As I watched people through the healing process, I noticed that the process is never a smooth, even curve upward into health. Most of the time, people experienced an immediate internal improvement. Then later, patients seemed to regress. At this point, they often questioned the treatment. Many times they thought they were worse off than before they came. Their energy fields clearly indicated that they were indeed better. The imbalances in their fields were much less; their organs were functioning better. Despite their more balanced fields, however, they were experiencing the imbalances they had more acutely. Sometimes they would even have worse pain. What was happening was they were becoming less tolerant of imbalances that at one time felt “normal” to them. In short, they were in better health.
I also noticed that people go through distinct phases during their healing process. These phases are part of the normal human transformation process. Healing requires changes of mind, emotion, and spirit, as well as physical change. Each person needs to reevaluate his or her relationship to the issues involved in a personal healing process and set them into a new context.
First, people must admit there is a problem and let themselves experience the problem. They need to come out of denial about the situation. I noticed that each time a person experienced “getting worse,” he or she was coming out of denial and into consciousness about another aspect of the problem. Many times patients thought they were angry because they were getting worse. Actually, they were angry that there was more to deal with.
Most patients would then search for a way to make it easier; they wanted an easy out. Many would say things like “I’ve done enough work on it” or “Oh no, not that again.” Finally, if the person decided to go deeper, there would be the willingness to go the next round, expressed in statements like “Well, okay, let’s go for it.”
Healing, like therapy, is a cyclical process that carries a person on a spiral of learning. Each cycle requires more self-acceptance and more change as one goes down deeper and deeper into the true, clear nature of the real self. How far and deep each of us goes is entirely our own free choice. How each of us takes the spiral journey and what road map we use is also a free will choice. Rightly so, for each path is different.
All dis-ease requires change within the patient to facilitate healing, and all change requires the giving up, surrender, or death of a part of the patient—whether it be a habit, job, life-style, belief system, or physical organ. Thus, you as patient/self-healer will experience the five stages of death and dying that Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes in her book On Death and Dying. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. You will also go through two more stages: rebirth and creation of a new life. They are a natural part of the healing process. It is of utmost importance for the healer to accept whatever stage the patient is in and not to try to pull them out of it. Yes, the healer may need to lead them out of it because of a physical danger that may be involved. But it must be a gentle leading.
To help describe the personal experience of going through the seven stages of healing, I have chosen two cases where surgery was required in addition to laying on of hands healing. These cases offer a broader view of all aspects of healing. Of course, someone utilizing only laying on of hands and “natural” healing will also go through the same stages.
Bette B., the first patient, is about five feet five inches tall, has dark brown curly hair streaked with gray, and has a very loving personality. She is a professional nurse and dedicated student of healing. Bette is sixty-seven years old, married, and mother of two children. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband, Jack, a retired safety engineer. Bette had previously had pain, weakness, and tingling in the left leg that led to paralysis from her waist down in 1954. As a result, she had two lumbar disks removed. After eight months of personal healing work, consisting of water therapy, physical therapy, and a lot of praying, she was able to walk again—something the surgeons didn’t expect. She had another back surgery in 1976, during which another disk was removed, along with scar tissue and bone splinters. She went to a pain and rehab clinic for recovery. In 1986, new symptoms of pain, weakness, and tingling in the left arm and pain in her neck began. In 1987, Bette went for more surgery, this time in the neck. I interviewed Bette a few months after her surgery.
Karen A., the second patient, is a tall, beautiful brunette in her midforties, married, with two stepchildren. She has no children of her own. Karen is a seasoned therapist. Her husband is also a therapist. At the time of this writing, they live in Colorado.
Karen’s illness occurred when they lived in the Washington, D.C., area. Her physical problems began very early in her life, around puberty. She had chronic pain in her lower pelvic region for years. Later it was diagnosed as uterine fibroids and endometriosis on the right ovary. She became infected, the pain got worse, and she decided to go ahead with a hysterectomy. The experience of healing led her into a very deep self-revealing spiral of inner growth.
We will go through the stages one by one to find and explore the basic ingredients of each.
The need for denial exists in everyone at times. We all try to be or pretend that we are exempt from the more difficult experiences of life. We use denial to hold this pretense because we are afraid. We think we can’t handle something, or we just don’t want to.
If you become ill, you will probably use denial or at least partial denial not only in the first stage of your illness or following confrontation, but also later on, from time to time. Denial is a temporary defense that gives you time to prepare yourself for acceptance of what will come at a later stage. Especially if you need harsh treatment, you are likely able to talk about your situation only for a certain amount of time. Then you need to change the subject to more pleasant things or even fantasy. That is okay; it is perfectly natural. There is something that you fear that you are not yet ready to face; in time, you will be. Give yourself the time you need.
You will be able to speak comfortably and directly to some members of your family, friends, and health-care professionals about your condition. And you will not be able to discuss it at all with others. And guess what! You don’t have to. This has a great deal to do with your trust of each person. It is of great importance to honor that in yourself. It also has a lot to do with these people’s feelings about illness, their own bodies, and your illness. You may be reacting to what is going on in them. (It is always necessary for health-care professionals to examine their own reactions to illness when working with patients. Their reactions will always be reflected in the patients’ behavior and can contribute a great deal to the patients’ well-being or detriment.)
Remember, denial is a completely normal mode of behavior. Do not judge yourself when you find it in yourself. We all do it, not only with illness but in most areas of our lives. Denial serves to keep us from seeing what we don’t feel prepared to see or feel. It is a defense system that keeps us from going nuts. If your system feels that it can handle it, you don’t have to be in denial. As soon as you are ready to handle it, you will come out of denial.
Long-term denial can be very costly. Yet it needs to be dealt with kindly and compassionately. You will need love both from yourself and others to get through it. So it is important to surround yourself with people you love and trust. Open to their love and share with them whenever you can.
Bette used denial by ignoring the messages coming from her body and her balancing system:
I remember having pain in my shoulder and down my arm over the elbow and thinking, “Oh, you’re just getting a little bit old and maybe you have arthritis. Just ignore it; it’ll go away.” When I was painting, I would have difficulty using my left arm.
The difficulty with my arm would come and go. I think it went on like that for about four years. The last year and a half before I actually went to the doctor to have the surgery, my hand and my arm were definitely losing strength. For the first time in my life, I had to ask my husband to open jars for me. I denied this away by saying to myself, “You’ve got a little arthritis in your hand. That’s all it is. Don’t get upset by it.”
I did ignore the weakness in my arm because that came and went also. I would get really, really panicky about losing the strength when it came to carrying packages in from the grocery store. But I wouldn’t allow myself to feel the panic long. I would change from the left arm to the right arm and make the packages a lot lighter.
I really believe, though, that part of this denial was almost necessary for the disease to get to the point where it was “operable.” At least, that’s the way it seems to me today. I don’t think it would have been operable at that time. I don’t think it had gone far enough. Had I known earlier, I would have been terrified. It was easier to deny it than to run to the doctor because I always had a saying as a nurse that I should know what was wrong with me before I went to the doctor, rather than going in ignorance and saying, “You’re the doctor, what’s wrong?” I felt I had to know the answer first.
As a nurse, we were always taught that a lot of things are in your head. My fear, I think, was that because I was a nurse and the doctor was “God,” he would tell me it was all in my head and that there was nothing wrong with me. That was a hard thing to overcome.
As I’m saying this, I’m beginning to realize how important it was then for me to do this on my own, rather than having to go and get help from doctors. I think the purpose of this entire experience was to enable me to feel powerless and to be able to work with other people.
I asked Bette what she meant by powerless. She explained that what she meant was that she needed to learn to surrender and feel safe. This will become clearer as we go through the stages with her.
Karen’s denial also took the form of ignoring messages from her balancing system that came in the form of pain. Being in the therapy profession, she spent a good deal of time “working on” the psychological issues involved. Unfortunately, it finally became clear that this was also a form of denial. Karen needed to deal with her problem on the physical level.
She states:
I think I was in denial all along until I decided to have the operation. I was in more discomfort than I let myself know, and I kept telling myself that if I just worked this next piece through, then it would all be okay. I could heal it. The form denial took was in keeping me trying to work things through in therapy.
What is under everyone’s denial is fear. The fear is of things they will have to face and go through because of their illness.
Karen was afraid that she couldn’t heal herself. She was afraid of the hospital experience and of being physically helpless during and after the operation. She also feared that she might die during the operation, even though there really was no question about her going through it successfully. She avoided the treatment for a long time because of this fear.
Bette’s fears were similar:
I was afraid of an operation, to be dependent on others because I was not healing naturally and had to do surgery. Another fear was that I would lose my creativity in my hands and not be able to paint. Painting has become such a soothing, wonderful, creative experience for me that [to lose] it terrified me more than not being able to walk.
Many times we have fears that don’t make any sense, but those fears feel very real and strong. Whether we label such a fear irrational or from a “past life experience,” as many healers do, these fears must be acknowledged and dealt with.
Bette recalls:
I feared that if anything was wrong in my neck, I was going to have my head chopped off. This was very, very terrifying to me. It came out of no place seemingly and was really very very frightening.
I think there were two cycles of all these stages of denial/anger/bargaining/acceptance. One was prior to being diagnosed, and the other was after the doctor told me to go to the neurosurgeon. In fact, when the doctor first told me he was going to send me to the neurosurgeon, I said, “No, not that!”
I remember my husband saying to me, “Why are you so afraid of the surgery?” And I remember saying, “I don’t know why.” I’ve had two other spinal surgeries, but it’s as though this were the vital part of my life. This was going to be terrifying because I truly believed inside me it was going to end my life.
I postponed it and postponed it and postponed it. I was just simply terrified. I can remember the morning of the first appointment. There again was that fear of having my head chopped off.
On the morning of going to the neurosurgeon, I remember getting up and crying bitterly to Jack, “I don’t want to go. Let’s forget the whole thing. This is more than I can handle. Why is this happening to me?” I was terrified and I cried for twenty-five minutes before I went to the neurosurgeon.
In Bette’s healing process, she was able to share these fears with her husband and friends. It was important for her to feel them in the presence of another person, whether or not they were realistic. It is this sharing that allowed the fear to be transformed. When she did this, her fear turned into anger and she entered into the second stage of healing.
If you go through the healing process, you will reach a time when you can’t maintain the first stage of denial anymore. You will then probably have feelings of anger, rage, envy, and resentment. You may say, “Why me? Why not Joe Blow, who is an alcoholic and beats his wife?” Because this type of anger is displaced in all directions, you will probably project it onto your environment almost at random. Friends, family, healers, doctors—none of them will be any good, and all of them will be doing things wrong. When your family gets your anger, they may react with grief, tears, guilt, or shame and even may avoid future contact with you. This may increase your discomfort and anger. Bear with it; this is a stage.
Your anger is easy to understand since you have to interrupt your life activities with some things unfinished. Or you aren’t able to do things other people can do, or you have to use your hard-earned money for healing rather than the vacations or travel that you expected.
Anyone going through the healing process will hit some anger. It will be different for each person. For some, it will be a big explosion like Bette’s, especially if they haven’t allowed themselves to be angry before. When Bette reached the second stage, her anger exploded and she went straight to the top:
I remember being very angry. I was very angry at God because I thought, “God put me through the paralysis of my legs and everything, and my legs still weren’t back to totally normal.” And I thought, “You can’t take my arms as well as my legs, because my arms are connected to my spirituality and my creativity.”
Anger, on the other hand, was just another emotion for Karen.
Anger was just one of any number of passing feelings that went through me. I may have been angry off and on in relation to how uncomfortable I was, but it doesn’t feel like a big stage that I went through. I think that at different times I had different feelings, like anger, that I wasn’t healed by people who were supposedly there to heal me or at some of the different doctors I went to. I would move between being angry for a while and then trying to make a deal with God.
Thus Karen moved back and forth between the second stage of anger and the third of bargaining.
Be prepared to find that you are much more interested in bargaining than you may have thought! Everybody does it.
Since anger didn’t get you what you wanted, you will probably, and quite unconsciously, try to bargain by being good and doing something nice so that you will get what you want. Most bargains are made with God and usually kept secret or mentioned between the lines, like dedicating a life to God or a special cause. Underneath there is usually an associated quiet guilt. You may feel guilty for not attending meetings of your religious choice more often. You may wish you had eaten the “right” food, done the “right” exercises, lived the “right” way. It is very important here to find and let go of that guilt because it only leads to more bargaining and eventually to depression. Find all of your “should-haves,” and imagine them dissolving in white light. Or give them over to your guardian angel or God. When you have completed your journey through the seven stages, you will probably find a change you wish to make in your life, but it will not come out of fear, as this one does.
Bette tried to bargain her way out of the illness by trying to get someone else, anyone but the surgeon, to fix it:
I was trying to get my husband to fix it. It was kind of like I wanted him to soothe me and say, “This is all going to get better.” I don’t think I actually realized I was bargaining, but I do know I said to myself, “If you just meditate more, if you do more baths, if you massage yourself more, and if you continue to use the white light, this will all go away and you will not have to go for surgery.” I wanted to dedicate myself to being a more devoted person to meditation and hoping that somehow this would get me off the hook.
I also went back and forth between accepting that, yes, I would have to go to surgery and hoping that somehow someone magically would wrap my spine in the gold light and everything would be taken care of. I asked for healings, but was never able to schedule one. I can remember Ann [a fellow student healer who offered healings to Bette] saying that she would come over, and I used a million different reasons why Ann should not come to my house. I didn’t trust her, I didn’t trust anybody, simply because I didn’t trust myself.
For bargaining, Karen went straight to God:
My bargaining took the form of my inner child that said, “Look, God. You make me better and I’ll do anything if you let me get through this. Or if I live and get through this [which there wasn’t much question about], I will make a deep commitment to give my life to the healing of this planet, in whatever form is required of me.” The more I bargained the more depressed I would get afterward.
Depression refers to the feeling state we experience when our energy is very low and we have lost hope of getting what we want the way we wanted it. We try to pretend that we don’t care, but we really do. We are sad, but we don’t want to express the sadness. We enter into a state of gloom and usually don’t want to interact with others. Depression means depressing our feelings.
From the point of view of the human energy field, depression means depressing the energy flow through your life field. Some of this energy flow correlates to feelings. Therefore, when we think of depression, we usually think of depressing feelings.
There are three causes for depression. One is denial from bargaining, mentioned above. That is trying to heal yourself through avoidance and rejecting yourself for the way things are, rather than a truthful seeking of a solution.
The second cause is depressing feelings of loss. All illness requires letting go of a way of life, a physical body part, or something like a bad habit. If you block your feelings of loss, you will get depressed. If you allow yourself to feel the loss and mourn it, your depression will lift. You will be in mourning, a totally different state. Mourning is an open flowing, a feeling of loss, rather than a depression of feelings. Whatever you lost, you need to mourn it. You may go through mourning at different times in your healing process. Just stay with the feelings of the loss whenever they come up for you. That will bring you to the stage of acceptance.
A third cause of depression is harsh invasive treatments like chemotherapy, anesthesia, and surgery that imbalance your body chemistry and make you go into depression. When your body resumes its physical balance, the depression will lift. From the point of view of the human energy field, the harsh treatments and drugs stop, slow down, or clog the normal energy flow through your energy field. Thus you become depressed. When the drugs wear off, the energy flow resumes, and the depression lifts. Hands-on healing clears the field in about half the normal length of time, and patients come out of postoperative depression sooner.
Bette’s depression took the form of self-rejection. She withdrew into herself and did a lot of crying:
I felt I was a bad person. If I had worked harder at the healing, if I had done my homework, if I had been a better God-person, then I would have been able to heal myself. It was almost as though I had to totally give in and heal my powerlessness in order to allow someone else to do the work. What was wrong with me? I could never be a healer. That was very, very scary to me, because inside, I truly believed I was meant to be a healer, and I still do. But going through all this healing was very scary at the time. I felt I wasn’t even a good wife anymore.
It’s really pretty ugly when all of this negative stuff comes up and you kind of go back to the old God that you knew a long, long time ago, and you feel you’re being punished for something because you’re not good enough.
I had to let go of a lot of things. I simply couldn’t do as much as I wanted to do around the house. I wasn’t able to concentrate on the healing class homework. We had planned to go away, and I simply couldn’t do it because I was in so much pain. I had to force myself in anything that I did. I had to force myself to get out of bed in the morning. I was uncomfortable in bed, but I was more uncomfortable when I got up. I really didn’t know what to do. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust anyone else. I had to go through a period of going for physical therapy to see if it would help, and actually the physical therapy made it worse. So I had to mourn the fact that that couldn’t help before it was the right time for me to have the surgery. Part of me was hoping it would help and part of me kind of knew it wouldn’t.
There’s one more thing, Barbara. I had to mourn the loss of my ability to paint during that time. That was really, really hard for me, because that had always been a way of healing for me. It had been a way to get through things and to still feel creative, to still feel spiritual. I was not able to do it because I couldn’t see, and that was a big loss, another loss. I was very depressed after the surgery, I couldn’t do any self healing at all then, I just forced myself to listen to a few tapes.
Karen’s depression was also full of self-judgments and self-rejection:
I just got bogged down under my own self-rejection. I felt I was failing at healing myself. I didn’t know whether I would be giving up by going to a doctor. I just got totally balled up in that kind of thing.
Finally, I woke up one morning and I had real bad pain in the right part of my abdomen, and I just felt like “I can’t take this anymore.” I didn’t know if it was psychological or physical, or what doctor to go to. I couldn’t get in to see my gynecologist, and I just was over the edge and so I called you. And when Heyoan talked to me through you, he reminded me about my self-judgment. I didn’t even know I had been in self-judgment. That was the turning point for me. I re-framed a lot around the operation at that point. I began seeing it as letting go of self-judgments and getting my needs met. That became the theme for me. After I talked to you, something lifted and I called and got an appointment with a doctor really quickly. I just decided to have an operation, and from then on everything just started moving.
As soon as Karen let go of her self-rejection and made the decision to have the operation, her depression lifted and she entered the stage of acceptance.
When you have had enough time, energy, and focus to process the four previous stages, you go into a stage in which you are neither depressed nor angry about your condition. You will have been able to express your previous feelings, your envy for the healthy, and your anger at those who do not have to face illness. You will have mourned the impending loss that your illness demands. You may wish to be left alone or to communicate in quiet, nonverbal ways of Being because you are preparing yourself for change. This is the time of really getting to know yourself better, of going inside and meeting yourself anew. You question the values you have lived by that have helped create your illness. You begin to feel your true needs and seek nurturance in ways that you haven’t before. You gravitate to new friends and may separate from some old ones, who may not be part of the next phase of your life. You make the necessary changes in your life to facilitate your healing process. The process speeds up. You feel great relief, even though there may be a lot to do to complete your healing.
Once Karen reached acceptance, things completely changed. Everything was then taken within the context of meeting her needs. Out of Karen’s acceptance came a way to take more control of her life by focusing on her needs. She learned how to ask for what she needed:
Speaking the truth, the truth of my needs, was the thing that released me. Just my needs without judgment. The minute I began saying them more, they began being answered. Lo and behold!
For Bette, it was the opposite. Rather than more control, for her acceptance meant deep surrender, something she had been terrified of before. As her healing process continued, the powerlessness that had been a symbol of weakness in Bette’s old context became a symbol of strength in the new. It takes a great deal of faith and strength to surrender. What she thought was collapsing into powerlessness and neediness was actually a surrender to love and to the higher power within her and all around her. For her, acceptance came in stages. The first was before her operation.
She recalls:
I really sensed deep within me that it was important that I have the surgery, I needed to go through the experience, number one, to learn to work with other medical people, to work with any other people, as a matter of fact. I needed to not be so independent. I needed to change this value of doing it all on my own.
Acceptance did not come permanently. It came in small, easy doses. It came as, “Yes, Bette, you must have the surgery. This is necessary for you to go through, and you’ve got to do it.” The other part was actually going into the hospital. I went back and forth through almost all of the stages. I again went through some denial. I was angry. I didn’t like anybody in the hospital except one nurse. It seemed they were all much too busy. However, thank God for my supportive friends.
A large part of Bette’s surrender was to ask for and to allow herself to receive a lot of support from her friends.
Acceptance and healing lead to rebirth, a time to meet yourself in a new way. You will be delighted with who you find there. In this stage you need plenty of quiet alone time to get to know yourself. Be sure to give yourself this time. Perhaps even go on a silent retreat, or go fishing for a few days. You may need a few weeks or even a few months of private personal time.
In the process of your recovery, you discover that you have uncovered parts of yourself that have been buried for a long time. Perhaps new parts you have never seen emerge. There will be plenty of light emerging from within you. Look at it; see the beauty; smell the fragrance; taste and delight in the new you. You find new internal resources that you were not able to bring out before. You may have always felt that they were there, but now they begin to flow to the surface. It can truly be a rebirth for you.
You experience everything in your life, both the present and the past, within a new context. This is a time of rewriting your history. This is when you understand that you can actually change your relationship to past events to heal them. It happens automatically because you have changed your stance in life. You have changed the context within which you experience your life. This is what is meant by true healing.
For Bette, rebirth began with humility:
When I first became humble enough to ask for help, it was like becoming less and less defiant and accepting the need to work with my husband and my friends and to be dependent on them. And accept the fact that I couldn’t do it all myself. It felt good to have the love and caring coming to me. It felt warm and comfortable and very reassuring.
I attribute my healing to the tremendous surgery by the doctor, to my ability to heal myself, and to my friends in the spiritual community who helped me also.
I’m not as afraid of being powerless anymore. Before, it was like being a ship without a rudder. So I had to be strong. I felt I needed to be isolated. I didn’t trust my higher being or higher power to provide what I needed. I had to do it by my will. Now it is nice to know I can trust other people, and I don’t have to be isolated. I feel safer trusting myself and others.
It turned out that what I thought was to be powerless was actually the need for me to surrender to the higher powers, both inside and outside me. I know there is a universal power that is there to provide me with whatever I need. I am a part of it, and it is a part of me.
Karen also placed old experiences within a new context during her rebirth stage. In the earlier stage of bargaining, she had been willing to “give her life” to whatever was “required” of her to heal the planet. But when rebirth came, she found that being “required” to “give her life” was coming out of a place of fear within her. It was like saying, “God, you save my life, and then I’ll give it up to save the planet.”
In rebirth, she found a deep commitment to first heal herself and then the planet. That is the way it works. Healing starts at home and then holographically threads through the rest of life on the planet. In healing the self, one heals the planet. These commitments came out of her love. Karen felt that the whole experience of the healing helped her to focus on what she wanted and needed to do next in her life:
The outcome of the operation was that I really got more deeply committed in that way. I came out of it wanting to give my life over in service, but it didn’t feel like the negative form of bargaining. What turns me on the most is helping healers find their unique mode of healing. It feels like a very important stage of looking at what I am about and taking a deeper level of responsibility for myself.
All areas of your life will be affected as you move into health again. Many areas of change and opportunity that you have longed for, and that were blocked or seemingly unattainable, open to you. You live more honestly with yourself and find new areas of self-acceptance that you were unable to maintain in yourself before. You find more internal humility, faith, truth, and self-love. These internal changes automatically lead to external changes. They come out of your creative force and spread holographically throughout your life. You attract new friends. You either change your profession, or you change the way in which you approach your work. You may even move to a new location. All these changes are very common after a healing is completed.
Bette’s life has changed tremendously. At the time of this writing, it’s been two years since her operation. In the first year, she spent most of her time healing herself and reorienting herself to her new attitude toward life. A lot of her fear was gone. During the healing process, she had related to the irrational fear of having her head chopped off with a past life in France, where she was guillotined. Of course this cannot be proven, but opening to and allowing the feelings around it dissolved a great deal of her fear. During the year of internal adjustment, Bette’s personal life began filling in. Her relationship with her husband became closer. Her sex life became more active. At the ripe age of sixty-seven, she says her sex life is better than it’s ever been! Her husband is delighted.
About two years after the operation, in 1990, Bette started her healing practice. At first there were a few clients; then it slowly grew. I called Bette after her operation for a followup on the earlier interview. I asked her about her life changes that were initiated with the operation, and how her practice is.
She told me:
I had to go through it to get over that terrible fear that I was going to die. It all connected to that life with the guillotine when my head was cut off. Now I’ve lived through that terror. I’ve gained strength, and I can handle a lot more. When I was ready to help other people, they just started coining for help. Now they are coming out of the walls. As soon as I help one person, two of her friends show up for help.
My art work has taken a back seat—no time for it. But it changed in character. My paintings became a lot more spiritual. Everything is in a new dimension. It’s as if when they cleared out my neck, it cleared out another layer of the—what did you call it?—the shroud around my core. I’m in a whole other dimension. My life is changed, everything is beginning to fall into place. I think the greatest thing is that I am beginning to know why I am here—that is, to heal myself and to heal other people, to help other people get well. I used to feel there were lots of limits, and now it seems the limits are gone. There is no boundary. I think it is up to me to help other people realize that they are boundaryless.
Karen’s life changed also, but in a different way. She and her husband decided to end their therapy practices in the Washington, D.C., area and move up into some mountain land in Colorado. They spent plenty of time saying good-bye to their friends of fifteen years, sold their house, and moved. They spent the winter months in Colorado meditating, reading, and simply Being in a way they had never been able to in their very busy lives in the East. After a year of this personal internal reverie, Karen is now again starting a practice in Colorado.