Spirituality: What Place in Wellness?
Author: Bernard Willemsen

(This article was first published in "The Source" Health and Wellness Journal, December 1999.)

Bernard Willemsen, author of "Don’t Water the Stick: The Path of the Psyche," and "Beyond a Shadow: The Path of the Spirit."

I once asked a group of people what the word spirituality meant to them. They gave definitions such as "getting in touch with my higher self," "something to do with God," "being considerate of my neighbour," "an altered state of mind when I experience myself as being apart from the physical world," "the feeling that something greater than me is in control," "connecting with my inner truth," and, "something I feel when I’m outdoors in nature."

Many of us think of spirituality as something mystical, beyond our grasp, or something to do with a higher, invisible power or intelligence. Consequently, we believe that, in order to be spiritual, we have to remove ourselves from the necessities of everyday life. But it is in those very necessities that the essence of spirituality lies. Leading a spiritual life means taking responsibility for ourselves at the most primal level. It means rooting ourselves firmly in reality and developing an understanding of who we are and how we relate to our environment.

The idea that an understanding of spirituality begins at a primal level, and not an elevated or ‘higher’ level, can be illustrated in the following way. Consider a forest. If we look at it from above the trees, we can only see the foliage. To really see the forest, we have to stand among the trees, not above them. From this vantage point, we can see the roots, the trunks, and the limbs of the trees. We can feel the moist soil and watch the wildlife and the insects, all of which help to maintain the life of the trees. It is the magnificent foliage that gathers sunlight in order to give us oxygen, but without the intricate system of branches, trunks and roots, the foliage could not exist. In fact, the entire forest started out with a single seed that, in all likelihood, was carried there by the wind or in the droppings of an animal.

Just as the forest is more than a canopy of leaves, spirituality is more than the contemplation of thoughts and ideas. Spirituality begins with the acknowledgment that we too are carriers of the seed and that our sexuality is integral to our being. This is not to say that thought is outside the realm of spirituality. On the contrary, it is the essence of spirituality. But it’s not so much the object of our thoughts as the way in which we think that reflects our spirituality.

There’s a story I like to tell of a woman whose husband and children put money aside to help her buy a coat for the winter. After buying the coat, however, she carries on thinking and talking about another, more luxurious coat that she saw but couldn’t afford. This woman has chosen to be unhappy, denying both herself and her family the joy of celebrating her purchase, preventing her husband and children, who struggled to put money aside throughout the year, from enjoying the fruits of their efforts. Worst of all, her self-centredness made them feel that they failed to make her happy and, as a result, an opportunity to nurture the children’s developing egos was lost.When a person fails to place value on the things that she does have, or on the labour that enabled her to obtain those things, she has no foundation upon which to build a spiritual life.

Spirituality is about taking responsibility for the energies that we send out both through our thoughts and our auras, realizing that our state of mind, whether loving or angry, has an impact on those near us. There’s the story about a person who went to visit his aunt who was in hospital, recovering from an operation. It was a cold and rainy day, he really didn’t have the time to take away from his job, and in truth he wasn’t particular fond of that aunt, but he went anyway. Though feeling irritated, he greeted her with a smile. His aunt was glad for the company, but after he left, she had to ask for more painkillers. The energy he unconsciously projected did not help her to heal, but instead aggravated her already compromised system.

This man’s motivation for visiting his aunt was not to give pleasure but, rather, to fulfill an obligation; he felt he should go. As a result, the energy that he passed on to his aunt had a harmful effect rather than a healing one. He may have even believed that visiting his aunt was a spiritual act.

Getting caught up in the ‘shoulds’, which often derives from feelings of guilt and unworthiness, makes us do things for the wrong reasons and prevents us from evaluating our feelings and actions honestly. It is not, for example, being spiritual to deny our own needs and invest our energies in those who are never satisfied and give us nothing in return. Nor is it spiritual to waste our energies on fruitless and unhealthy patterns of thought.

Spirituality thus has a direct impact on our physical and psychological well-being. The origins of many illnesses can be found in the relationship between the mind and what I call the "body psyche," that is to say, the energies associated with the physical body. When these energies are depleted or blocked, not only is the body’s ability to heal itself greatly diminished, but the body’s ability to prevent illness is compromised.

If our goal is wellness, we need to become aware of what we are doing with our minds. Are our thoughts productive, or do we spin our wheels, regurgitating old hurts and resentments? Do we strive for a vibrant energy flow, or do we allow our bodies to become the dumping ground for pools of stagnating mind energy? Our bodies are like a fish swimming in a stream. If the stream is polluted, the fish will be tainted; if it is pure, the fish will be healthy.








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Ben Willemsen, human energist and parapsychologist, is the founder of the Centre for Human Energy, created in 1987 to promote an understanding of the powerful role of the psyche in our daily lives, and the way in which it controls our ability or inability to heal.

Born in Rotterdam in 1936, Ben studied Ship Engineering in Amsterdam and immigrated to Canada where he worked for more than twenty years in the engineering field. At the age of 41, following an extraordinary psychic awakening, Ben was led to a path of psychic development and research in human energy.

Ben is the author of the highly-acclaimed, "Don't Water the Stick: The Path of the Psyche," and "Beyond a Shadow: The Path of the Spirit," the first two volumes in a series on human energy.

Email: bernard@humanenergy.net
Website: www.humanenergy.net

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