a profoundly awake, unencumbered activity of feeling. In the last analysis this activity of feeling is the same unencumbered activity by which the Source knows itself and we know the Source.
THE HEALER’S WAY OF BEING: FOUR WAYS OF FACILITATING HEALING
In order to better understand the way of healing I only sketched above, it will be helpful to lay out some of the other more familiar ways of facilitating healing and compare how they accomplish their results. To avoid confusion, I need to confess at the outset that I come to this discussion as a practicing manual therapist. As a result, I articulate the four ways of intervening in terms most suited for and familiar to the manual therapist. With a little more explanation, however, this way of dividing things up can be shown to apply to all systems and disciplines of healing.
The most common way of facilitating healing is through what can be called the Direct Approach. Most people are familiar with an example of this kind of intervention from being treated by osteopaths and chiropractors. The technique is delivered as a high velocity, low amplitude thrust that “pops” or releases a fixed joint. A different kind of direct technique that is designed to release soft tissue can be found in the practice of Rolfing®. These direct soft tissue techniques effectively release fibrous myofasciae that interfere with normal function and the body’s ability to balance in gravity. For example, when a Rolfer places her client in a seated position directing him to curl forward while applying heavy pressure with her elbow as she runs it down his back, she is employing a direct myofascial technique.
Direct techniques are many, but these two examples should be sufficient to illuminate how the direct approach works. With respect to manual therapy, all direct techniques employ the direct application of energy to problem areas. The purpose is to release fixations and restrictions by forcing the body to change in a predetermined way. Recall the experience of getting your neck adjusted, for example. The practitioner turns your head and neck in the direction it is stuck and cannot turn easily. Then when he cannot turn you any further, he applies a quick thrust forcing your neck past its motion barrier thereby freeing the facet restriction. The adjustment is usually accompanied by a pop, but it needn’t be to be effective.
At bottom, the direct approach does not permit the body to release in its own way. There is no attempt to listen to how the body needs to be approached because the healer is forcing his will and intentions on the body in a very basic way. Direct techniques, like all techniques, have their limitations. But the fact that direct techniques force change on the body should not imply that they are not beneficial. In most cases they can be highly effective.
The second form of intervention can be called the Indirect Approach. It is more refined than the direct approach because it takes advantage of the body’s intelligence and drive toward wellness. Like so many remarkable techniques, indirect techniques were discovered and cultivated by the osteopaths. Instead of taking the lesion to its barrier or pressuring soft tissue to release in a certain direction, indirect techniques do just the opposite.
For illustration, let’s look at an overly simplified example. Imagine a structure that is bent to the left. Instead of trying to straighten it out by pushing it to the right, the indirect approach gently takes the lesion further into its strain. In the application of the first part of the technique, with the body’s permission the practitioner slowly and carefully pushes the structure further to the left as though to complete an arrested gestalt. When the structure reaches the limit of its strain and cannot go any further, a pause or suspension of activity occurs. Then after a moment of stillness an amazing shift happens. All on its own, the structure begins to move this way and that in the most unpredictable ways as it unwinds itself out of its left side bending and eventually straightens itself out. In the second part of applying an indirect technique, the practitioner’s job is to suspend his will, drop any intention for change, and let the body find its own way to normal.
Unlike the direct approach where the practitioner’s orientation is one of willfully forcing change, the remarkable effectiveness of the indirect approach rests on the practitioner’s ability to cultivate the body’s natural propensity to seek normal function. The practitioner accomplishes this extraordinary feat not by any simple act of changing techniques, but by fundamentally changing his orientation to the client. He shifts his orientation from willing and intending change to allowing the body’s intelligence to find its own path to healing. For the second part of the treatment, if only for a brief and not always clear moment, he returns to zero and the client’s body does the rest.
The third approach to facilitating healing is best exemplified by the work of William Garner Sutherland, D.O. His discoveries constitute nothing short of a Copernican revolution in how to deliver therapy. From his discovery of the inherent movement of the cranial bones, coupled with his understanding of the importance of the craniosacral system and how to manipulate it through indirect techniques, to his astonishing discovery of the breath of life, Dr. Sutherland’s revolutionary discoveries and ways of working are brilliant, momentous, and many. In order to advance our discussion of how to facilitate healing, instead of enunciating all of his contributions, I want to focus our attention on the discovery that came to him late in his life, a phenomenon he called the breath of life. The approach to facilitating healing that evolved from its perception is known in most circles as Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. For our purpose we will call this third approach The Organizing Forces Approach. This approach includes any system of facilitating healing that requires the healer to change her orientation as a way to activate the organizing forces to perform the work of healing. This approach also judiciously applies the use of intention to affect the organizing forces.
Unlike the previous two ways of facilitating healing, the organizing forces approach does not at first involve the administration of any kind of technique. When the practitioner places her hands on the client’s complaint, there is no application of subtle pressure, no attempt to gently move a structure, no application of energy, no negotiation with the body, and above all, no intention to change or heal anything. In the first phase, the healer’s primary job is not to change her client, but to fundamentally change her orientation toward her client. She must get out of the way, drop her self and any agenda for change she might have, and simply listen to what the body wants to reveal to her. Before she applies any technique, she also must keep a wide perceptual field and hold open or allow a space to appear in which the ordering forces in and around the client can manifest. Simply stated, the healer must return to zero. Otherwise, in this first phase, even the slightest intention to help the client or intervene in some way that contravenes what the body wants can interfere with the healing and in some cases actually create further dysfunction. When the forces reveal the patterns of dysfunction and how they want to be treated, the second phase begins. In the second phase, the practitioner decides to either allow the organizing forces to perform the work of healing or employs techniques that use intention to direct the forces to behave in certain ways.
As a preliminary way to get a handle on what these organizing forces are, consider a water fountain. Like the human body, the form of the fountain remains relatively constant while the constituent materials are being constantly turned over and renewed. The difference, of course, is that in the case of a water fountain the organizing force that maintains the form is an external machine, while in the body, the organizing forces that sustain and maintain us are inherent to life and the wholeness of the body itself. This last point is important. The organizing forces are in no way external to the wholeness of the body. They are a manifestation of wholeness itself. Since the wholeness lives in every detail, much in the way the complete image of a hologram is manifest in all the pieces of a broken holographic plate, the wholeness of life and its organizing forces are one and the same and live in every detail of the body.
Dr. Sutherland’s momentous discovery was learning how to perceive these forces and how they work. Even more remarkable was the realization that when the practitioner cultivates what we are calling the practice of zero, the intelligence of these forces is stimulated to do the work of restoring health. The manner, order, and timing in which this intelligence treats the client’s problems is called the inherent treatment plan. These forces are not senseless mechanical forces, but posses a kind of intelligence that knows what is best for the organism and knows how to best use the knowledge and skills of the practitioner for restoring health. These organizing forces want to be perceived. They act with purpose and intelligence, are goal directed, respond to the practitioner’s intentions and intentionality, and are sentient through and through.
The mother of these organizing forces was called the breath of life by Dr. Sutherland. Although it has been subject to all manner of speculative metaphysical and theological interpretations, the breath of life in all its incarnations can be perceived. The breath of life manifests in three distinct but related expanding and contracting, or inhalation and exhalation, phases called the long tide, the mid-tide, and the cranial rhythmical impulse (CRI). The CRI occurs eight to fourteen cycles a minute, the mid-tide is two and a half cycles a minute, and long tide occurs one cycle every one hundred seconds or six times in ten minutes.
The long tide is the most powerful expression of the breath of life and is perceived as a large potent field phenomenon around the body that also envelops the practitioner in its spiral-like centrifugal/ centripetal motion. The breath of life generates a potency that conveys its ordering function through the fluids of the body. The fluids become potentized with the ordering nature of the breath of life. The breath of life also creates a biosphere that surrounds and is part of the wholeness of the body. With the creation of the biosphere comes the manifestation of the mid-tide, which has a longitudinal fluctuation. It is less intense than the long tide and, like the CRI, more associated with the particularities of the client’s individual embodiment.
Following Dr. Sutherland’s early ways of working, dysfunction of the CRI is usually handled by means of direct and indirect techniques. By changing his orientation and using his intention the healer can call on the mid-tide to release restrictions throughout the body. Unlike the mid-tide and the CRI, the long tide does not seem to respond to intention or any techniques or attempts on the part of the practitioner to affect its functioning. It appears when the practitioner approaches zero. When it shows up it in a session, it works on the dysfunctions it uncovers according to its own design and accelerates the healing process.
Our investigation into the third approach to facilitating healing demonstrates two profoundly important points about the nature of healing. First, it shows that healing can occur simply in response to the orientation of the healer. Indeed, as long as the healer practices zero it is possible for him to heal without the application of any technique whatsoever. Second, the organizing forces approach partially revealed what is at work in all forms of healing. As we continue our to deepen explorations, it becomes increasingly more evident that what makes itself present in all healing is a loving faceless activity that cannot be reduced to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force. Yet, even though it cannot be reduced to any of these ways of intervening, it nevertheless is present and at work in each.
This loving faceless activity manifests most clearly in the fourth way of facilitating healing. For it to make itself known to us, we must change our orientation from trying to heal through the application of techniques to practicing zero with the client. We must also work without touching the client. Practicing zero without touching the client allows this loving faceless activity to come to presence in the intervention form most suited to the problem and perform the work of healing. When all is said and done, the fourth way demonstrates most clearly just what Roshi said. Healing is about being one with the person to be healed. Or what comes to the same thing – it is about being one with the Source and its unifying love.
The fourth way of facilitating healing is often seen as a form of energy healing. But since energy healing techniques are found in every approach, calling the fourth way an energy approach is not precise enough. For reasons that will soon be clear we will name it The Zero Distance Approach. The fourth way of facilitating healing cultivates the loving faceless source of healing. Embracing and being embraced by the unifying, unencumbered love of the Source, it allows the coming to presence of that activity which is not reducible to technique, intention, will, skill, or the application of force, and yet, is present in all healing. In retrospect we can see that the fourth way is prefigured in the second and especially the third ways. Consequently, at first glance the fourth way appears to be a variation of the third form of intervention. But it actually differs in two ways. First, it does not resort to technique or intention because its way of working is completely a function of the orientation of the healer. Second, and perhaps most surprisingly, the fourth way does not involve touching the client.
To get a feel for how the fourth way works let’s look at a simple allegory. Imagine a room that contains many workers and various powerful tools to assist them with their maintenance and repair work. The room is dark, however – pitch black, in fact. Normally, the darkness poses no problem. The workers are comfortable and happy in the dark, and as long as the work is routine the workers can do it blindfolded, as it were. But when there are emergencies the workers need to not only see, but see with informed eyes. Unfortunately, even though the workers are very motivated and want to get to work as soon as possible, they do not know how to turn on the lights and their eyes don’t work very well. In emergencies the healer is absolutely critical because his first job is to turn on the lights. His other job is to simply lend his attention to the problems the workers uncover and continue attending to them while they are being repaired until he no longer feels them. Neither of the healer’s jobs require his onsite presence to be effective. Also the healer’s work is not about rolling up his sleeves, pitching in, and working alongside the workers. What the workers need from the healer to do their work, it seems, is the light and the informed perceptual vitality the healer brings. Repairs are complete when the healer no longer feels there are any more problems. When there is nothing left to feel or attend to, the light withdraws.
Central to the fourth way is the practice of zero (or unification with the client) in which healing is the result of the healer’s orientation rather than the application of technique or intention. Equally important is the healer’s ability to maintain the experience of unity while simultaneously being able to see and feel what is chosen to be worked on and the manner in which problems are released. Since the healer schooled in the fourth way does his work without touching his clients, his perception is not narrowed down by the limitations inherent to perceiving with his hands. Becoming free of his hands allows him to expand his perception so that he sees with his whole being, body and all. When he listens with his whole being, rather than just the hands alone, he sees and feels more. His perception is much more vital and expansive. Deeper, more difficult problems are more precisely revealed. He also sees and feels more ordering forces and energies than were revealed in the third way. And most remarkable of all, his perception of, and effect on, his client is not limited by distance. It does not matter whether the client is in the room or on the other side of the world. Either way the healer’s orientation still provides a loving space in which the body eagerly reveals its problems and is healed. Whether he is in the room with the client or in another country, the zero distance healer’s job is fundamentally twofold: to become one with the client (clear a space or light up the room) so that the myriad organizing forces and energies can appear in order to do their work, and see and feel what is being worked on until it is no longer felt.
Before we leave the four ways of facilitating healing, I want to clarify a point about their use. I don’t want to leave the impression that in trying to differentiate clearly between them in thought, I am advocating that they should be kept separate in practice. In the hands of experienced practitioners educated in all four approaches, they are often mixed together according to what is deemed the best and most effective treatment that can be tailored for the individual client.
INTENTIONALITY AND INTENTION
These days among healers of every persuasion you often hear it said that intention is more important than technique. Sometimes it is stated more modestly as intention is every bit as important as technique. Unfortunately, just as often as you hear one of these claims made is how often you never hear it explained. Therapists nod their head in enthusiastic approval when they hear a version of this maxim stated, but what does it really mean? What is the relationship between intention and technique? Does intending make it so or does intention plus technique make it so? Unfortunately, these maxims embody confusion between intention and intentionality which obscures the important insights they are trying to express. As we shall see, if healing and the increased effectiveness of technique both can be a result of the orientation of the healer, then it is the nature of the healer’s intentionality (what I have been calling his orientation) that makes all the difference, not his intention.
In order to better grasp the relationships between orientation, intention, and technique we need to flesh out the concept of orientation. What I mean by orientation is the same as what is referred to in phenomenology as intentionality. One of the important discoveries of phenomenology was that intentionalitv is an essential structure of our being. Intentionality is an orientation toward and opening onto the world. It is always directing itself toward and being solicited by the world. We are much less passive receivers of incoming data and much more active interrogators reaching out, groping for variegated contours of meaning or sense. Phenomenologists tend to refer to the meaning-bearing intentional capacity of consciousness by saying, “Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.”
In order to see through the confusions surrounding intention and technique, it is crucial to realize that intention and intentionality are not the same concepts. Intentionality is an essential structure of every form of consciousness. The intention to do something, therefore, is just one example or kind of intentionality. According to phenomenology, any form of consciousness you can imagine is a form of intentionality. Daydreaming, anger, fear, sadness, lust, problem-solving, hope, faith, charity, forgiveness, feelings, negotiation, abstract thinking (indeed all forms of thinking), gardening, perception, and so on are all forms of intentionality.
Every time you try to describe some form of consciousness, notice how a preposition turns up in your description. In saying, “I am angry at you,’ or, “I am happy for you,” or, “I am afraid of guns,” or, “I am thinking about her,” or, “I am not sure of all the implications of the proposition,” the placement of the preposition usually indicates a form of intentionality. The preposition displays the way in which consciousness is oriented toward reality and that consciousness is already embedded in a context and imbued with meaning. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something.
Imagine that you are looking at a flower. You can distinguish two sides to this situation: your consciousness and the flower, or datum as meant. If you are studying the flower as a botanist, the flower becomes an object to be classified or analyzed, and your consciousness is in the reflective mode. If you are lost in the beauty of the flower, the flower is no longer an object, but a wondrous bursting forth of color and life in which you are participating, and your consciousness is in the prereflective mode.
Depending upon what sort of thing you are looking at and whether you are objectifying it in reflection or participating with it in prereflection, your orientation will be correspondingly different. The prepositions that occur in your descriptions of experience, (“I was overwhelmed by its beauty”) indicate that you are embedded in and actively engaged in many ways and at many levels with the world.
The prereflective absorption and participation with beauty is obviously different from the prereflective intentionality involved in witnessing an automobile accident. The reflective understanding involved in classifying a flower is quite different from reflecting on and reporting an accident hours after it has occurred. The way in which you are oriented toward reality depends upon the nature of that toward which you are orienting (a flower or an automobile accident) and whether you are orienting reflectively or prereflectively. Each of these ways of orienting is a kind of intentionality.
Intentionality is a meaning-bearing, multifaceted orientation to and engagement with the world. Because of our philosophical tradition, when we hear the word consciousness we most often think of a non-bodily, non-spatial, self-reflexive, isolated, private, mental phenomenon. But what we call consciousness is not something non-bodily and private at all. Rather it is very much a spatial, bodily orientation toward and engagement with the world. Intentionality is a way of bodily orienting and being present. Since self and body cannot be separated, the very nature of our being-in-the-world is a bodily directing-itself-toward. Consciousness is a psychobiological orientation, a way of coming to presence, a way of occupying, inhabiting, and organizing space, a way of spatializing intentions, purposes, energies, and desires. Fundamentally, intentionality is a meaning-bearing psychobiological orientation to and engagement with the world, a way of being bodily toward and with the world.
With this all too brief explication of intentionality behind us we can return to the relationship between intention and technique. Recall what we discovered in our examination of the four ways of facilitating healing. We learned that the closer the healer is to zero, the more his psychobiological intentionality manifests the unifying love of the Source, and as a result, the more effective, effortless, and profound his work becomes. Whatever techniques he may employ become that much more effective. We also learned that the psychobiological orientation of the healer was sufficient to bring about healing. From these observations we can conclude that the healer’s intention, attitude, or thinking is not as therapeutically significant as many therapists imagine. Rather, it is the nature of the healer’s psychobiological intentionality, his orientation to and engagement with the client, his way of being bodily toward and with the client that makes all the difference – not his intention.
Clearly, intentionality is profoundly more important than intention. All by itself, just holding an intention for change is not enough to effect change in a client. More than any other kind of technique, intentions are effective only to the extent that they are held by a healer whose psychobiological intentionality is oriented correctly. But if the effectiveness of both technique and intention are enhanced by the healer’s intentionality, then the maxim that intention is more important than technique cannot be true for two reasons: 1) intentions administered without the right kind of intentionality have little or no effect; and 2) when the healer uses his intention to effect change, he is employing intention as a technique. Consider the implications of the second point. If intention is just another kind of technique, if it is just one technique among many, then the maxim reduces to the nonsensical claim that technique is more important than technique. For the same reason, the more modest maxim that intention is equally important as technique also reduces to nonsense, namely, that technique is just as important as technique. For the sake of clarity, the various maxims should be refurbished to simply recognize that intention is a technique the effectiveness of which is dependent on the intentionality of the healer. If we want to create a maxim we could say that intentionality is more important than intention and technique. But the truly important point is that the psychobiological intentionality of the healer who practices zero is the way to the faceless loving activity that sits at the heart of all healing.
CONCLUSION
Having come to the end of our exploration of the Zen of healing, I recall Roshi’s simple statement about becoming one with the person to be healed and I am struck by how many words it took to get here. This realization is a reminder that although the intellect is not irrelevant to our quest, the insights articulated here arose from the always-ongoing practice of learning how to see and feel freely without the encumbrances of everyday perception.[:]Zen and the Art of Healing
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