In part 1 of this interview, PATRICK FLEURY explored the question, “What is health?” and how we can flow with the cycles of Nature. In part 2, he looks at life, illness and death, and our immortal nature.
IN CONVERSATION WITH
PATRICK FLEURY
Q: What happens with someone who is chronically ill? As a healer, how do you work with them to optimize their health?
PF: If someone has a chronic disease, a bad disease, it is an opportunity to observe what is permanent and what is impermanent. We know that everyone is going to die one day, but what is going to die? Only the body, the energy that comes with the body, some aspects of the personality, but the real identity will not die. So for me what is important is to work with a person to help them be in connection with their real identity first. And to show them that they are not going to die because there is something permanent there, whether in a form or without form.
If they are connected with this aspect, they are more relaxed, they are no more afraid of death, because the main problem for health is the fear – there are many emotions, but the worst one is fear. If they are rid of the fear, health can come more easily. If they cannot survive an illness, it is not such a big problem, because they know that the soul has already programmed it.
It may be difficult to accept that when a soul comes into a body at the time of conception it has already decided where it is going to be born, which family, which country, which situation, and has its own destiny, deciding also when it is going to die. So when I take care of my patients, and there are some I cannot cure, I am able to say, “Relax. You have already decided when you are going to die. Whether it happens because of illness or an accident, you will die because your soul will withdraw itself from your body, from your personality. So now, have an intense life! Take every minute of this life, this opportunity, to be really present, to be there. Also to live, to do what you have not been able to do before.” When my patients are able to feel it, then many things can change with health also.
But what is most important is that the doctor, the physician or the healer has to be in that state him or herself’ not just to convey it, but to share it. When we do not have fear, patients feel it. When we are convinced about what we say, they feel it.
So again we come back to meditation – we have to feel it, we have to experience it. If we feel that something in us is immortal, where is the problem? It is just a change of form.
Q: What about working with people you know have an opportunity to recover?
PF: There are always possibilities to recover if the soul decides it can continue in this particular life for its evolution; but sometimes people are stuck. In India, they know very well about reincarnation. In early Christianity and Judaism, they also knew about reincarnation. Our evolution takes many, many lives. So sometimes a person finishes a certain program and has to change form, like changing a suit of clothing, takes another body, so that they have the possibility to go ahead. But having said that, we have to make the most of the present opportunity, so when I treat a person I try to cure them the best possible way. I do not go into a fatalistic approach to the philosophy of karma. This kind of philosophy is helpful when it comes to simply accepting events, accepting ourselves, relaxing and taking some distance from the fear of death, which is the main fear people have.
When a patient is really relaxed, the energy in the body is working very well, and so it is much easier for them to regenerate their whole system. So sometimes I have seen miracles. For example, I remember one old lady for whom the doctors had said after opening her up in surgery, “There is nothing we can do.” She was told that she would die within three months. Her daughter brought her to me just to help her, to accompany her, and of course I was praying for her. A few months later she was still there, and the doctors could not find the sickness anymore. I did not do anything, but she had another opportunity to continue. Beforehand she was very religious, but very strict and rigid in her beliefs, and then she started meditation and made a lot of progress in her relationship with God. She passed away four-and-a-half years later from a stroke.
I went to the hospital to see her before she died, and she was in a coma, so her daughter said, “Maybe we should stop all the machines she is on to keep her live.” But I was looking at her, and still her being was transforming in front of my eyes, her life force was there, and she was preparing herself to leave that body. I can tell you it was wonderful.
It is about the way we have of looking at people and sickness. Sickness can help us to understand who we are, to overcome many things, and to be more ourselves. And there is another aspect: today many people are not living in tune with Nature, so they are eating artificial food and they have lost harmony in their daily cycles of life. There is a lot of stress and ambition, which we see in politics and in countries fighting for oil, for water, for this and that. They want to be richer and richer, and this is for me the major sickness of human beings. Look at how we train our children; we want them to be elite and sadly we don’t let them be in contact with who they really are. And then we want the elite to be at the best level of their performance, and if they are not there we say they are past it, they are over, and we throw them away. There is a difference between being the best and being excellent. We have to be excellent.
If we are really trying to be the best we can be, at our level, to continue to excel, we need not compete ith others. When we compete with others, it produces a lot of sickness. If we are to understand the base of any sickness, it is because of our way of life. In fact many doctors and healers only treat the symptoms that appear after an illness manifests, but if we want to be healthy we have to change our way of life. First, we have to eat good food, balanced food, local fresh seasonal food. Why? It gives us the energy of the season so that we can be in tune with Nature in that season. The food gives the correct message to our body. We also need to exercise. There are options like Pilates, Yoga, Tai Chi, to walk, to run, to breathe. It is very important.
We also have to go to the next stage and deal with emotions. These emotions are coming from feelings, from real feelings, and so we have to be in contact with our inner feelings. And the best one islove; and compassion, to do good for others, to be benevolent. If you are like that, you are sure to be healthy, but it cannot be artificial. It has to come from inside, to be in contact. Ram Chandra used to say that emotions are the smoke of real feelings. So to be in contact with these real feelings is what matters.
The problem in the Occident is that we want to ‘know’ ourselves, and to develop the ‘self’, and it is a jail. It is better to try to be free of this jail, and this freedom is known as liberation. So if we truly want to be healthy, we have to be in contact with the real inner being, the one who is permanent. Here in France we speak of the soul, in India the atma, and the Chinese speak of shen. The words don’t matter – that is not important – but if we exclude or refuse that spiritual level of existence, that major aspect of who we are, it is like being handicapped.
Then above that is the level of Reality, in which we are in contact with everything in this world, and every aspect of life. So we come back to this statement that, “The whole of creation, the whole universe is within us.”
INTERVIEWED BY ELIZABETH DENLEY
