Appendix A

The Seven Healing Factors and Their Influence on Energy Development

Pranic Healing is very powerful, even miraculous at times, in its effectiveness to relieve physical and emotional symptoms of illness and bring about health and wellness. However, there are certain aspects that affect the efficacy of any healing, regardless of the system or patient. In Pranic Healing, we call these the Seven Healing Factors,[1] and understanding them will make any healing more successful.

We are including information on the Seven Healing Factors in this book on energy, youthfulness, and longevity because they are also general rules that apply to a person’s use of prana in any setting, whether it be for healing another or generating prana for your own health benefit. (And if you think about it, what is increasing your personal supply of energy if not self-healing?) Understanding the Seven Healing Factors can help you optimize your Nine Energizing Breaths practice.

1. Receptivity. In healing, receptivity refers to the willingness of the subject to keep a positive or at least neutral frame of mind about the healing treatment. While it’s fine to maintain a healthy skepticism about any sort of healing effort—either traditional or alternative—unremitting negative thinking likely will not help you get healthy. If you begin treatment thinking “this will never work,” or “I don’t believe this guy can wave his hands and heal me,” then you’ll probably get what you’re thinking: it won’t work, or at least it won’t be as effective or long-lasting as it could be.

Receptivity applies to the Nine Energizing Breaths in much the same way. We don’t ask for, nor do we expect, blind belief in the exercises as they are presented here. As noted earlier, Grandmaster Choa was a stickler for proof, and he urged students to practice what he called “intelligent evaluation.” But you should keep an open mind to the possibility that they could work for you. If you’re unable or unwilling to give it an honest try and keep negative thinking and negative emotions at bay, you’re unlikely to be as effective as you’d like to be.

2. Skill of the healer. Healing is a skill, and as with any skill, the more a healer practices, the better he or she becomes. A more experienced healer will be able to draw in more energy, have greater concentration, be more confident, convey that confidence to his or her subject, and thus, likely be a more effective healer. It works that way with the Nine Energizing Breaths as well. The more they are practiced, the more precise your attention to detail, the better you become at the exercises, and of course, the more energy you will generate. This is part of the “energetic compounding effect” referred to earlier.

3. Severity of the problem. In both traditional and alternative medicine, the sooner a health problem is detected and treated, the better chance of getting it resolved quickly and completely. If a problem is allowed to become chronic, it becomes more difficult to return to health. Similarly, if before you begin the Nine Energizing Breaths, you’re in exceptionally poor health, maintain an unhealthy diet and/or have unhealthy habits (such as smoking), it may take you longer to reverse those long-term health problems and feel the positive energy-building effects of the exercises.

4. Age of subject. As explained, our age is determined by how vigorously our chakras spin and how clean they are. People who are unaware of how to counter the natural aging process through energy exercises and meditation will find their energy dwindling as they get older and thus, may find it more difficult to bounce back from an ailment or be healed by a healer. With regard to practicing the Nine Energizing Breaths, an older person—as defined by the condition of their chakras—may need to practice a little longer and more diligently than a younger person to get the same benefits.

5. Environment. Your immediate environment has a huge effect on your personal supply of energy. If you live in a polluted area, eat energetically dirty foods, and generally do not take care of yourself, either a pranic healer or a physician may find it difficult to heal you quickly and easily. Likewise with the Nine Energizing Breaths: if you keep your body, aura, and personal environment energetically clean, you’re likely to make faster progress.

6. Emotional factors. Negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, and fear have a damaging effect on your aura, congesting your chakras and meridians and generally reducing your overall energy level. The emotional factor is also tied in with receptivity: if you constantly monitor your symptoms and wonder if each little ache or pain is evidence of the condition getting worse or the ineffectiveness of the healing, your receptivity—and the effectiveness of the healing—will be diminished. The most important emotional factor, however, might be forgiveness, which is really the ability to let go of anger toward someone who has hurt or harmed us. It might also be the most difficult for many people to implement, but it’s still very important to work on it—which is why we include the Ritual of Forgiveness as one of the supplemental energy-development exercises. Practicing the Nine Energizing Breaths will definitely help you cleanse some of these strong negative emotions, such as fear, anger, or anxiety, from your aura, but the more of them you have, the longer it may take you to get fully energized. (In addition to the Ritual of Forgiveness, Meditation on Twin Hearts, and The Nine Revitalizing Breaths, there are other Pranic Healing techniques, such as Pranic Psychotherapy, that provide more focused, direct emotional healing. See appendix C for more information on Pranic Psychotherapy.)

7. Karma. When a variety of remedies has been tried to heal someone, and the person still is unable to be healed, karmic factors need to be considered. Karma is the cosmic law of cause and effect. “We reap what we sow,” and “What goes around comes around,” are popularizations of the law of karma. If you smoke and have a diet heavy in fatty foods and then develop heart disease later in life, it’s fairly easy to see the physiological cause-and-effect relationship. And as noted earlier, if you’ve engaged in unhealthy habits for a while, it may take a little longer for the Nine Energizing Breaths energy boost to kick in for you. It’s easy to see this as physiological karma, too.

However, many spiritual and healing traditions believe in a much more expansive law of cause and effect: that all our thoughts, words, and deeds come back to us in some form or another—either as good or bad health, prosperity, relationships, and so on. In this context, karma may also have a broader impact on your ability to generate energy. For instance, if you’re prone to a quick temper, you’ll likely have a lot of unresolved anger (negative emotion) in your aura. Or if you have a habit of being condescending or mean in your relationships, this too will fill your aura with negative emotions. And we’ve already pointed out that holding on to these negative emotions may well affect your practice of the Nine Energizing Breaths.

There are many other aspects of karma, and it’s a topic worthy of a much longer discussion. It’s covered in detail in higher-level Pranic Healing and Arhatic Yoga classes.