Stephan Schwartz
Introduction to Henry Reed's
The Intuitive Heart
by
Stephan Schwartz*
Henry Reed has written a gentle and compassionate book centered on the heart, yet informed by his years of first class academic training and research. I've known Henry a long time. And over those decades have watched as he worked the labyrinth of his own pilgrimage, evolving from a head centered academic, to a teacher and counselor whose heart has opened while his head has stayed engaged. In this book, I think, he has distilled the essence of what he has learned on his own journey.
One of the things he shares is that "you already carry within you a natural intuitive ability." Based on my own life-experience, as well as my 25 years of research into the nature of consciousness and the relationship of science and spirit, and the research I have seen from a dozen other laboratories around the world, it seems clear to me that this is true. Intuition, which I define as psychic awareness moderated by informed judgment arising from experience, is not something you get from someone else. Rather it is a facet of your own abilities which you nurture, just as you take native musical talent and develop it into the skill that lets you play an instrument. Only in this case, you, yourself, are the instrument, and the music is your life.
What I particularly like about what Henry has done in this book is that his approach to working with your intuition is not theoretical. I don't mean research evidence, although he references a bit of that; rather it is that what he is writing about developed and was tested during dozens of workshops and seminars. Through that medium he worked out a simple six-step program that people seem to have used with consistently reported success. No small feat for a person who has set himself up as a guide. The steps are simple: Step one, learn from your breath; step two, make the heart connection; step three, invite a memory; step four, tell your story; step five, search your heart for wisdom; step six, learn from feedback.
He spells these out early in the book, and the rest of the text elaborates on how to put them into use, with some wonderful, and often very moving personal stories. One comes away thinking: "Hey, I can do that' nothing scary there." And that's the point.
One of the sad things about our modern world is that we have so little to hang on to in the way of shared ceremonial experience. It is a missing component in so many of our lives: the special event shared with friends that marked a passage, revealed a long sought insight, or helped unravel the meaning of a transition. Henry has a special fondness for meaningful ritual and the other thing I like about The Intuitive Heart is that he describes several of his rituals in such simple terms that he makes it easy to think about doing them.
I particularly appreciated the Dream Tent experience, where a normally ordinary space is consecrated to the purpose of having important dreams. Henry's description retains echoes of the 4th Century BCE Temple of the god of healing, Asklepius, whose principal shrine was at Epidaurus on the eastern coast of the Argolid in the Mediterranean's northeastern Peleponnese. During the time of the Greeks, men and women would come to the temple in search of healing, both mental and physical. As with Henry's Dream Tent, they would sleep in a special area, known then as the Abaton, asking for a dream. The process was called incubation and based on the inscriptions which come down to us, as well as Henry's modern reports, it seems to almost always work. The next morning a member of the specially trained cadre of temple attendants known as the Therapeutae (from the Greek verb therapeuo "to heal" or "to serve" ' from whence the modern word therapeutics) would help the dreamer interpret the dream. In Henry's case it was himself, and the others in the ceremony. From the insights derived during the discussion at the ancient temple a regime of healing would emerge. If the problem was physical the program often involved diet, cleansing, exercise, bodywork, and herbal preparations. Does it sound familiar? It should. The Edgar Cayce Readings espoused a very similar approach in the early years of the last century, and it's not so very different from the complementary medicine many doctors practise today. Henry adds a nice twist to this though with his Dream Helper Ceremony, in which one person dreams for another. This act of service is predicated on his belief, with which I fully concur, that one key to spiritual growth lies in small acts of service.
There is only one mountain, and it an illusion, so how we get up it and the path we pick is largely a matter of personal taste. One could do much worse during the course of one's pilgrimage than picking Henry's gentle ceremonies, with their emphasis on helping others to help oneself.
*Stephan Schwartz is the author of Secret Vaults of Time: Psychic Archaeology and the Quest for Man's Beginnings.
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