Prelude to the Practices
There is no such thing as impossible. All is possible.
Impossible is made by the limitation of our capacity
of understanding. Man, blinded by the law of
nature’s working, by the law of consequences which
he has known through his few years of life on earth,
begins to say, ‘This is possible and that is impossible.’
If he were to rise beyond limitations,
his soul would see nothing but possible.
—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The best way to make sure that a spiritual practice—any spiritual practice—doesn’t work, can’t work, won’t work, is simply not to do it. If you go to all the trouble of reading this whole book and, without trying a single practice, say, “Nah,” that doesn’t mean that the practices don’t work. It also doesn’t mean that there is not even any spiritual practice that will achieve the same results for you. To use Charles Kreiner’s words, if your mind is set on healing, you may discover those practices, or find them among the practices you already know—and then you can pass those on to the rest of us.
On the other hand, you may conscientiously try all the practices in this book, and some or all of them might not do thing one for you. When I was a wee child and not given much if any latitude in my food choices, my mother often enjoined me and my siblings to “take three bites, to learn to like it.” Eventually, I learned to like just about everything, except turnips. To this day I do not like turnips. So if there’s any practice here that you’ve taken the spiritual equivalent of three bites from, and as far as you’re concerned it just keeps coming up turnips or the equivalent thereof, that may just be your cue to seek others that will work for you and perhaps other people besides. With your mind set on healing, you’re sure to find something.
Most people like to cleanse and sanctify the space they’re working in. Plain housecleaning, just to start, is great. Perhaps you also like to light a candle and burn something aromatic, or spray water with a few drops of an essence of a purifying plant in it—cedar oil is a good choice for northern climes—if burning anything is out of the question in the place where you are. Or you can just wave a piece of cloth or anything else imbued with an intention of spiritual cleansing throughout the space.
A word, though, about white sage: white sage is a wonderful purifier that is becoming increasingly endangered by commercialization and commodification, so it can take going to some lengths to find any that is sourced in a good-karma way. The Indigenous people who cultivate it have asked us very nicely, more than once, to please not steal their plants, and this is not metaphorical: in June of 2022, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada reported that in Baja California, armed gangs were stealing truckloads of white sage plants from the Kiliwa people, sometimes violently, for cultivation elsewhere and sale on the Internet. That is the logical end-point of cultural appropriation: flat-out armed robbery.