Two beliefs guide my practice: all healing is self-healing, and through healing ourselves, we become a healing presence in the world. My role is to provide information and facilitate change. I also help people view themselves and their actions with compassion. I make an important contribution, but the ultimate decision to heal, to make change, rests with the person receiving the information. I provide a healing hand; the real “work” is done by the person I am collaborating with.
My goal is to provide information and assistance for those who want to make change. I make the reading process feel as safe as possible and provide information and assistance from a neutral perspective – without judgment of what I am seeing.
It is easy for people to come away from one of my sessions thinking that all they did was sit there during the reading without doing anything. The important thing to remember is that the “work” is spiritual or energetic in nature; it doesn’t actually involve any physical activity.
All healing is self-healing because nothing alters without your permission and desire to make a change. There are some sessions where I barely start the first sentence and it is like pulling the plug on the drain of tub of dirty bath water. The person is releasing things faster than I can verbalize what I am seeing. All they needed was help feeling safe before they started to make their changes.
Other times, the person will start to process something and it leads to other things that have been buried for a long time. As I guide them through the process, clearing away the first block makes it possible to go deeper with the healing. Even at this more measured pace, the changes are always about what the person is willing to bring to the surface, discover, and heal.
However there are two situations that remind me that all healing is self-healing. The most common scenario is the people who come to me truly stuck. I give them the information that they need; I describe and work to clear the blocks and symbols in their space; I use all of my techniques (and I have a lot of them) and nothing works. My solution is to just keep talking. It may seem kind of random – making the block sound extra big or extra silly or extra strange, but it usually works. I talk until something internal “clicks” and they release the block and their energy starts to move again.
The second scenario is when someone asks for a healing on behalf of another person, and that person declines my assistance. The first, and most memorable, time that I had this experience was about 6 or 7 years after my ordination. I knew of a 10 year old boy who recently had a kidney transplant, but his body was rejecting the kidney. I looked at the situation and could see the energetic change that would make his body accept the kidney. I reached out to the child as spirit; I told him I could fix it so he’d be okay and asked if he wanted me to give him a healing. He thanked me, and then he told me no. He said that he didn’t want the healing – that his lessons, and lessons of his family, would be found in his dying. It was very clear, I could have shifted the energy, but he would have just shifted it back again. The healing was in his hands, not mine.
The other belief that guides me is that through healing ourselves, we become a healing presence in the world. This was something difficult for me to understand for a long time. My teachers always said that working on ourselves made each of us a “Healing Presence” to those around us. They said that just by walking in to a room, we created a healing for everyone present. They said that, by healing ourselves, we gave the people around us permission to heal themselves as well. Personally, I didn’t get it. How could I be a catalyst for change for others – I was just doing my thing: being ordinary.
In April of 2012, I was diagnosed with stage III cancer. As I moved through that process I finally gained an insight into how this process works.
My doctor surgically removed the cancer and I started chemotherapy. For me, this was never a “fight” against cancer – after all, the cancer was already gone. No, from the outset, it was an opportunity to collaborate with my body to clear out the energetic/spiritual issues that caused the cancer to develop in the first place. I used the chemo treatments to help my body dig down and find the energetic triggers I needed to process and clear. To help me manage what I was going through, and to let those who cared about me know I was okay, I wrote about my process and shared those thoughts with friends, family, and even concerned members of my community. They said I was amazing and inspiring. They talked of courage and being proud of me. I was just being me though – going through my life and process and healing myself. Regardless of the world’s feedback, I didn’t see what I was doing as anything particularly special. Again, I felt that I was just being ordinary.
As I moved through the initial cancer “follow-up” stage – getting checked every 3 months and cleaning the residual chemicals the chemo left behind from my body. I still thought of myself as being ordinary. I still got feedback from the world that I was anything but ordinary. Apparently I was still amazing, inspiring, courageous, supportive and brave. In short, I was a healing presence – even though I didn’t see myself as doing anything special.
That was when I understood. How I see of myself isn’t important – it is what others experience when I’m around that matters. Being myself, being ordinary, doing what I need to do to heal myself is what people find empowering. By simply being who I am, I’m showing other people that it is possible to have all kinds of gunk stuck in your energetic system and still clear it away. It is possible to heal yourself – even from pain and hate and nastiness you’ve been packing around for years or even lifetimes. It is possible to make change – from simple changes to fundamental changes – in how you live your life and use your energy.
This means that we can ALL be ordinary. We can all move through life just being who we are – ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. When you are just being yourself – being ordinary – you are aligned with who you are and with the God of your own heart. You are healing yourself. Other people see that healing and are inspired – even when it seems like no big deal to you. In sort, by working on your own issues and healing yourself, you’ve become a healing presence.
