I have written this book not only as an introduction to the practice of Energy Healing, but also as a way for you to create a path for your own personal healing process.
I want to take you on a journey where you begin to recognize the parts of yourself that you have hidden, and feel safe enough to be with them and tell them that it’s all going to be OK. Revealing aspects of yourself that need healing takes courage, and I know and trust that you will look after yourself on this journey and only go as deep as you are able.
With this book, you can make a great start. Bringing your mind, your emotions, your heart, your soul and your body on the journey makes such a difference. If you’re reading this book and are seriously thinking about stepping into your own personal healing work, that’s wonderful. But if you are afraid of it, if you are feeling the resistance in your body, don’t put the book down just yet! Hang in there – feeling resistance to your personal work is a strong indicator that something could change in your life as a result of healing. The resistance is asking you… are you ready?
I invite you to expect miracles to start coming into your life. Expecting miracles is part of Energy Healing too, and your thoughts around healing are also part of the healing! Energy Healing is not just about putting your hands on your body and thinking yourself better, although that can help. Energy Healing is about reconnecting to your soul, remembering who you are and allowing yourself to be yourself, more of the time.
The key to Energy Healing is authenticity, which means being real or genuine, not being false.
Here’s the difficult bit – authenticity means not lying to yourself any more. Not pretending that everything is OK when it isn’t, or pretending that things are not OK, when they actually are. You need courage to become an authentic Energy Healer. You must question what you are saying to yourself. Ask yourself if it’s actually true, and have the strength to accept what is true and let go of what is not.
Energy Healing also means being congruent. The healed person knows what their heart feels, understands their gut instinct, and works with both of them. They don’t tear themselves apart trying to believe something that they know deep down is a lie.
Congruence: as above, so below What your brain wants, thinks, or believes is the same as your heart, your intuition and your soul.
So many of us hold ourselves back because we push ourselves too hard in the direction we think we should be going in life, and don’t stop to listen to how we feel.
‘Every morning I wake with a sense of dread. I don’t know what it is; it’s like everything slows down. I eat my breakfast slowly and walk to work slowly, like I’m in a movie. Then, as I turn the corner onto the road where my office is, my stomach lurches, like I want to vomit. My heart races, and I think about something else completely. It goes away eventually, usually by the time I am sitting at my desk with my morning tea, going through my emails. But I feel heavy in my body all day, and when it’s 4 p.m., it’s like the sun comes out from behind the clouds, and I look forward to getting out of there.’
Sandra’s job was making her anxious. She kept telling herself that she was suffering from anxiety, to the extent she began to believe she had depression. This is a case of someone telling themselves something that is not real so they don’t have to make a change in their lives. Sandra bore the pain of going in to a job that she really did not like, and over time it made her sick.
Being congruent is knowing that your job is making you ill instead of ignoring how you feel and forcing yourself to do what you think you need to do. That is why healing is scary, it may mean that things in your life have to change.
If you’re like Sandra and are in a situation that doesn’t resonate with you, accepting the way things are instead of pretending everything is OK is actually a better way to handle it. By pretending things were fine Sandra put her mental health at risk to the point where she began to create the symptoms of depression. After a very bad time and several panic attacks, Sandra was forced to look at what was actually going on. She came to me to get some help.
‘After realizing that it was being in work that was making me anxious I took a week off and rested. It was great to clear my head, do some gardening and visit friends. When my week off was coming to an end, I felt the panic coming back, so I took another week off sick and made this appointment with you. I need the money to pay the bills, I can’t quit my job – what do I do?’
I asked Sandra what she could do to make going into work easier for her while she looked around for another job. She started telling me many things, but they all came from her mind.
‘Stop a minute, breathe.’ I said. ‘Drop down into your heart – what does your heart feel about work?’
‘So heavy’, she said, ‘my heart is so heavy.’
‘What images come into your mind with this heaviness? ‘I asked her.
‘Being at the canteen, people talking, gossiping, stories. Same stories going around and around.’
She breathed with me.
‘Now, drop down into your tummy. What does your tummy feel about work?’
‘Sick, I feel sick. The people at work are so negative, they’re always talking about how bad things are, how awful life is. Being around them, I feel like I’ve lost hope for humanity.’
After sitting with this, Sandra realized that the actual work she had to do wasn’t so bad. It was being around negative people that was making her feel sick. To confirm this, she imagined herself going to work in an empty office, sitting at her desk with nobody around, just doing her work routine undisturbed, then coming home.
‘That feels completely different to me’, she said. ‘I don’t feel sick doing the work at all. I actually enjoy what I do. Maybe it’s not the work at all that’s upsetting me, maybe it’s the people in work!’
Isn’t it interesting that when you become congruent, authentic with yourself, the real problem can be something that you didn’t even realize? Sometimes the obvious thing isn’t actually the problem at all! Once you recognize the actual problem, then solutions can appear. Sandra discovered that she was sensitive to energy and was picking up the emotional energies of the people around her. She and I worked on ways she could disconnect from the group energy, release the negativity around her and feel clearer at work, and at home. She began to feel brighter in herself, and could go back to work the following week and feel better about it. Although she found some of her colleagues were not happy with her new way of being, she knew that it was much healthier for her. She eventually did get a new job just to change her environment, and was able to recognize negative group energies and not get involved with them. The exercises that I used with Sandra are in this book, so if this story resonates with you, you’re in the right place!
Please bring your whole heart and soul into your healing practice. And your brain too! Be authentic. Be congruent with yourself. You have to allow yourself to feel the exercises, to be open to them, for them to change you. This is when the magic happens. If you hide things from your Self you will have trouble doing the work.
You may be a beginner at Energy Healing, but you’re not necessarily a beginner at life. The richness of your life experiences makes you who you are, and that counts. There is no right or wrong when it comes to these exercises, so you cannot compare your experience of healing to someone else’s. It’s like comparing your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 16! They have their work to do, only they can do it, and the same goes for you.
Each exercise is designed to be repeated many times. So if you’re having trouble with one of them, do as much as you can do, then leave it and come back to it another time. But do stick with it, be patient with any resistance you may be feeling, as each time you do the exercise you will break through a little deeper. Know that resistance to some of these exercises could be you just getting ready to let something go and move to the next level. A little bit of resistance is natural and good. However, a strong resistance towards one of the exercises may mean that you’re not ready for it yet, so don’t push hard, wait until you feel ready.
These exercises have to be heartfelt to be useful to you. You can go through the motions, say the words and not feel anything at all, and then tick the box that you’ve done them. But you haven’t, not really. I would rather you stick with one exercise until you feel you’ve got it working for you, instead of racing through the book and trying everything half-heartedly. Allow the information and the healing to seep through you, like the warmth of a long, hot bath. You have plenty of time to do this work. You’ve got the rest of your life.
Remember, healing is about feeling better, being confident, happy and well. Clearing what is in the way of being well through these exercises takes time, patience and dedication. When you feel the results of the work you put in, there’s nothing like it! It frees you. The relief is indescribable, suddenly there’s magic and colour in the world. You have to experience it to believe it. Words don’t do it justice. You’ll enjoy the feeling so much you’ll never want to go back. You deserve it (yes, you do!) and if you keep up your practice, you can feel that way most of the time. Energy Healing is a practice. Remember, you’re never finished healing.
If you do not feel the energy shifting in your body when you try the exercises, I would suggest that you persist with them regardless. It’s possible that you may need to break through some sort of energetic wall or blockage before you really begin to feel the changes.
I have had clients that have never ‘felt’ the energy, but they’ve seen it or have just known that it has moved. And if, after trying for a long time, you still don’t feel a result, you could consider booking a session with a healer to see if they can help you move through whatever is blocking you from moving forward. Again, there is information about how to find a therapist in the Resources section.
Imagine a guitar string: when you pluck it, it vibrates. The speed of the vibration is the frequency, which is the note that you hear. A low vibration would give a low note, and a higher vibration would give a higher note. You can feel vibrations in your throat when you sing, low vibrations on the low notes, high vibrations on the high notes. We have a vibration too – our Life Force Energy vibrates. As we experience life, learn things, are influenced, our vibration changes, or shifts. As we experience emotional pain, trauma and distress, our vibration gets lower. When we experience joy, happiness and peace, our vibration gets higher.
Holding on to pain shuts off the flow of energy through our body. Blocking our natural flow affects our vibration by lowering it, and if we don’t process and let go of our emotional pain, the blockages can also cause physical pain. If not attended to the physical pain can cause mechanical damage, chemical damage and affect our metabolism. You can visit a physiotherapist for a frozen shoulder, get your exercises and lift weights to get stronger, but if you don’t deal with the emotional pain you are feeling, the energies may stay blocked and your shoulder could always be a problem for you in your life.
Energy Healing goes straight into the energy system of the body, relaxing and releasing the blocks, opening up the flow and raising its vibration. By working directly with the energy and releasing the blockages you get the benefit of the physical pain lifting, and then the body can heal itself.
We all have days when we feel heavy and slow, like we can’t get out of bed; these are when we resonate with heavy and slow vibrations. Our vibration affects our choices and our moods, so on a low-vibration day we may choose to listen to sad music, wear dark colours, eat comfort food and not want to spend time with people. We also have days when we leap out of bed full of the joys of living and make high and fast vibrational choices including wearing bright colours, listening to upbeat music, eating healthy foods and being sociable. We have more energy when we are at a high vibration, and we have hope and motivation. We feel productive and creative.
Energy Healing works directly with the vibration, not with the emotion, so you don’t need to name what is going on. Our brain, however, does like to know what is going on, so when you recognize that you feel sad and your brain wants to know why, that’s OK. But if you’re working with a vibration of a sadness that’s been in your body for a long time, it might not be as helpful to try to make sense of it. Sometimes you have to step away from the brain, from the needing to know, and just accept that you’re feeling sadness. What can help when this happens is to remember that the feelings are a vibration that you are experiencing in that moment, they will pass, and you are still you regardless!
When you practice Energy Healing you may ‘pull down’ a high-vibrational energy into your body. Due to the laws of physics, low-vibrational energies cannot stay in the same place as the higher ones – if you have a darkened room, and you turn on the light, it’s not dark any more. You don’t get an ‘instant hit of happy’ with Energy Healing because it’s rather like a drip feed, slow and steady, and you have to come into balance with the energies and stabilize. But you will feel more grounded, more relaxed and more like yourself again. Know that we are not our sadness, just because we feel sadness. Remembering this when you feel down, and using Energy Healing to feel better is very empowering and much healthier than spending your time analysing why you are sad and not shifting the vibration.
Over time, with a regular healing practice, your body will carry higher vibrational energy for longer amounts of time. This means it is possible for you to feel good more often than you feel bad. Feeling good can become the daily normal for you, and you will only feel bad if there is something wrong.
Imagine a swimming pool, beautiful, fresh and clean. Then someone goes and throws a bucket of dye into it! If you are not allowed to drain the pool and start again, the only way you can remove the dye is by flushing it out. You attach a pipe to one end of the swimming pool for the new water to go in, and a pipe to the other end for the old water to go out. Let’s say you turn the tap on and the new water pours into the pool, and the old water starts to flush out. The first few hours of doing this, it won’t look like anything is happening at all. Even if you leave the tap on overnight, the pool would still have dye in it the next day, but you might begin to see an improvement. After another 24 hours, you could probably see the bottom of the pool, and perhaps by the third day, the water would be clear enough to swim in.
So when you ‘turn on the tap’ on you, with your Energy Healing practice, the new high-vibrational energy flows into you, and then the old stuff that you don’t want gets shaken up, shifts and leaves. The amount of ‘dye’ in your ‘swimming pool’ is based on your life experiences and your ability to process them and let go. This is why you cannot compare your results with healing to anyone else’s. Some of your old, heavy vibrational energies may take years to shift, particularly if they are blocked in your physical body, but sometimes the old, heavy energies are ready to release, and leave really fast! If you’re congruent, you can say goodbye to your pain and let it go much more easily than if you’re incongruent and are trying to let go of pain that you’re not actually ready to let go of yet.
One of the reasons people don’t heal is incongruence. Hiding something from yourself because you are not able to accept it, or don’t want to work with it, is a form of denial. Your body knows it’s there, your soul knows, but by your brain consciously pushing it away and acting as if it doesn’t exist, you become incongruent. Incongruence is a big block to healing and this is why I’m spending so much time talking about it here. If this is something that you think you are doing, that’s great, because now you can stop doing it! Be gentle with yourself, you’re not doing anything wrong. This is a natural thing. You might want to take some time to nurture yourself, give yourself permission to look at what might be in the way of you becoming congruent on your healing journey.
There are a few other reasons why people don’t heal – you can’t let go of emotional pain that you’re not ready to let go of yet. Awareness and being gentle with yourself really help here; understanding the source of the pain that you struggle with can help you do whatever you may need to do, before you can let it go.
Consider Mary, whose grandmother had passed away. Mary had always loved her grandmother’s opal ring, and when everyone was in the house for the funeral, she went up to her grandmother’s room and took it from the jewellery box. She didn’t tell anyone, and when her grandmother’s things were being gifted to the family, they noticed the ring was missing. Mary didn’t speak out about what she had done, and was too afraid to wear the ring, as everyone would know she had taken it.
Mary came to me because she had started seeing her grandmother everywhere. She felt haunted by her image and was anxious, stressed and upset. Mary wanted to heal, and we worked together, but it seemed to get worse for her. She couldn’t forgive herself for what she had done, and because of this, she couldn’t grieve for her grandmother. She had to tell her mother that she had taken the ring. Her mother understood and forgave her and then Mary was able to forgive herself. That’s when the healing happened.
Grieving is a necessary process when we experience loss in our lives. It enables us to let go of emotional pain around the loss and come into balance with our new life situation. Mary actually had to take action and speak to her family before her consciousness would allow her grieving process to take place. Gaining forgiveness for what she had done was the permission she needed to allow herself to heal.
Is there an action you need to take in order to clear anything in you that is blocking your healing process? Take some time now to open up gently and reveal to yourself anything you may be hiding from yourself. You don’t have to share this information with anyone, but you do need to become aware of it.
The main reason why people don’t heal is the fear of who they will be when they are healed. As Marianne Williamson says, ‘We are more afraid of our light, than of our dark.’ It’s as if we believe that once we are healed we will have to be perfect and aren’t allowed to make any mistakes, and we can no longer blame anyone else or have any excuses for our failings. This is not true. As a healed person you are still a human being, and as a healed person you will still have your lessons, your mistakes and your learning to experience. Our learning continues until the day we die; there are still plenty of new experiences to be had to enrich our lives. I will talk more about this in Chapter 7. Just know at this point, if you have trouble feeling like you deserve to be happy and pain-free and to have a good life, then you might need to consider doing work to increase your self-worth and self-esteem.
Don’t give up on yourself, no matter what you discover. All things will unfold as they should, and if you make a commitment to heal (and follow through on your commitment), then you will heal, perhaps not as quickly as you would like, but you will heal, I promise.
Intention is a decision to do something. It’s an aim, a plan or a direction. Intention is usually set within the context of what you want to do with your day, or with your life – ‘Today I am going to have a good day’, or ‘He studied medicine with the intention of getting a job as a doctor.’
Intention is fundamental to healing work. You need to set an intention to heal before the healing will happen. A healing intention must be in alignment with all the aspects of yourself, all the aspects of your soul. (Alignment meaning on the same side, and in agreement with.) So, if your intention is to go to college and study medicine to be a doctor, but your heart wants you to be an artist, you’re not in alignment with your decision.
That’s a big example – but again, if you’re not ready to heal something and your brain is pushing you to ‘get over yourself and heal it’ like Mary was, this creates more resistance. Then the healing becomes more painful than it needs to be. Healing is an organic process – it’s natural, and only happens when you are ready. The first part of being ready is to set your intention to heal.
Yes I know it sounds funny, but sometimes you get so used to feeling bad you’re afraid to feel better. Permission is very powerful, and if you don’t give yourself permission to heal, you won’t accept the healing. Permission is also important when you are ‘sending’ healing to someone else, and we will talk about that later, but it is important for you to give yourself permission too. It’s like opening a door and sometimes, when you set the intention and give permission to heal, that’s actually all that it takes for the healing to happen. Very powerful!
You can say it out loud, or you can say it quietly to yourself, but it’s best when you quiet your mind and focus your awareness on what you are doing and feeling. Try to bring your mind into the present moment and don’t get caught up in thoughts around how, why, when or anything else.
Here are some different ways to give permission; try them out and see which one fits you today. Remember that tomorrow you will feel differently and you may need to choose a different one.
Notice if you feel anxious when you say this; you may need to relax, breathe and say it again. Do you mean it 100 per cent? Really?
If you don’t that’s OK, ask yourself why, and come back and try again later on.
You’ve set an intention and now you’ve given permission. See how it’s all building up! Now you need to open and receive.
How do you know if you’re really opening up to receive? Imagine you’ve bought some new clothes, and your friend says ‘I love that outfit on you, you look amazing!’ You say, ‘Not really, it’s just some new clothes…’ and brush it away. That’s not receiving what they’re saying. Your self-esteem and self-worth have an influence over this. If you have low self-esteem, it’s harder to accept a compliment.
Let’s try again. They say how amazing you look and you say, ‘Thank you!’, and you blush and turn away, and close down your heart because it’s not really possible that you would look amazing. Well, it’s better, but you’re still not receiving the compliment.
Let’s try one more time. They say how amazing you look. You look them in the eye and you stay there. You don’t run away in your mind, but this time you feel it. Imagine that the compliment they sent you is a ball of light, coming from them to you. You stay and accept it. You feel a shock or a hit from the light as it enters and becomes absorbed into your system. Like a shiver! Then you say, ‘Thank you, I appreciate you saying that.’ A higher vibrational energy (the compliment) coming into your system can feel strange, even painful, in a good way, depending on what vibration you are carrying in that moment. That’s why we run from compliments; they change our vibration, if we let them.
Now you know how to receive properly. Try this exercise for real the next time someone says something nice to you. Then you can say something nice back to them in return.
Soften your resistance to healing by imagining a door in your mind that now opens to let the healing come in. Remember the swimming pool? Well, if your water is warm and the new water is cold, you will get a shock from the temperature change. So let’s imagine the Energy Healing is the same temperature as you are, so that it feels gentle and good, so that there are no shocks involved. You could also imagine you’re opening both of your hands to receive a gift, or you could imagine a box that was buried deep in your soul, one that has been closed for years, is being dusted off, and now is ready to open to the light. See it open in your mind. ‘Yes! I am ready.’
So now you know that Energy Healing is not just about healing with energy. It’s about being true to yourself, not running away from your pain, releasing old wounds and changing your life.
Healing can get worse before it gets better – have you ever given up sugar or caffeine? There’s a detox period in which your body releases the bad chemicals that were bound up in your body, and you can feel ill from that. You can have a terrible headache, you can be dopey in your mind, need to sleep or just feel rotten overall. But if you persist, after a few days your body clears, and then you really start to feel the benefits. You may feel lighter, more awake and have more energy. The same thing can happen with healing. It’s called a Healing Crisis, but it won’t last, and when it’s done you will feel much better. So, don’t give up!
Swimming pools catch leaves, sticks, even bits of stones and gravel. Imagine as the new water goes in to clear the dye, it stirs up the pool a little and the debris floating on top gets forced into the out pipe, and then blocks it. More water forces it to move, but it is blocked and slow. Once the debris is eventually pushed through to the other end, it comes out with a ‘POP!’ and it’s gone. The pipe is clear again and the pool is that bit cleaner, but the process wasn’t easy. Imagine how much water is needed to force the debris out of the pipe.
When you start a healing practice, you go ‘into process’, which means the waters in your ‘swimming pool’ get all stirred up and then start to flow in the general direction of being clear. You’re much more complex than a swimming pool, but if you were one, you might have gravel, leaves and mud, but you might also have bits of broken cars, shopping trolleys, even glass, depending on what you have experienced in your life. When you start healing you don’t know what dirt is going to get churned up, what bits of sticks and debris may end up blocking your pipe, so to speak.
I want you to be aware of this so that you can be your own watchdog and make sure that you look after you. Sometimes you might be healing for days and not feel any result, like you’re pushing the water into the pipe, and the gravel isn’t moving. You might even feel physically ill or emotionally upset, and not know exactly why. Memories of things that you’ve forgotten about can surface, and you may find yourself trying to make sense of what’s going on for you. Don’t. Just know that you are in the process of healing, and that these stuck energies are moving, and will eventually leave, so that you can be at a higher vibration than you were.
You don’t have to do this alone. If you want to get help don’t be afraid to ask. Talk to a friend, to someone in your family, or find a practitioner to help you, if it’s too difficult to do it alone. Check out the Resources section and you can always ask me questions by email or visit me on my Facebook page.