How can a ‘pure’ Nembutsu healing be practiced, or how can specific unhealed aspects of the mind be incorporated into practice? There are two ways. One is for a specific memory or repeated mental sequence that keeps on coming up. You can ‘freeze’ a representative frame of this, as though it was a picture. Then you simply ‘place it at the Buddha’s feet’.
What I mean by this is you create your inner shrine, and already there are the pictures of your intentions around the walls. You place a small ‘mental photograph’ representing the whole unhealed state at the feet of the statue, and by implication, there is the intent that it be healed. You concentrate as normal, and feel ‘high’ emotion and joy as is usually practiced, with the faith that the mind is unwinding the energy around this ‘knot’, without further input from your ‘self power’. Obviously this needs to be combined with a mental diet. With a strong conviction that this higher part of your mind or energy or however you want to consider it, has taken it as a wish and has answered, and so it will never be dwelt on in the mind again.
Another thing you can do is to make a composite image. This is a symbolic representation of a state, or time, that you are asking to be ‘cleansed’. The advantage of this is that the ‘brush is wider’, it can cover a wider aspect or time. To take my own example, my difficult upbringing. Well much of it was based around the school I went to, but also generally the home town I was brought up in. (I spent my life away from there). So I had to wear a uniform at school and the badge on the front had some symbols of the town. One is a castle, as it was famous for an old castle of which only the outer wall now remains near the railway station. There were also three gold keys and a red rose, all on a maroon background, which is the town ‘colour’, and so the football team wears this etc. You see variants of these symbols and colours all around the town and so there is a strong association for me with all of these symbols. So I imagine a picture of just the castle, it’s kind of an artistic rendition of the turrets as used to be on my uniform, and a single gold key along the bottom. The symbolism of the key for me is ‘the golden key’ a book about surrendering problems and just not thinking about them. I read it and the day I finished I found an archetypal gold key on the floor walking home and have kept it on my person ever since as a symbolic reminder to simply not think about problems.
The formal healing practice is the same. The image stays on my ‘inner shrine’ during chanting. But the picture is also a replacement thought. If I catch any kind of related memory or thought about this whole time period in my mind, I ‘freeze’ the action on the picture and shrink it down to postcard size and put it on the shrine for ‘other power’ to deal with, then I ‘hold’ the composite picture of the castle in consciousness, taking up the whole mental screen. I imagine that around the length of my physical body and within me to locate it and give it some ‘cubic reality’ and hold it long enough until I get the feeling that it has done it’s job and whatever state was trying to manifest a mental picture has lost its momentum and there is no more ‘thought pressure’ trying to return.
This is a background mental activity and I can carry on with pretty much anything while I do that. The time needed to ‘hold’ it to replace the thought is around a minute in my experience. There is another, simplified, more direct method DIRECT CROWN SURRENDER. Being mindful and focused on the body for a long time I use the language of ‘high’ feelings, meaning sensations in the body that are ‘wholesome’ or happy and leading to awakening are higher in the body and the sensations generally are rising upwards (and vice verse when I’m off course with something). Often, with a strong sense of surrender or aspiration (towards awakening) there is a very distinct feeling above my crown, almost like a ball of static electricity is contracting the skin there. I use an energy technique which I detailed elsewhere, to directly stimulate this, but just putting my awareness in that location can ‘activate’ that higher energy sometimes.
Another thing I sometimes do is to use THE CROWN CHAKRA ITSELF AS THE REPLACEMENT THOUGHT. So rather than hold a specific image of Nembutsu to replace an unhealed image, I switch to sensation on the crown, which is where the highest energy in my body is, so in a way it is a similar surrender but energetic rather than visual. And of course it isn’t a zero sum game, there can be a combination of the two techniques, whatever works to let go of the energy.
There are a few other things you can keep on doing to assist the healing journey. One thing I do is ‘escape into reality’. As it is I had this horrible childhood and it resurfaces with resentment and bitterness. But I spent my life living in Asia, and now am settled in a country I love. The worst day here is a lot better than my best day in my home town. When, in the present, these painful memories come up it is often when I am not too busy… otherwise I would have been too busy to daydream!
Anyway, I become very, very mindful. I look at the mental pictures, the bad memories IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, I locate where they are ‘in cubic reality’, where the mental screen is existing IN THIS PRESENT MOMENT in relation to my body, and also the feeling and physical sensations which the pictures are causing. Then I am also very mindful of the outside, what my physical senses are experiencing in this PRESENT MOMENT. So I’m not LOST IN THOUGHT anymore. Before I was 90% in my mind and 10% here and I flip that to be 95% here, aware that I am not in the past there, I am here with pictures on a mental screen hovering around my eyes, in the tropics, under a palm tree or having lunch with the smells and sounds and tastes of the country I love and I can fairly easily invoke a strong sense of gratitude, and this is the essence of it. It’s not having these mental pictures at all which is the problem, but being powerless against the state they are associated with. If they come up and the associated state is retrained to be presence and gratitude, then we are all good!
There is another fairly radical way to heal long-standing issues, and you will either get this or you will not. Remember, THE MIND IS A PLACE, it doesn’t feel that way now because you imagine things embodied in physical reality and you are 95% here with the physical, and you are 5% ‘there’, and so it feels faint, and wispy and far away and distant. But other times, it’s more ‘real’, in deep meditation, hypnosis etc. and you are 50/50 in two worlds, and if you progress with spirituality (or perhaps already) then you’ve had 99% ‘there’ experiences, fully opening your spiritual senses in another world.
But your fixed self is also an illusion. In a sense, when you look into your mind and it’s ‘just imagination’ there is another version of ‘you’ in there, a real you, in a real world where you are the divine creator. When these pictures of you in ‘your’ past come to your mind you don’t have to think of them as a dead past. It’s a living past, a different reality in the multiverse, and there is another version of you there actually suffering, and YOU ARE A GUARDIAN ANGEL, you have the power of creation there, to go back and comfort or help that other you in that other reality.
Another thing I do I call ‘juxtaposition’. I take something or someone from now back in time with me. For example, I had a friend here in Asia, I lost her a year ago, but for a few years I really liked her, liked to see her, and all my thoughts and memories about her are from a different world to how I grew up. I am a wholly different person and I met this wholly different person who was wild and energetic and spirited and I think back forty years to this prison of a school I was once in. I have this memory of being alone at a solitary desk, staring out the window at a greenhouse where they grew plants but they were all dead, and there were no lessons or anything to do, I was just holding reading books designed for retards because the teachers were sexist, racists whose job it was to make sure I failed at everything, but I used to hide novels in the book so I could read and pass the time. But there was still an overwhelming feeling of utter boredom.
But I imagine taking my friend from now back into that time, I see another version of me trapped in the past and I’ve introduced him to this wild, beautiful, spirited woman from the future and left her there to brighten his world, keep him company, fight his battles with him when he’s abused, and the great thing is that it’s real. There’s a version of her there now and I rarely see that past without her there with him, defending him and entertaining him and giving him the will to keep going. And so the process of healing is the same thing, I am not pushing that memory away, but I am changing the state that it exists within.