Part 1
A Paradigm Shift
Soul-Centered Healing (SCH) is a cross between hypnotherapy and shamanism. It’s an approach that recognizes other dimensions of the self beyond the physical body and the conscious self. SCH recognizes the psychic, energetic, and spiritual dimensions of the person as well.
Using hypnosis, SCH can help a person identify and resolve sources of pain, conflict, or confusion that operate at these levels outside ordinary consciousness.
These are the levels that “talk therapy” often cannot get to because of the inner blocking and ego-defenses. Most often these blocks were created in childhood to protect the conscious self from overwhelming trauma, pain, or terror. The problem is, once created, they continue to be triggered. These defenses operate so automatically, so seamlessly, we usually don’t catch it unless we’re looking for it.
Beside these kinds of blocks, Soul-Centered Healing also recognizes that there are phenomena, conditions, entities, and energies operating at these levels that can cause someone emotional and psychological distress. Using specific methods and protocols, Soul-Centered Healing helps a person access and work at these levels for healing.
Generally speaking, there are four primary categories of phenomena that Soul-Centered Healing usually deals with at these unconscious levels. They are:
- Ego-states, also called sub-personalities.
- Intrusion or interference by spirits or other dimensional beings.
- Disruption within one or more of the chakras and energy bodies.
- Past life conflicts or trauma negatively affecting one’s present life. For any specific individual, one or more of these levels may be involved in his or her difficulties.
Before I talk about these phenomena and healing methods, however, there is a critical issue that needs to be addressed first. The issue is paradigms of reality. A paradigm refers to a society and culture’s shared worldview—a set of fundamental assumptions and beliefs about reality and how things are.
This is a critical issue in talking about Soul-Centered Healing because the psychic and spiritual phenomena dealt with in the healing process are not even acknowledged as real in our Western culture. These dimensions of the self and reality are not taken into account in diagnosing and treating a person.
We live in a paradigm dominated by empirical science. It has been labeled scientific materialism. It’s a paradigm that assumes that matter is the ground of all reality. If something cannot be reduced to its physical components, then it’s not real.
At the same time, many of the phenomena and realities dealt with in Soul-Centered Healing contradict what our Western paradigm says is real and what isn’t. Take for example the existence of spirits. SCH recognizes that beings exist who are conscious and aware, but who do not possess a physical body. It recognizes, too, that there are realms of spirits, and that there are certain conditions where spirits and humans can interact.
From within an empirical paradigm, however, the very thought that spirits exist is non-sensical. You cannot have something made of nothing. So, the logical position is, “let’s not waste time and money researching nonsense.” An alternative position for empirical science is that if there are other dimensions or non-physical realities, they are outside the scope of science—as though the half-truth is what we must settle for.
Strict empirical science can be expected to adopt the same attitude toward Soul-Centered Healing as it has toward so many approaches to healing. It is an attitude that assumes that these subtle realms are all nonsense. The same applies to so many of the phenomena that Soul-Centered Healing recognizes as energetic, psychic, and spiritual realities. They are phenomena and realities that cannot be fully understood or explained within a strictly empirical measure and framework of thinking.
This contradiction between paradigms needs to be acknowledged up-front. The limitations of empirical science force us intellectually and logically into an all-or-none position regarding psychic and spirit realities. For empirical science, there is no in-between. Either spirits (and other paranormal phenomena) exist and empirical science is wrong in its basic assumptions, or empirical science is correct, and any claims about spirits, past lives, or psychic phenomena, etc. must necessarily be delusions, fantasy, or deception.
Soul-Centered Healing presumes a yes on this all-or-none question. There are other levels of consciousness and reality beyond the physical and beyond ego-awareness. There are discarnate souls and we return to that state when the body dies. For those who already accept this, Soul-Centered Healing is an exploration into inner worlds of the self and soul and into some of these different realms of consciousness and spirit.
For those who do not believe, or are not sure, I’m asking that you temporarily set aside the empirical assumptions about what is real. Understanding Soul-Centered Healing, with all its implications, requires a shift in paradigms and a radically different way of thinking. If it’s going to make sense at all, the reader will need to treat these dimensions and phenomena “as if” they are real. Only in this suspension of disbelief can these realities be understood and evaluated on their own terms.
In the short video below, David Lorimer talks about empirical science and the limitations of its materialist paradigm. He begins with the story of Galileo and the refusal of Church officials to look through his telescope and see for themselves that Jupiter did have moons. The churchmen knew if it were true, it would upend the Church’s teachings of Earth as the center of the universe. Empirical science is now in the role of the 16th century Church. Empirical science and its officials deny the testimony, evidence, and research into paranormal or anomalous phenomena. If true that there are other dimensions of consciousness and reality, it will, in Lorimer’s words “require a fundamental shift.”
I believe, like David Lorimer and so many others, that as a culture we are coming to a boundary involving realities beyond the physical. The struggle for our culture, as it was in the time of Galileo, is how to cross that boundary into a “new world” and navigate the social upheaval it is bound to create. It took well over a hundred years—five to six generations—for the population as a whole to accept that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but a planet orbiting the sun.
I would argue that the boundary we are facing now is of equal or greater magnitude even than the one crossed by Galileo. To accept that there are other dimensions of consciousness and being beyond the physical; that valid communication can be established with other beings across dimensions; that we humans, as souls incarnate, are multidimensional beings that are active at other levels of consciousness besides the ego; and finally, that we may consciously access some of these levels directly.
I have written about this paradigm shift elsewhere. I will have more to say. Right now, though, it’s enough to say that Soul-Centered Healing has crossed that boundary and deals with the psychic and spiritual dimensions of the self and soul.