Peace Lily Healing

So, when did I get interested in energy and energy healing?  Normal 1960’s upbringing: read Dick and Jane, watched Ozzie and Harriet, My Three Sons, Wild Wild West.  No energy healing there.  Doctors were avoided unless needed.  Prescriptions were rare.  No one looked inside with MRIs, X-rays, mammograms, colonoscopies.  We were reasonably healthy and low users of the medical system.

My college experience at Duke was steeped in Economics and Political Science studies.  I also studied the ways of social structures as exhibited by dorm, sorority and fraternity activities.  If there was an exercise class, it was aerobics, not Yoga, Tai Chi or Qi Gong.  Anyway, girls didn’t work out much.  Energy was expended from the neck up during the week and the neck down at nights and weekends, though not really much of that personally due to my lack of ease with boys.

 

After graduation, my job as a bank examiner for the Comptroller of the Currency in Atlanta kept me on the road in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.  Energy was expended after work at the local disco, usually attached to the hotel where we were staying.  Energy healing meant not drinking too much and going to sleep earlier.

 

Then I moved to Washington DC area to work for the Central Intelligence Agency as an economist.  Yes, I can talk about it because I was on the overt side, not the covert spy agency side.  I could tell you about GDP, inflation, unemployment, how governments would make decisions because of economics.  The energy I understood was OPEC, gas rationing, and petrodollar recycling. 

I returned to graduate school at Tulane to pursue a Masters in Business Administration.  I was following the American dream that all could be rich and successful.  All you needed was education and energy to pursue opportunities.  Yes, energy turned into opportunities that could create money.  E=MC2 , Energy was found in money from multiple corporations.

I made it all the way to New York City and my Wall Street job before I even heard the word chakra.  I had a dear friend who was the first one to tell me about chakras.  She was having kundalini experiences and it wasn’t pleasant.  There was an East West bookstore on 52nd Street that I enjoyed wandering through on my way home from work.  There I bought my first book on chakras.  I also bought the Celestine Prophecy, books by Lynn _____ and other books that would catch my eye.  In between popular spy novels, I would find myself attracted to reading books on self-healing. Personal experience with energy related to the effort it took to climb the flights of stairs to my fourth floor walk-up.

I had been 13 years in the city working at Bankers Trust, Morgan Stanley and Citibank before I began studying energy healing in person.  My teacher was Esther Yang.  I first went to see Esther from a friend’s recommendation.  I was working with the International Community Service Day foundation to raise money and involve the community to build/improve a playground at a Chinatown public elementary school.  I was co-leader of the effort along with my male co-leader and we had groups of men and women to support us.  It was a crazy endeavor, and with working full time, I felt overwhelmed.

At my first session with Esther, she asked me why I was bothered by a woman I was working with on the playground project.  I had said nothing to Esther about the project or the woman.  It seemed she could read my mind.  Then she had me lie down on her massage table and touched my sternum in deep circles with her fingertips.  I burst into tears.  She spent time at my head and at my feet.  When she said we were done, I got off the table and felt lighter and freer, like a heavy backpack had been lifted off my shoulders.  I continued to see her for personal sessions which I later understood to be energy clearing and balancing sessions.  Then I signed up with her classes to begin a more formal study of energy. Esther hosted a small group of women and we began by studying the works of Barbara Brennan (Hands of Healing) who had been her teacher.  I now understand that Esther could see the human energy field and that guided her in knowing how to work with it and clear it.

I had just turned 40, and discovered a tumor on my left ovary, suspected ovarian cancer. I was scheduled for surgery and removal of the tumor and maybe complete hysterectomy. My friend recommended that I go see a master of Pranic Healing to see if he could shrink the tumor.  He worked on me by waving his hands around my body and dumping invisible stuff into a salt water bucket.  While the tumor didn’t shrink or disappear, there was a calmness that came over me and I was able to endure the fear and psychological impact of impending surgery, potentially losing my femininity (or that’s what I thought then), and of course the statistical knowledge that at that time, ovarian cancer survival rates weren’t great.

I survived surgery and went back to work.  I also became a student of Choa Kok Sui’s Pranic Healing method. I took many classes, participated in study groups, and even met Choa Kok Sui himself.  I continued to visit the East West bookstore and buy books on chakras, meridians, healing with energy.  One day I decided not to continue my studies and practice in Pranic Healing because I was not comfortable with the idea that I was using my energy to go into someone else’s field and affect their energy.  I didn’t want other people’s energy coming into my field either.  I didn’t want to have to vet the practitioner to ensure their energy would be beneficial for me. 

I got married while working in New York.  My husband, Scott, was working in West Virginia and Salt Lake City.  We would get together on the weekends wherever we could meet and be budget friendly.  One of the places we met was Boulder, Colorado.  When I saw it, I knew this would be a great place to live.  So began our very long migration to Boulder.

After many months of commuting to see each other on the weekends, I realized that we were still dating, and hadn’t really begun our marriage.  I wanted to be married.  I was at a point in my job where I didn’t see that I could climb the corporate ladder any further without a pick ax and pitons in someone’s back.  I had a wonderful boss and we conspired to eliminate my job so I could receive the company’s severance package.  So, on New Year’s 1997, I was packed and ready to move to Salt Lake City to be with Scott.  I had enrolled in Massage Therapy School starting in a few days because I wanted to leave the corporate world and enter fully into the healing arts. 
 
Massage school was fun.  I had a knack for massage, and one of my favorite classes was Touch for Health.  We learned there are energetic buttons in the body that can control responses and relieve pain. We also studied Eastern philosophy of chakras, meridians and five elements.  We applied these concepts for classes in shiatsu and acupressure.  I graduated, passed the requirements for national certification, and started working part-time at a massage spa associated with the Double Tree hotel. 

It took us awhile to leave Salt Lake City and move to Boulder in 2000.  Our daughter was 18 months old and I was a full time mother.  I had a small at home massage practice, and continued reading books on spirituality, energy and healing.  In 2002, we had to move back to Salt Lake City to adopt our son.  I had received a recording about this healing system called BodyTalk.  It talked about tapping into a body’s innate wisdom, re-establishing communication links that had been compromised, and allowing the body to heal itself.  It seemed crazy but made sense to me.  Also, it did not require me putting my imperfect energy into someone, but relied on their own energy system to make corrections with some prompting from the practitioner.  I signed up for my first class in 2002.

None of it made logical left brained sense.  You follow a protocol road map, pull on someone’s arm, tap on their head, tap on their heart.  Rinse and repeat.  I didn’t fully grasp all the concepts yet there was something that wouldn’t let go of me.  I jumped into my church’s healing circle offering BodyTalk to people who had been struggling with chronic conditions.  They kept asking me back and I kept exploring.  Did I get results?  Hard to say.  They kept asking me back.

I continued to take BodyTalk courses through the years, developed a small clientele and used BodyTalk on family and friends when requested.  Did I get results?  I think so.  It is amazing that the body has this capacity to repair and heal.  Sometimes it needs a witness.  Sometimes it needs communication restored.  Sometimes it needs surgery.  Sometimes it needs medicines and supplements.  Did I get results?  People kept asking me back.

What changes in clients with BodyTalk?  What is anecdotally reported: Better digestion, less anxiety, clearing emotional trauma, stronger immune response, pain relief, support in next steps in life, better surgical outcomes and faster recovery, clarity, less brain fog, peace, euphoric feelings, better range of motion, greater tolerance of chemotherapy, harmony among pets, harmony in human relationships, clearer boundaries.  The list goes on.  What we will never have in BodyTalk is the “gold standard” of double blind studies.  The “gold standard” isolates variables and fails to account for the integrated nature of life and the unique signature of each person’s biofield.  Some say it’s just a placebo effect.  I say Hurrah!  I’ll take a 30-40% improvement for doing nothing every time.  But I believe it is much more than placebo.  It is recognizing that given the right resources, the body can heal itself.

As an energy enthusiast, the quest for healing doesn’t stop with one modality.  I’ve taken classes on homeopathy and become a health coach through Energetix, a reputable company specializing in complex homeopathy and spagyric herbal tinctures.  I’ve become a practitioner of Estoteric Acupuncture, a balancing modality created by Dr. Mikio Sankay.  I am a student of Qi Gong. I am a seeker of methodologies and devices that we can use to reduce pain, increase energy.  I am a human guinea pig experimenting with that which might help me heal, and therefore may help others.  I am an energy enthusiast. 

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