I asked my friend Laura, who is a healer, and for whose insight I have the deepest respect, to comment on Jesus’ healings. She said:
I feel that Jesus touched people from a place of great presence and love. He was in contact with the essence of these sick people, and they recognized that. And if they were open to him, they could receive that love and use it to heal themselves.
The people he healed were ready to let go of something. There was an opening in them which was probably there before they saw him, but when they saw him there was a deeper opening that allowed them to move through pain or suffering in order to be healed. These healings are described as instantaneous, but they weren’t necessarily instantaneous. There were probably many steps along the way which led to the healing. If someone is completely ready to be healed, and if the healer can hold the space of wholeness and love for her, then it’s possible at that moment for her to open up and heal herself through the healer. But with some of my patients, most of what I do is lay groundwork. Every moment of laying groundwork is just as important as that one moment when everything opens up. That seems more miraculous because you can see and feel the cure. But actually every moment along the way is just as miraculous.
The curing of physical symptoms is only one aspect of healing. A disease begins as a certain energy before it goes into the physical body. Once it manifests itself on the gross level of the tissues, healing it is a slower process, because the body is a lot denser, it vibrates more slowly than other energy levels. Though even with physical symptoms, love can accelerate the healing process.
But healing can be deeper than that. It can be a transformation of the whole person: not just a physical healing but an emotional and spiritual opening as well. When you embrace an illness, and really learn what it’s trying to communicate to you, your whole life can be transformed, from the inside out.
When I’m doing a healing with someone, I don’t try to direct the energy out through my hands. I allow it to flow out. If someone is open to me and letting the healing happen on a deep level, my feet feel strongly connected to the ground, the whole upper part of my body feels connected to the heavens, and I feel connected to everything, and there’s a flow of energy in my body that heals me also. It’s a very pleasurable experience, very calm. When the energy is flowing, I feel that everything in the universe is perfect the way it is, that everything is just as it should be. There’s a deep calm, and a quiet sense of joy. The energy flows through my body, and it flows out through my hands. It is highly intelligent, so it moves to wherever the person needs healing, on whatever level.
Basically, what happens is that the energy which is connected to everything else, the energy of the Tao, or “source energy” I sometimes call it, fills my whole body, and it moves out my hands also, and the person I’m working with remembers that energy in her body. Because that’s who we are. We all come from that place. So she remembers that, and her energy comes up to meet it, and in the course of coming up to meet it, the physical illnesses and the emotional blocks that she’s holding on to are easier to let go of. Most of the time we identify ourselves with our body or our personality, we feel that we are our illnesses and neuroses. And if these things are who we are, then letting go of them seems like committing suicide. So it’s very hard to let go. But when someone can feel this energy moving through her body, and remembers who she really is, then it’s a lot easier to let go.
On the healing of the leper
This healing may have been instantaneous, but from the Gospel account it’s impossible to know whether it was complete. If it wasn’t complete, then whatever manifested itself as leprosy would have manifested itself again—in a week, a month, a year—as another disease or an accident or some other kind of difficulty. If the healing was complete, nothing would have been left unresolved, and the illness wouldn’t have had to be expressed in another way. It could be that Jesus’ love was so strong, and entered the leper’s body so deeply, that he felt completely accepted by it, and this allowed him to let go of all the manifestations of feeling unaccepted and unloved.
On the healing of the woman with the flow of blood
It seems like the woman was feeling enormous reverence for Jesus and a strong belief that he could heal her. So she was very open to anything that could happen. It helps to have great trust in the healer and it helps even more to trust your own ability to heal. Sometimes trusting the healer can open a pathway to trusting yourself.
The flow of Jesus’ healing force, when he “felt in himself that power had gone forth from him,” seems to be a response he had to the woman without consciously knowing it. When the energy flows, it’s not as if it somehow goes out of me and leaves me drained, it flows through me. It feels like it’s more present for me as well.
After the healing, the woman in the story seems to be filled with gratitude as well as fear. With that kind of healing, she must have felt that she had been given back to herself and that things were all right in the universe. And with that feeling of peace and well-being inside her, there must have been a sense that what she had done really wasn’t so terrible. But she knew that she hadn’t been straightforward, and she was afraid that Jesus was going to scold her.
It’s good that Jesus said to her, “Your trust has healed you.” It’s clear that her trust was enormous, to the point that even touching his robe could heal her. There was a great openness in her; without that openness nothing would have happened. He’s saying, “Don’t think that I actually did anything to you; your own trust is what healed you.”
On the raising of the dead girl
This incident reminds me of when I watched my grandmother die. I felt her presence there in the room, after she died. I saw that her spirit—or however you want to call it, the essence of who she was—hadn’t really separated from her body. She wasn’t in her body, but hovering somewhere above it. Then, gradually, she was less and less present, and after maybe twenty or thirty minutes she was gone.
I think that when the spirit really separates from the body, death is irreversible. But if this girl had actually died, she had been dead for such a short time when Jesus arrived that she could still have returned. It’s possible that the force of his conviction, or his very presence, could have brought her back. My question is whether it was appropriate to bring her back. Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to die. Sometimes that’s the best healing.
Maybe there was something unfinished in the girl’s life and she was just checking out of her body. Some people die because they just don’t want to deal with very painful karma. Of course, they have to do it all over again, but they’re not aware of that. I can’t tell from this account whether Jesus’ act was an act of love. If she felt complete with her life and was ready to die and had no desire to come back, and if he was calling her back because of the father’s grief or the needs of the family, then it wasn’t an act of love, and it wasn’t a healing either. But if she really wanted to come back and he was there helping her with his presence, then it was an act of love.
On the healing of the blind man
I like this story a lot. I like the blind man’s description of “men like trees walking,” because it sounds so real, like it wasn’t made up by some editor. Only someone who had been blind would say that. And I also like the fact that Jesus did the healing in two parts: he did a first healing and the man got partly better, and then he did another, and the man could see clearly. So it happened in steps. Most healing does. Usually the instantaneous healing is glorified, but most growth in life, most changes, happen gradually. We take in as much light as we can, and we digest it and assimilate it, and then we go on to the next step and then the next; and there’s something very beautiful about that. Whenever people transform their lives and do really deep healing, that’s a miracle. It’s not any more miraculous to get rid of physical symptoms all in one step.