The communication may start small: a dip in energy that keeps us home from a party, or a somewhat sore throat, or an allergic reaction, or an achy joint, or loss of focus, or a slight miscommunication, mishap, or moment of misbehavior. Yet these messages progress if we don’t really listen and respond. The symptoms get louder and more severe; processes and functioning are disrupted. Digestion, circulation, tissue repair, and/or hormonal communication can falter. And the instrument progresses from malaise to malady (sickness), which also snowballs — sometimes because of the pharmaceuticals we take in lieu of authentic communication; sometimes because the habit of not knowing how to care for our own particular, beautiful, amazing instrument just wears it down over time.
A PATH TO HEALING
Although illness can be extremely complex, a compounding of years of miscommunication, the path to healing can be much simpler and more direct. If you learn the language of energy, learn to let your body, mind, and spirit communicate to you in their wisdom about what your instrument needs, and then provide that moment by moment, you will heal.
In the past thirty-five years, I’ve worked with thousands of clients, some with extremely complex and serious life-threatening medical conditions, and others with less dramatic, life-interrupting chronic symptoms. All of them were seeking ways to find support for their instrument rather than mere management of their symptoms or disease. I have seen, again and again, how powerfully you can activate healing once you participate in the ongoing communications of your body, mind, and spirit.
My path into healing work evolved from necessity. It was also shaped by some outside-the-box experiences that were not in the violin-tuba culture on offer in my home when I was growing up.
In my early twenties, my world cracked open. My beloved, but dead, grandmother, a woman who had been massively obese in her life, showed up in my mind’s eye. She told me not to follow the path she had followed but instead to open to guidance. I was not sure what that meant. But within a day, I was seeing a ticker tape of letters scrolling through my head with a message from my inner teachers, group consciousnesses who called themselves my Councils.
Within a week, I was hearing that guidance in my mind, taking dictation on a rich curriculum of spiritual, perceptual energy training that continues to this day, forty-plus years later. You’d think that with all their wisdom, they could have kept me from getting sick! Instead, they predicted that I’d move to California, grow even sicker, and in the process of healing, become an energy healer.
They said, “We’re going to give you three initial tools.” I took dictation: “A golden sheaf of wheat, freshly cut. A solid earth stone. A pair of silver scissors.” It made me giggle. I had no idea what they were for, and they sounded like props in a fairy tale.
Later that same day, however, there was a knock on my door. It was an acquaintance from school, a woman I barely knew, who said, “Are you a healer? I need some help.”
Telling the story now, I’m not sure why I said, “Yes, come on in.” I had only three tools and no clue what to do with them. But at the time, it seemed natural.
She explained what was going on. Her digestion was off, and she was having shooting pains in her arms and legs. She was in enough discomfort that she couldn’t concentrate to do her schoolwork. She’d been to the doctor, who ran tests and told her nothing was wrong.
My memory of the actual session is a bit vague. I remember using the wheat to stir the air around her intestines and then to repeatedly pull energies out and shake them off. I remember placing the stone on her solar plexus, and she reported that it made her gut feel calm for the first time in months. I used the scissors to cut some lines that I then hooked up to other lines at the suggestion of my Councils. And I remember being on the brink of giggling the whole time. But step by step, my hands just proceeded, and in about thirty minutes, it was done.
She said, “Thank you, that did the trick. I feel much better.” We never discussed it, although she did mention about a month later that the symptoms had never returned.
Looking back, I wonder why the whole experience didn’t leave me shaken or confused. Maybe it was like my experiences of listening to foreign languages. I had the sense that I could almost understand it. And I was willing to listen and learn.
About eight months later, I did end up moving to California, as my Councils had predicted. I soaked up the sunshine and the go-with-theflow culture and thrived for a few months, until I had another energy and nutritional crash, this time so serious I found it difficult to do simple tasks. This led me to the momentous diagnosis of malaise.
The complementary practitioner my doctor (bless her heart) referred me to was a chiropractor, who had studied a newly developed form of healing called Applied Kinesiology.
This chiropractor diagnosed me with a complex of things that have since become almost clichés in the complementary medicine world: candida imbalance in my gut, leaky gut, blood sugar imbalance, adrenal crash, and for the headaches that were starting to show up more frequently, cranial jamming. I was delighted to have names and explanations. But more, I was enchanted with the technique she called muscle testing, a biofeedback tool that allowed her to ask my body what was going on in various energy channels and get responses in the form of muscles holding strong or releasing.
Dialoguing with the body in this way made sense to me. I loved the Chinese medicine charts on her walls and the way she’d use these pathways to figure out what needed to be balanced in my body’s energies. I had always thought of energy as what I didn’t have when I crashed out. I had never thought of it as the fuel that governs the body’s functions in positive ways!
Then something strange started happening to me. First, I found I could predict which meridian pathway would test “weak” with the muscle tests. I could just feel it, see it, or even hear it. My chiropractor used a lot of nutritional supplements and dietary modifications as part of her healing work. I discovered I could see which supplements I’d need. I could point to the bottle on the shelf that contained what I needed, and I could even tell her the ideal dosage. Although I knew so little about anatomy that I didn’t even know where my organs were located, I found I could point to the organs that were out of balance, and the energy testing would confirm it. I could see in my mind’s eye that my chiropractor’s gallbladder was a lovely forest green and mine was puke green, and sure enough, my gallbladder meridian would test weak.
Over the course of the six months we worked together on my health, I learned to feel when an energy would test weak, and I started seeing what might fix it. Some of the fixes were in line with Applied Kinesiology. Others were more off the wall. For example, I might take both hands and push the energy on either side of my head down my body and off into the ground. Then an energy that had tested weak would right itself.
With time, my energies balanced, my gut healed, and my lifelong exploration of energy healing was launched.
SELF-HEALING WITH ENERGY MEDICINE
Energy medicine is, as Donna Eden and David Feinstein have said, a form of healing in which energy is both the patient and the medicine.1 Our bodies communicate using chemical messaging and energetic messaging. By using energy techniques to influence the energetic messaging of the body, mind, and spirit, we can influence the behaviors of the body (including its chemistry) and activate its natural abilities to heal.
In its contemporary form, energy medicine involves using pathways and techniques mapped out within various traditions, such as Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, yoga, and shamanic healing, among others, in healing practices that date back thousands of years. Contemporary energy medicine also incorporates newer understandings from energy healing pioneers, physics, kinesiology, and body-mind modalities, which give us