Shedding Shackles
v
Healing
Touches
Gifts from the
Great Physician
v
v
Healing Touches
Gifts from the Great Physician
v
Roland Trujillo
Copyright ©
2023 by Roland Trujillo
The Great Physician
The great Physician now is near,
He speaks the drooping heart to cheer,
Your many sins are all forgiven,
Oh! hear the voice of Jesus;
All glory to the risen Lamb!
I now believe in Jesus;
I love the blessed Savior's name,
I love the name of Jesus.
His name dispels my guilt and fear,
No other name but Jesus;
Oh! how my soul delights to hear
The charming name of Jesus.
Adapted
from the hymn
………………The Great Physician by William Hunter
This book is dedicated to truth speakers and truth seekers everywhere
– those who love the truth enough to say it out loud and risk losing other’s
approval and who sometimes suffer loss because of their forthrightness; and
those who keep searching for truth and never give up till they find it.
DISCLAIMER
I am not a
doctor. I am a pastor and spiritual care giver. The information provided in
this book is for educational and informational purposes only. In no way should
it be considered as offering medical advice. Please check with a physician if
you suspect you are ill. You should always discuss any medical treatment with
your health care provider.
The
information in this book is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship
with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical
advice. The reader is encouraged to make their own health care decisions based
upon their research and in partnership with a qualified health care
professional.
Contents
The Power in the Presence of God
The Soul, Mind, Body Connection
Believing Right, Living Right, Feeling Right
The Sick System is Founded on a Lie
The Big Lie and How It is Overcome
Glory to God Instead of to Selfish Self
Good Things Happen When You Stop Trying
On Your Knees Before God, Standing Tall
Before Men
From Anger to Poise, From Defeat to Victory
While
Jesus was dining at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating
with Him and His disciples—for there were many who followed Him. When the
scribes who were Pharisees saw Jesus eating with these people, they asked His
disciples, “Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On
hearing this, Jesus told them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician,
but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to
repentance.”
(Mark 2: 15-17)
Is there such a thing as a healing touch?
There is. But as usual we look in the wrong places to find it. We look for it
from other people—which is understandable, I suppose, because we tend to look
for everything from others.
When we were little kids we were totally
dependent on our parents, and this was good because it is so ordained by God.
He’s the one who invented the idea of parents and kids. He made it a great joy
to have kids, but with the joy comes responsibility. They are dependent on us.
But all along the way, kids have to start
doing things for themselves. They have to take their first step. And no one can
do it for them—they have to take that step themselves. Soon they are riding
bikes, doing chores, going off to school, making their own friends. And the day
comes when they move from home, get married, and soon they are parents
themselves.
Just as kids are lovingly and gently weaned
from dependency on mom and dad, they must learn to stand on their own feet and
be independent in as many ways as possible. To the extent that a person can
earn a living, perhaps have their own business, follow their intuition and
conscience to make good decisions, form their own opinions, and basically
handle their own affairs without being dependent on others, it is good.
There comes a time when you have to outgrow all
your childish dependencies and become self-reliant.
We should not be dependent on comedians to
make us laugh; on the government for food to eat; on pills to manage our moods;
on someone to tell us right from wrong; or, for that matter, on another person
to make us happy.
All of this is to say that somewhere along
the line, many of us faltered, lost confidence, succumbed to put down, or
through false allegiance and insecurity became dependent on others to an
excessive degree.
The problem is that with each attachment to
the world, lines of communication and links are formed that replace a healthy
dependence on God. Soon you become almost totally outer directed. You lose the
independence from which you are free to search and reach within for intuitive
answers from your Creator.
The truly independent person is free of
debilitating dependencies and false allegiances precisely because he or she is
dependent on God. Such people stand tall before men but are on their knees
before God.
Unfortunately, many of us continue to depend
on others to an unhealthy degree. Sure, we can get and give a helping hand. But
the help should be to just enough to get a person on their feet but not so that
they become forever dependent on it. Remember the old truism: it is better to
teach someone to fish than to give them a fish. For if you give them a fish
they can feed themselves for a day; if you teach them to fish, they can feed
themselves for a lifetime.
True freedom requires a commitment to truth,
a loyalty to God, and a willingness to risk alienation from others in order to
champion truth and what is right. But for most people, it’s just too easy to
look for some person, expert, institution, or government program to solve your
issues.
Nevertheless, we all get away with this for
a while, as long as we are young and full of energy, and as long as things are
going reasonably well. When some little issue comes up, we can always call a
friend, borrow money from someone, ask an expert, or search online.
But when bigger issues arise—relationship,
marriage, health, and spiritual issues—we begin to find out, usually the hard
way, that no one has real answers, and eventually we discover that we have nowhere
to turn. To put it another way—nowhere to turn but to God.
For whatever
ails you—you need the touch of God. He will heal you soul, make you whole, and dispel
the darkness so that joy may return. He will restore the years the locusts have
eaten, and give you true hope. Just how He will do these wonderful things awaits
your happy discovery, as you see salvation implemented in your life.
He will also restore your independence and
give you understanding, so that you may begin to see the wisdom of His ways and
with confidence and courage lead a productive life, according to His purposes,
and eventually find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. God promised all
of these blessings and many more, so many more that you will hardly have room
to receive them all.
God fulfills His promises. But remember that
His promises mostly have an “if” clause associated with them: “If you turn from
your wicked way, if you follow Me, if you obey My commandments,” and so on.
So the coming to be of all the good things
depends on your finding God, keeping in constant contact with Him, and
following what He inspires in your heart.
The important thing is to re-find and
sustain contact with Him, and in His Presence find relief from your mental
torments. He would give you the grace to stop worrying and complicating your
issues. He would give you time, lots of time, to see your errors, sort things
out, and right your course.
But as it now stands, most people are
woefully far from God. Most don’t even know it—they continue to rely on others.
Sure, others may help, and with some misplaced faith in others, the worry
process, which interferes with recovery, is put on hold, giving the body and
mind the time to recover.
The natural self-healing processes may do
the job for a while; but the secret cause of your ailments remains: the absence
of God and His Presence, and conversely the presence of the intruder who entered
the vacuum left by the avoidance of God, displacing God’s place in the soul.
Some of us, thankfully, sense that there is
something deeply wrong with us spiritually and we begin to sincerely seek for
real answers. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Christ said. They realize their
sorry state and cry out for true answers. Their cry is heard by God and He
responds.
The searching, the yearning, and the silent
cry are the important things. God answers with grace, light, forgiveness, and
time. And in the matrix of that benificence, restoration occurs.
It is God you need: His Presence, His love,
His involvement in your life, and His touch.
No matter what your problem is: God is the
answer. Find Him and you have everything. Positive changes, restoration of
wholeness, the return of joy, improved relationships with others,
understanding, and many other gifts await. Find Him and you have found it all.
Over and over in the past, you have tried to
makes things better. First you tried imposing your will on circumstances or
people. With people issues, you tried getting angry. Then you tried being nice,
too nice, to win their favor. Maybe you begged and bargained. All you got was
their contempt, an uneasy peace, or a hellish servitude to them for their
approval..
When it came to health issues, you probably
fell in line with everyone else at the doctor’s office and at the pharmacy.
Even when the various experts did not really
solve your issues, you kept clinging to your belief in knowledge to solve
everything for you, so you may have tried becoming a knowledge authority
yourself. You searched on line, read books, took a class or two, or perhaps got
a college degree. The idea being that with such knowledge you could solve your
issues and find happiness.
Your doctor visits, your appointments with various
experts, your online searches, your college degree, and your involvement with
some organized religious or spiritual group kept you busy. So busy, in fact,
that you didn’t have time to worry. With complicating worry temporarily on hold
and not complicating things and upsetting your tummy, you experienced some improvement.
Your goal kept you focused, so you set aside your doubts and fears, and again
thing appeared to improve for a while.
If your involvements were so emotional and
captivating that you believed wholeheartedly in them (like you should be
believing in God) then you may have become what the famous water front
philosopher Eric Hoffer can a “true believer,” like a cult follower,
evangelizing and seeking to covert others over to the treatments, organization,
or education you believed in.
From that point on, such a person never
looks back, never allows a doubt to enter, refuses to hear other opinions, and
defends to the death their dogma and leaders. Like devotees of Hare Krishna,
Marxists, or like Jim Jones cult followers, such types are almost beyond hope.
But if you are reading this book, chances
are you are not one of the aforementioned. You too got caught up for a while with
what you thought would solve your problems, but you could not shake the hunch
that something was still missing. Plus with the student loans, treatment costs
and side effects, servitude, broken marriages and ruined relationships—the
evidence continued to pile up that something was amiss. Your experts and
outside groups didn’t solve your problems, and most of all they didn’t take
away the inner darkness, confusion, anxiety, and depression that seemed to
follow you and resurface over and over.
You
used to rage and blame, but the day came when all you could do was sit there
dumfounded and oppressed. You wanted to redo it all, start over and make things
right. But it never worked before. And you didn’t know how to make things
right.
Nothing really worked. Each tactic and each
manipulation only made things worse. Sure, for a while things seemed better on
the surface, but deep down, nothing had changed. So you were left with seething
resentment—toward others for having failed you, toward yourself, toward life,
and most likely toward God.
You might even have thought of doing away
with yourself. But that would be just another cop out; and definitely not the answer.
You
didn’t start out to mess things up. But that is what happened.
However, there is a positive side to
reaching rock bottom. Now the person may be ready for a dose of truth and
finally searching for real answers.
So here we are again, back to square one.
Well, take heart. Things may yet change for
the better. The problem looks complicated, but the solution is simple. At this
point I would like to share something with you that I wrote in a previous book.
It is so relevant that I would like to present it here for you. It states the
problem and most importantly, the solution quite clearly I think. Here it is:
It’s not the experts, educators, writers, or
organized group leaders that are to blame. It’s not your parents that are to
blame.
It’s not your partner. Nor is it that you
are not trying hard enough. The problem is that something is missing. The
solution is finding what is missing.
Now I will give you a hint (both about what
is missing and about where you can find it).
But first an analogy. It is well know that really
hard core drug addicts will never change until they see their wrong, are truly
sorry about what they see about themselves, and really, really, really want to
change.
Often this only happens after they see,
without trying to deny it, that they have caused total devastation of their
life and other’s lives around them. Finally they see the extent of their wrong
and have to admit it with sorrow.
Now they can change. Prior to that, it was
all denial, excuses, blame, and manipulations to fool others. Generally the
moment of truth—and that is what it is—comes when they hit rock bottom. They
wake up one morning in the gutter and ask “why am I here?”
Now perhaps you see where the magic is: believing
instead of denying the truth about oneself, followed by real searching for
answers to sincere questions, real desire for the truth, and really seeing the
need for change.
Another way of saying it is—the person sees
that there has to be more to life than selfish pleasure seeking and pain
relief. The person starts to really search for the purpose for their existence.
The missing ingredient is truth. Truth is
the leaven that leavens the entire loaf.
The truth is like sunlight—it contains both
light and warmth. It is so good that it makes you feel bad. It is both tender
and stern. It brings new life and hope for the willing soul, and it devastates
and destroys the old way of living (dying, really).
Of course the truth was always there, but
the stubborn ego was not ready to receive it. Most people find a way to accept
truth on a shallow level so that it does not penetrate.
The truth must penetrate, and for it to
penetrate deeply enough, the person must be willing to accept it.
Truth spoken with love from a friend can
wake a person up. But only if the person is willing to accept it and accept it
deeply without resentment will it do much good.
What
the truth spoken with love does is it wakes a person up to the light of truth within. If the person then continues to
stay awake because they want to be awake and know the truth – then the light
and love of truth will change them and also extend through them and change for
the better the world around them.
All you need is to want this light of truth
and have a willingness to yield to it and allow it to shape you, and soon your
problems will be over.
Bear in mind that this does not mean that
all of your issues will disappear immediately. Though some will!
Some issues will remain for you to see,
understand your error; and then you will be given a second chance to handle the
same situation that gave rise to the issues, but this time with wisdom and
grace. Things will be different now—you’ll see—because you’ll have the inner
light of intuition guiding you moment by moment.
So where does this truth come from? It comes
from within. In its light you know without knowing how you know, you intuit,
you realize, you regret your errors, your hard heart is softened, and you are
chastened.
The truth can do what no one else can do and
what you cannot do for yourself—it can change you for the better.
Of course, it goes without saying that this
Truth of which I speak cannot be gleaned from books or experts. It cannot be
found out in the world. It can be found only within, and it is from God.
When you accept this truth, love this truth,
yield to this truth, wait upon this truth, and trust this truth – you are
thereby yielding to your Creator. You are accepting and wanting His truth in
your life; and since truth only comes from Him, you want Him in your life too.
But now here is the beautiful part—it counts
with God that you accept the truth when you see it.
You probably won’t, in the early stages,
even know that it is from God! You may not even at that point be sure if there
is a God. All you know is that you are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
You see the truth and are sorry about what you see about yourself. You also see
that you cannot change yourself. And you also don’t want to blame or resent
anyone anymore. Your conscience has caught up with you. This time you don’t try
to run from it. That is enough.
Now just go about your life and see what
there is to see. Wait for the truth to dawn. Most of your insights will come at
odd moments during the day. See, realize, feel a bit of embarrassment or pain
over what you see about yourself. Then sigh and feel the burden lifted from
you.
One day you will come to know just who is
taking the burden away. You may even find long held guilt suddenly gone and be
puzzled by this. For now, just be grateful and move forward boldly to meet your
new life.
Don’t try to change your partner. Don’t try
to make anything work out. Just see the need for improvement and wait for the
inner light to show you just what your error is. There is little more to do
than to just sigh a sigh of relief and press onward.
When you see an error in the light, that
error (your resentment of someone or something for example) is highlighted so
that you can see it. In the light, the error is seen to be at variance with
what is right. There is nothing more for you to do at that point. Any efforts
you make to roll up your sleeves and try to fix things only interfere with the
action of the light.
When you get your ego out of the way, the
light itself will rectify and make things right.
In fact, just seeing the error is already enough
in many cases. God is like a good parent. When a child has done something
wrong, the parent is happy and perfectly satisfied when the child sees his
wrong and admits it. Mostly, nothing more is needed.
This book contains lots of information. Just
read what interests you until you get an insight and then put the book down and
ponder what you were awakened to. Or just open the book to any page and start
scanning. Chances are you will quickly see something meaningful. Don’t study
the book. Scan the book for clues until something is highlighted for you.
At that point you may close the book and end
that reading session to go about your life, carrying with you that which you
realized to later see it again even more deeply. Thus you grow day by day,
realization by realization.
As you read this book you will note that I
sometimes make mention of a little meditation (which is free to download at the
Shedding Shackles website). I have found that it helps a person calm down, get
centered and then be attuned to receive delicate insights. Mostly people are so
upset all the time that they are lost in thoughts and negative emotions. The
meditation simply teaches you how to stand back from worry, doubts, and upsets,
so it is easier to see clearly and act wisely.
- 1 -
We all want to recover from our afflictions.
We want to experience joy again and peace of mind. We want relief from the
negative thoughts and emotions that rise to ruin every beautiful moment. We
also want to restore our relationships. We wish we could undo the past and
start all over. We want others to understand and forgive us and we want to
forgive others.
It’s been so long since everything has been
all right that we can hardly believe that such a state even exists. We are also
afraid: that God hates us, that others will hate us before and after we have
gone. We fear that our loved ones, especially our kids, who are messed up from
what we did or failed to do when they were growing up, will come to something
bad.
Well, take heart. Though you can’t
unscramble an egg, God can. Remember what Christ said: “with man it would be
impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
All good comes from God. Real and lasting
recovery and restoration begin with the soul. The words of the old hymn say
there is a balm in
Christ said that He was sent from the
Father. Christ promised us that he could set us free and told us that His yoke
is light. He said “My peace I give to you.”
Christ has peace for you. All you must do is
find it. He has forgiveness for you. All you must do is receive it. Christ
wishes for you to know Him and to know the Father. All you need do is yearn for
truth, search for it with all your heart, and welcome it and yield to it when
you find it instead of fighting it and defending pride.
If it were complicated to do, then as
confused and messed up as most people are, it would be too hard. But it is not complicated.
All you have to do id one thing. One thing. Return to the state of mind you had
just before your first big upset long ago. In that state, you have access to
all the good that is waiting for you. And in that state you have separation
from the hell into which you have fallen.
If you are like most people, you are currently
down there in the miasma of your thoughts and emotions. You fight one thought
with another and one emotion with another. But no sooner do you close the door
on one horror, than you find yourself in another.
It’s like being in a swamp of quicksand
where each move you make only entraps you more. But even while you are down
there, God takes over and leads you out of your bondage.
God sent His servant Moses and gave him
power over the Pharaoh. God freed the people and led then first through the
waters of the Red Sea and then with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of
fire by night He led them through the desert for forty years, providing for
their every need along the way. Now in
an analogous way, He sent the Christ to redeem you and Who has power over Satan,
to lead you to freedom. God sends His light so that you might see and
understand. His light leads you out of slavery, through the washing of
regeneration, through the desert to the promised land.
This blessed state of mind, where it all
begins, is where light leads to light.
Insight to insight. Freedom to freedom. You are progressively freed. And even
as you are freer, you are readied to become even more so. As you gain
understanding, even just a little, it permits you to find more understanding.
All of this and much more is available in
the blessed state of consciousness.
So you must come up to awareness: where God
is, where light is, where answers are.
Now perhaps you can see that the key to your
recovery is to return to the aware state of mind—the non-hypnotized,
non-psychotic state of mind—and stay there.
When you are not hypnotized, when you are
not high, when you are not in a psychotic state, when you are not daydreaming
or lost in past scenes, and when you are not emotional, you are close to
reality. You are awake and the awake state you can also be aware, functioning
from your God given intuition.
And if you should discover that something
that is not you resides within, do not be alarmed. You are seeing it in the
light, and your right intent insures that God will give you the grace to bear
what you must see, while He holds the dark side at bay so that you can continue
on the discovery path to freedom.
Prior to meditation and God entering your
life you were not even free to want to change for the better. You see, the
thing controls your “want to.”
When a person yields to temptation, they are
responding to the will behind the temptation. It is this invisible will that
they are obeying, and its will takes over your will. To the extent that its
will operates in and through you, you do not even have a will. That is why you
can’t even will to (or want to) to right.
In this state, the invasive will is the only
will active, and you are further held in bondage by the things it tempts you to
reach for. The alien will (which you take to be your own) controls you mind,
the control center of your being; and things you have responded to act as
stimuli to cause emotional and physiological response.
Now when the temptation object beckons, your
body responds, you can’t say no. And soon you yield to the lusts of the flesh
for what respite there may be in satiety and all passion spent and sleep.
When the will that is not your will controls
you, you have no will. Its will operates, then temptation objects take over to
compel you with animal impulses, emotion, and the hypnotic effect on the mind.
Have you ever woken up during the night and
felt a bit chilly. An extra blanket is nearby, but you would have to get up to
get it; yet somehow you can’t rouse yourself to get up and get it. In this
example, you just don’t have the will to rouse yourself, and the only thing
that will move you is when you start shivering and are driven by that.
When it comes to something good or useful
that a person could do, sometimes they don’t do it because it’s just not in
them to do it. Don’t be surprised to discover that fact in others (and in
yourself). That’s why, for example, many people don’t vote.
But sometimes something else is afoot. For
example, you know that you should meditate, that you should become aware and
stay out of daydreams. But something won’t let you. It’s will is stronger than
your will. This is the alien presence, the shadow government, your own deep
state.
There are four ways it controls you. First,
you have yielded to it so often that, as I said before, you can’t say no. Its
will is your will (especially if you agree with what it intends). Second, it
controls your want to. As I said
earlier, having yield it to it so often its will has displaced your will, so it
won’t even let you want to.
You know you should meditate, but somehow
you don’t want to. You know you should quit smoking but somehow you don’t want
to. You should stay away from that bad influence person but you don’t want to.
You should go and apologize to someone that you did wrong to, but you don’t
want to. Or to put it another way, you can’t rouse yourself to want to enough
to do it.
The third way it controls you is through
influence on the mind. It whispers suggestions, ideas, seductions, and threats
to the mind in order to dissuade you from doing what is right. You may want to
meditate and seek truth, but it tells you “that it’s too late, that the
meditation doesn’t work, that you’re not ready,” and so on. It suggests some
other type of self-improvement practice; it tells you to wait; or it says that
something bad will happen if you try to meditate properly. It is desperate. It
will try anything that works. It wants to keep you from meditating, from doing
what is right. It fears being observed for what it is, for then it will lose
power.
The devil has more tricks up his sleeve.
Should you begin to rouse yourself to do what is right and start to come to the
light, it becomes alarmed—it fears that you will come to the light and it will
be cast out into hell.
But since you have identified with its
secret whisperings and images, and since you have often gone along with it, you
think that its feels are your feelings. This is very common error.
Understand that it fears the light and fears
that you will come to it. It is not your fear. It is its fear in you. Separate
from it. Observe it. Realize what is not you. Then God’s light will come
steaming in and exorcise the things of darkness.
So should you come up to full awareness, if
the yearning of your soul is toward wanting to know the truth, then God will
give you the grace to be able to drag yourself to a chair and start meditating.
He will give you the grace to quietly say no to what previously you could not
say no to.
From now on, with God’s grace a constant
accompanying factor, when temptation pulls on you, your soul is awakened, and
your true yearning is permitted to stay clear. You see, the devil can’t control
your yearning for truth. He has had control of your will but only because your
yearning was insincere and because you were lost down there in the machinery of
your mind and in emotions.
From now on when dishonest appeals seek to
pull you into them, your soul is wakened and you are given the power to stand
back.
So you see it really a process of waking up
more and more to God and His beautiful reality. There are higher states of
consciousness which you will rise to as you progress, always with God’s help
and grace. But it begins with proper
meditation followed by basic realizations, as you awaken to the truth.
You see things as they are and yourself as
you are. It’s not a pretty picture, but now you won’t over react to what you
see because you realize that the light is showing you. You no longer identify
with the wrong, so when you see how you once went along with wrong, you groan
and marvel at how misguided you were. But now you see it with objectivity, as
you cleave to the light, identifying with the truth about the wrong.
You were once very naïve and emotional. So
you were easily misled into committing wrongs that you thought were in your
best interest. Now you see the truth about the lie that misled you. Eventually
you will see the source of the lie in all its hideousness, giving you all the
more reason to shrink from it and cling to the light.
When you have found the blessed state of
mind, your mind is flooded with light. As the days, weeks, months and years
pass—errors, subtle misbeliefs, lies, and what stand behind them surface for
review. Each time, light overcomes darkness. Old illnesses may seem to return,
but they are only being brought forward for healing in the light.
You will be able to relax. Now you know that
God is responsible for saving you. No more effort and struggle are needed. Good
will come to pass in its own time, without effort on your part. This will give
you even more time to marvel at God’s handiwork and await the good that will
come to pass. Now your future is filled with hope because God makes it so.