I used to direct the usual Ignatian Retreats giving more emphasis on many hours of praying which was very much liked by all. In 1991, a group of sisters came for their Silver Jubilee Retreat for a month to Belgaum. One among them was a very sick person. She suffered from arthritis, asthma, chronic ulcers, always feeling cold, even in summer she had to use warm clothes including socks. At the age of 18 she had a paralytic stroke. Though recovered, her one hand and leg did not regain full normalcy. She could not attend the normal time-table of the retreat. What she could do only was to talk about her past life's many many sufferings and feel sad. She had plenty of fears. She even under went exorcism as part of treatment to make her well. Towards the end of the retreat she told me that her hand became normal! Crooked figures straightened. After a few days her leg too became normal! It was very difficult for me to believe the cure as I had not come across this type of cure in my earlier retreats. I had seen many charismatic healings, but this was entirely a new type of healing for me as we had never prayed over this person during the retreat for healing. Only she was helped to handle her negative feelings of sadness, fears, guilt and anger. Her asthma disappeared, a person who could not touch cold water without getting wheezing started taking cold water bath in the mornings without any asthma problems. It took 3 months for me to make myself believe this healing was true and since 1991 till today, she is free from her years old illnesses.
 This made to reflect about the process of healing and I came to realise the role of negative feelings in our life and how we have to handle them for our mental and physical health. Since then, the 1st week of St.Ignatius' Retreat Scheme became more important for self purification from every sort of negative feeling which does harm to us. It is not enough to make a good and sincere confession with good resolutions. One has to go deep into one's past life experiences to purify one self. It is by going into deeper levels of feelings, I came to realize that conscious level forgiving is insufficient and only through working over the negative feelings of hurts and anger, one can reach real forgiving from the depth of one's heart where the memory of the hurt doesn't hurt in any way.
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In our usual retreats, we do not generally enter into the feeling level. In the conscious level we can do a lot and feel that we have been purified and our contact with God in prayer is all real and genuine:- our forgiveness is genuine as we make a very sincere confession. What is missed out is that in our usual type of retreats we do not enter into the sub-conscious level. Only when we enter into the sub-conscious level, we begin to become aware that though we forgive, our negative feelings have not disappeared. In fact, one is shocked to discover how much anger and resentment and deep seated unwillingness to forgive and accept and be good to the 'enemy' from the depth of one's being
Only when we work out our negative feelings we become internally free. Though we think we accept our parents, brothers, sisters, caste, economic status, body, sex, sexuality, complexion, height, weight, intellectual qualities, deficiencies, limitations, losses, pains, crosses, sicknesses, sins, jealousy, mistakes committed, we will discover what we do in the conscious level is not fully real but quite much imagined. It is easy for a woman to say in the conscious level, I am proud to be a female as God has created me! But if she goes into the sub-conscious level she would definitely find it is not all that easy and there may be plenty of conflicts, resistance, anger even towards God for having been created as a female person especially in our Indian context. So the need to become aware of the need of purifying and redeeming our sub-conscious. |
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