The Chabad Process in Healing

By: Ya'akov Gerlitz

This paper is part of the Sefirotic Alignment Therapy series, the clinical application of the merkava. The merkava as taught by the Arizal (Rabbi Isaac Luria) is a method in which a person can align themselves with the ten sefirot in order to heal disease, maintain health and achieve proper spiritual perspective. As a clinician one can use the sefirot to help derive at and refine a diagnosis and help choose appropriate treatment. The methods presented here are taken from the chabad module of our class "healing and the ten sefirot."

Step One. Preparation

When counseling it is crucial to adopt an attitude of true brotherly love and a feeling of commonality with your patient. This type of love is possible when you have true love between your soul and the person you are helping, without any trace of condensation. You must maintain focused concentration and deep inner silence, clearing you mind from all extraneous thoughts. This process also requires humility before Hashem. By focusing all your energies and silencing your mind in order to help the person in front of you, you will create a spiritual vacuum that will allow Hashem into the therapeutic process and insight to be drawn down.

Your attitude during the healing process should be one of "Paradising." As Rabbi Yitzchak Schwartz explains "paradising is enlisting and compacting the totality of yourself into the moment, no matter what you are doing." It can be done during constricted consciousness (where G-d feels far away from you), expanded consciousness (where G-d feels close to you), eating, in short all the time.

The challenge of paradising during the healing process is to be totally present to your surrounding while being guided by your inner Divine voice. The major obstacles are:

• worries about the future
• anxieties of the past
• disconnection of the higher and lower soul, with the lower soul not being onboard. (The lower soul is the playful childlike part of us.)

Step two: Holistic Absorption

Develop the art of "holistic absorption," in which you take in the complete, wide-angle picture. This means that you absorb yourself into the person's narrative, fully empathizing with him. His story becomes your story. In this way, you can properly understand him from his perspective. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch zt"l calls this process "subjective identification."

Some people prefer to write as the patient talks. One excellent technique for writing during this part of the session is to use a right brained "spider chart." The essential point here is to be able to place all information holistically on the same page so that you will be able to process the information more efficiently during meditative analysis. In a sense you are making a painting from the narrative.

Holistic absorption is not just for counseling. In fact, it can be used during a physical examination. A few years back I was speaking to a colleague of mine who is a physician. He described that he listens through a stethoscope, by "being" inside his patient's body; he doesn't just listen to the lungs, he "feels" his patient's lungs.

Step Three. Yearning

Isolate the issues that need to be healed or the diagnosis that needs to be made. Yearn for Hashem to give you the clarity to be able to help the person in front of you. This yearning creates a void (challal) so that you may access your inner "small still voice." In a sense the yearning "pulls down" the information. This yearning will help you with the next stage of isolating the Omek Hamusag.

Step four. Omek Hamusag

Now that you have the large holistic picture you need to filter it by meditating and arrive at the Omek Hamusag, "the essential point." The omek Hamusag needs to resonate with the central core idea and capture the essence of the patient's narrative. If the preceding stage of holistic absorption was characterized by subjective identification, this stage is one of objective distance.

You arrive at the omek Hamusag by meditating on the question, "what is the single most unique or distinguishing point that pervades this patient's story." The answer will be the omek Hamusag. This requires deep meditation with all your mental faculties, weeding out any irrelevant thoughts or feelings that may negatively impact your attitude or understanding towards your patient. In this deep thought you will merit Divine help (with G-d's grace) in arriving at the omek Hamusag.

Once you have the omek Hamusag, you have the power to treat. There is power in the singular dimension omek Hamusag word or idea.

Step Five. Treatment Plan

Once you have arrived at the omek hamusag it needs to be packaged in a way that will benefit your patient by putting it into a cohesive treatment plan. This is accomplished by synthesizing the information with the healing techniques and skills you posses. A treatment plan takes all of your therapeutic skills and meshes them with the issues at hand thereby dictating which therapies to use and which issues to focus on.

In Conclusion

This process is one aspect of using the sefirot as a therapeutic tool. We encourage you to send in your feedback on how this technique has helped you and what, if any, modifications you made to make it more suitable for you. The mutual sharing of ideas is in keeping with the goals of the Jewish Healing Foundation which is to build a network of like-minded healers eager to practice authentic, Torah- based Jewish healing.

If you would like to learn more about Sefirotic Alignment Therapy please visit our lecture page at www.JewishHealing.com/seminars.html

To contact Ya'akov please email him at yaakov@jewishhealing.com or use this form.