excerpts

Excerpts From How People Heal

How Healing Works
Adapted from chapter 4, Anatomy of the Soul.

From a healer's perspective, energy and consciousness underlies our
bodies. This energy is called chi in China and prana in India. It surrounds
and permeates our bodies. It is more fundamental even than our physical body.

As former NASA scientist-turned healer Barbara Brennan explains in
Light Emerging, "You are energy. You are not in your physical body--
your physical body is in you."

Most disease, whether it is a physical illness or a chronic life pattern,
is associated with blocks and disruptions in this flow of energy. When
a healer opens a person's energy and creates more flow, it can affect a person physically, emotionally, mentally and/or spiritually.

A person may, after a healing, have more awareness of emotional patterns
relating to a physical problem after a healing. A person may also experience
more rapid healing of a wound or illness. A spiritual shift might involve
feeling peace, love and connection to one's true essence.

Healing Research
Adapted from Chapter 2, Child's Play.

Researchers only began studying the effects of energy healing, also
called intentional healing and spiritual healing, in the laboratory in the
1960s. By 1998 more than 177 controlled studies of energy healing
had been completed. Of these studies, 72.9 percent found significant
effects in the judgment of Dr. Daniel Benor, an American psychiatrist
who reviewed them in Healing Research: Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality.

Dr. Benor began collecting the data after a colleague invited him to witness
a healing session by MariEl healer Ethel Lombardi in 1980. Dr. Benor says he was a total skeptic-until he saw her do a healing. "She brought about a
change in one hour in a young man that I couldn't explain," he recalls.

He says Lombardi did not even touch the lesion under the young man's
nipple, which was the ostensible reason for the session." As she was doing
the laying on of hands, she said, 'You have some unfinished business with
your father,' " recalls Dr. Benor. "She'd never met him before. He nodded
and started sobbing. She looked at me and winked, as if to say, 'Top that
in psychiatry.' "

Dr. Benor says he palpitated the lesion before and after the session. He
claims that it shrank by a half-centimeter and grew softer after the treatment. "Imagine: This woman cut through in no time, what it would take me years
or at least months of work to do as a psychiatrist," he says. "So I started looking at the research."

The studies, which he gathered over nearly a decade, show that healing
treatments affect the growth of hemoglobin, cancer cells, bacteria, human
hormones and enzyme levels in vitro. They also demonstrate that healing
influences the growth and health of fungus, plants and animals. Other
studies found that healing reduced hypertension.

One study even documented reduced symptoms in a group of men who
had suffered heart attacks and then received prayers, while in the hospital, from people they had never met. More recently, a follow-up study of
prayer and heart patients, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, also found significant results.

Another study done at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco,
of 40 end-stage AIDS patients, found that the patients who received distant
healing had fewer illnesses and fewer hospitalizations and improvements in
their moods, compared to the control group.

The National Institutes of Health is now funding two large studies of
distant healing, one involving glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer, and the
other involving AIDS patients. Medical researchers at Duke and Harvard
Universities are also studying prayer and laying on of hands.

Some doctors, like Larry Dossey, editor of Alternative Therapies, author
of Healing Words, and the former chief of staff at Humana Hospital in
Dallas, Texas, consider these studies irrefutable proof of the power of spiritual healing. Dr. Dossey calls these studies, "one of the best kept
secrets in medical science."

Dr. Benor is equally impressed. "If psi healing were a medication, it would
be accepted as a potent treatment by mainstream science," he asserts. "This
is especially so in the view of the absence of side effects."

A Skeptic Tries A Healing
Adapted from Chapter 3, “Shifting Paradigms”

Finally, in February 1995, I decided to see what it would be like to have
a healing treatment myself. My attitude was: prove it. Diane Arnold, a cheerful, blonde woman in her 40s, was then a newly-minted graduate
of the Brennan school and a former general partner in a brokerage firm, seemed like a down-to-earth person as she led me upstairs to the parlor room of her Brooklyn town house. As she sat me down on her couch,
she asked me to describe my "presenting complaint." Although I have suffered from frequent migraine headaches for most of my life, I didn't
think of myself as having any physical problems. But like so many people,
I certainly wanted to be happier. I especially wanted to understand my romantic relationships better.

Arnold seemed to feel that she could help. (I was dubious. I had been through years of psychoanalysis. I understood some of the causes of my anxiety, but I had not changed in any fundamental way.) I lay down on the table in her small healing room, and closed my eyes. After a few minutes I had the strangest sensation of something spinning inside of me--but not in
my body. I sat up with a start. Arnold was holding a pendulum over my abdomen, which esoteric literature describes as the location of the third chakra. I had felt my chakra spin. It turned out to be the highlight of the session. Other than that, I just felt so relaxed, it was almost like I had
been drugged.

By the end of the session, I even wondered if I had made up the sensation of my chakra spinning. Nevertheless, I tried a few more sessions. They
were all pleasant. I drifted off into a kind of sleep. I was in a good mood afterwards. Arnold described being guided to draw flowering vines on my "etheric" body during one session. After another, she told me three goddesses came and did the healing while she stood and "held the space." She'd never heard of one of the Goddesses. "Sw---she says her name is Sweet Mother," Arnold reported. She had a lovely poetic imagination. I
had to give her that. But I was losing patience. I didn't see any particular benefit. The fifth session, which I assumed would be my last, was the
turning point. And I almost walked out on it.

On that visit Arnold announced that she would work on my neck. "You
have quills in your neck," she said. I looked at her: Was she utterly crazy? Then it occurred to me she was speaking metaphorically. But no. "There really are quills," Arnold insisted. "Someone's been throwing barbs at you when you try to speak your truth. The quills are on the right side," she continued. "That means that they were thrown by men."

I got up to leave. But something made me stay to give healing one final test. As I lay on the healing table, I fell into that state of pleasant, slightly drugged relaxation (which I now know is a sign I have entered an altered state of consciousness from the energy). Then Arnold reached my neck. I suddenly experienced the most irritating stinging sensation. "Whatever you're doing, that hurts," I announced as calmly as I could. The sensation was so annoying I wanted to kill her. Even so, I wondered if it was the power of suggestion at work.

"I'm just removing the quills," she said. "It'll be over in a minute."
"Are the 'quills' going to come back?" I asked, sarcasm in my voice, after the session ended. I couldn't help it. I had felt something. But certainly not imaginary quills. "Not unless you let them," she said.

I didn't give these "quills" another thought. I left this woman's house certain
I would never return. I flew to Colorado to ski with my brother and his family. At the end of a lovely week, my brother and I got into an argument. I'm sorry to say this, but it wasn't especially unusual. In the middle of our exchange, however, I suddenly became aware that he was far more nasty than he needed to be. "You can't speak to me that way," I said quietly. "If you do, I will never visit you here again." I had never held my ground like that before. He was furious.

Only when I was on the plane returning to New York did I remember the "quills." My brother had thrown a barb at me--and I didn't let it stick. Suddenly, I felt in my bones that the way I responded was connected to the energy session. It was as if I was a computer and someone had gone in and reset my programming ever so slightly , smoothing out a glitch. To me, it was both subtle and astonishing. It was only then that I became convinced that energy healing was real.

Later, a few of the earlier sessions that I had dismissed turned out to be extremely significant, too. I learned over time that subtle energy affected me more like a letter or a poem or a song than a pill in the sense that its significance and impact unfolded over time. I found that even seemingly basic healing sessions often made more sense a day or a week or even months later, as the energy and consciousness percolated its way through my system.

Eventually I had many other experiences, in the course of my research on subtle energy healing that I would have said were impossible until I had
them. One of the biggest shocks was my first long distance healing session,
in which I literally felt a healer run energy through my body and release a migraine headache--the kind that, for me, usually lasts for several days and
is impervious to prescription medication--although at the time we were on opposite coasts. How could someone 3,000 miles away impact my system? It is something that scientists are just now beginning to study. Yet, it appears to be an innate gift, part of being human. Eventually, after the appropriate training and a great deal of inner spiritual work, my vision opened up and I found myself called to do healings and distant healings.

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