Question: Does meditation include healing?

Sri Chinmoy: Meditation includes everything. In meditation we enlarge our consciousness until it includes everything in the universe. There is nothing we cannot achieve through meditation. Each individual has the capacity to heal if a person knows how to concentrate and meditate, and especially how to concentrate on physical ailments. There is no ailment in God's creation that he won't be able to cure. But we have to know if it is God's Will for us to heal someone. Otherwise, we may act like the hostile forces who want to break the rules of the divine Game.

There is a difference between healing that is done by an ordinary healer and healing done by a realised soul. The ordinary healer has learned some techniques for removing an illness from someone, but after some time he himself may become the victim of the diseases he heals in others. Why? Because he doesn't know where to throw the diseases after he has taken them away. If we take healing as a profession, if we just pray and think good thoughts for a few minutes and then go and cure someone, then we are acting against the divine Force, the divine Law. It is in our deepest meditation that we come to know what we should do and what we should not do. If the Supreme asks us to heal someone, at that time He gives us the power, and when He gives us the power, we are not responsible. The result immediately belongs to Him. But if we are responsible, we may be caught by the result of our own action. This is the difference between acting with the help of our meditation and acting out of our own so-called human compassion.

A realised soul only heals when God asks him to do so. He knows that in the cosmic Play of his Father, the Supreme, everything that happens is a necessary experience. He only intervenes when the Supreme asks him to. And when he heals someone's illness, he knows that he can throw the illness into the ocean, into his infinite Father who has commanded him to take it. He has no responsibility because he is an instrument of the Supreme. The ordinary healer thinks he is being supremely compassionate in healing others of their diseases, but is this healer more compassionate than God? God knows what experiences people need. If He wants to cure them of their illnesses, He will give the right instrument of His the power to do it successfully. In most cases, the Supreme will not use an ordinary aspirant to do healing, because if he is a sincere aspirant, the Supreme wants him to have realisation first. That is the most important thing.