Threefold Healing and Wholeness

I am at Unity Village this week enjoying the final series of classes required for me to be a Licensed Unity Teacher.  That brings me one step closer to ordination and I am full of gratitude.  My days begin at 8:00 a.m. with four hours of class focused on prayer, both principle and practice.  It is a wonderful way to begin the day.  As part of the class, we attend the daily prayer service at the Silent Unity Chapel.  It is a present reminder that the Unity movement was founded on the healing power of prayer as was demonstrated by co-founder, Myrtle Fillmore.  While Charles Fillmore is often given credit for advancing the movement, it was Myrtle who began the prayer ministry upon which it rests. 

The following is an article I wrote last year after attending a class entitled “Myrtle and Charles on Healing and Wholeness.”  One of the texts for the class is Myrtle Fillmore’s Healing Letters which is a collection of letters Mrs. Fillmore wrote in response to prayer requests that were sent to Silent Unity.  I was particularly struck by one of her letters that affirms the power of prayer, but seems to dissuade the writer from the belief that it is somehow magical.  It affirms that while prayer is a powerful practice, it is not magic, and one must take personal responsibility for his or her own demonstration of wholeness.

In her response to two statements from the writer in which he asks to be “sent some healing vibrations” and “to relieve us through Silent Unity healing,” Mrs. Fillmore reminds us all that the path to healing and wholeness is three-fold, involving all aspects of our being - spirit, mind and body.  This three-fold path to healing and wholeness applies to all aspects of our life experiences, including physical health, financial well-being, self-expression through our chosen vocation and avocation, and our relationships with others.  If we are to demonstrate the full expression of all the Good that God is as us, we must realize our Truth in spirit, mind and body.

We know that the spiritual Truth is that each of us is an expression of Divine Intelligence, Substance, and Supply, that which we call “God.”  As the allegorical story in the book of Genesis tells us, we are created in the image and likeness of God.  Not only that, but we are created to live in the Kingdom of God represented in the story as the Garden of Eden where all is provided, there is no need, and there is nothing lacking.  As in this story, God gave it all at the moment of creation, and we eternally exist in this state of wholeness and perfection.  We only “separate” ourselves from this state of being as we hold the belief that we can be separate.  It is a state that can only happen in our minds.  Thus, we must keep our minds stayed on the Truth.

The mind, as we understand it, is more than our thoughts; it also includes our feeling nature.  Since our thoughts and feelings are so closely interlinked, it is difficult, if not impossible to determine which comes first.  There are those who assert that thoughts elicit feelings, and others will argue the reverse.  Because they happen almost simultaneously in most cases, it is of little concern which arises first.  For the purposes of healing and wholeness, it only matters that we are aware of our thoughts and feelings and intervene on those that are not in alignment with our Truth.  Often, our feeling nature will alert us when we are out of harmony with our spiritual Truth.  Any feeling that does not have its foundation in peace, love or joy can be our signal that our thoughts are off track and are in need of investigation and realignment.  We establish a consciousness of healing and wholeness as we keep our thoughts and thus our feelings in alignment the Truth of our being.  It is this consciousness which establishes the foundation for the demonstration of life experiences that embody the fullness of our Truth as it opens us to receive the divine ideas that we are to bring forth into manifestation and sets the stage for our action.

The body, or the physical, is the final aspect of establishing the demonstration of Truth in any aspect of our lives.  From the consciousness of Truth, we open ourselves to the wisdom, understanding and imagination, as well as other faculties of our nature which co-founder, Charles Fillmore, indentified as “The Twelve Powers of Man.”  We open to the guidance that is available to us in the quiet of our peaceful, loving, joyous minds, and we use our powers of strength, will, and power to move forward, and take the action that we are called to take in order to bring forth into the physical realm the manifestation of a body, career, relationships, and bank account that mirror the Truth of our nature as God in expression. 

Thus, spirit, mind and body must be three-in-one, as one, in order that we may demonstrate healing and wholeness in all areas of our lives.  Myrtle Fillmore encourages us to, “Daily declare that your spiritual life and world, your mental life and world, your physical life and world are unified and that you are expressing harmoniously the ideas of the Christ Mind on these three planes.”