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My Personal Perspective As a Healer

I had a healing practice for some fifteen years. I’ve been a healing teacher for thirteen more years. One thing I know with absolute certainty is that healing and teaching must be approached with love, humility, courage, and power if they are to be effective. Healing and teaching must be done in the clear light of the deeper spiritual truths. Whenever a patient comes to me in need of healing, I am aware that the deepest need any person has is to find his or her way home, to the real self, the divine within. It doesn’t matter what the presenting complaint is. The deeper inner need is always the same. In opening the way into the real self, patients heal themselves.

All healers and teachers must walk their talk. It takes a lot of self-development and self-transformation and a lot of training in the healing arts to be an effective healer. Humility and meticulous honesty with self are of utmost importance. The hard part about healing training is not the techniques but the personal growth one must go through to become ready to learn the techniques. Then the techniques come quite naturally. For example, in my years of teaching, I have seen beginners try to learn advanced techniques before they are spiritually ready to enter into the deeper spiritual experience connected with the technique. What results is a lot of fantasy and sometimes temporary damage to their fellow students’ energy fields. In other cases, I have seen people take a weekend workshop, get labeled or label themselves as healers, and begin a healing practice. Many times, these people give ineffectual healings and fantasy prognoses. Some even announce fantasy cures to very ill clients who end up back in the hospital.

The heart of healing is not the techniques but the states of being out of which those techniques arise. For example, when I first began healing, I accomplished less in a one-and-one-half-hour healing than I can now accomplish in a few minutes, because I can now enter into much deeper and more powerful spiritual states of being that transmit thousands of times more noninvasive healing energy that is extremely precise to what the client needs.

Healers do not work miracles. All healing can do is what the human body can do. It can do a lot, and there are things it can’t do. To my knowledge, no human being has ever regenerated a limb—yet. But I’m willing to bet that every illness that has been labeled as “terminal” has been healed or “spontaneously remissed” by at least one person. “Terminal” is the present state of the human condition. We will all “die.” That is, our physical body will die. But that doesn’t mean we will die, as in “cease to exist,” or even lose consciousness for very long, for that matter. The hardest part of physical death may be the fear of letting go into the unknown, of letting go of loved ones and in some cases the physical pain associated with death.

I say these things from life experience gained through what I call Higher Sense Perception. Many people call it being psychic. I prefer the term Higher Sense Perception, meaning the development of the senses beyond the ordinary ranges most human beings use. That’s not as glamorous. All the five senses can be expanded beyond the normal ranges with good teaching and practice. As with any other skill, some people are more talented than others. When you develop seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching beyond the normal ranges, a whole new world opens up. It takes quite a bit of getting used to, but if you give yourself plenty of time, you can integrate this new world into your life. Of course your life will change, but it always does anyway.

When Higher Sense Perception opens, a person can see energy fields surrounding and interpenetrating everything, including the human body. These energy fields are intimately associated with all life functions and change constantly in accordance with life function, including physical, mental, and spiritual life functions. The human energy field, or aura, is composed of seven energy levels, as we have seen. Each level has constantly changing patterns of energy that pulse with the life-force. Each level is composed of higher vibrations or pulsations than the one it surrounds and interpenetrates. These patterns change with health, sickness, and the dying process.

When we learn about the human energy field and observe it for a while, a new idea dawns. The human energy field isn’t just an energy field. It is the person. In fact, it is more the person than the physical body is. The levels of the human energy field are really energy bodies. They are you. You are energy. You are not in your physical body—your physical body is in you. From this perspective, then, when you die, something very different happens.

I can “see” a person after they leave their physical body at death. People who just died still have some of these energy bodies. They are composed of the higher four levels of their energy bodies, without a physical body inside them. The lower three levels, that hold the physical body in place, dissolve in the dying process. To me, death is a transition. It is a great change. It is a rebirth into another plane of reality. Unless they have had a long-term illness, people usually look pretty healthy shortly after death. Usually in hospitals, they rest on the “other side” of the curtain that separates what we normally call life and death. To me, that curtain is illusory; it only separates our physical self from our higher spiritual self, which does not die at physical death. Taken in this light, we can look at it as a curtain that separates who we think we are from who we really are.

These things may sound outrageous, but to stand by my reality, I must say them. It is real for me. If it is not real for you, then do not try to force my experience into your reality. You must build your reality out of your experience. In that building, consider the possibility that life is a greater mystery than you know, and whatever death turns out to be for you, it has the possibility of being a really wonderful surprise.

Another aspect of Higher Sense Perception is perceiving spiritual guides or guardian angels. This level of reality opens when one opens Higher Sense Perception to the fourth level of the human energy field and higher. In the beginning, I just thought I was having a vision or making something up. I would be giving a healing, and an angel would walk into the room. I knew they were angels because they had wings. The ones who didn’t have wings, I called guides. Soon they were putting their hands through mine as I worked on people. I could see and feel their hands working. Then they started telling me where to put my hands, and what to do in a healing.

I still hung on to the idea that it was just a vision. Of course, people kept getting well when I did what they said. A big change came when I decided to ask the guides questions. They answered with things I did not or could not have known. Our interactions had become relational. I could see, feel, hear, smell, touch, and interact with them. They had become just as real to me as anyone in a physical body. This still takes some getting used to. It’s not something everyone can do, at least not yet.

If guardian angels and spiritual guides are not part of your reality, consider the possibility that they could be. You may be pleasantly surprised by how your life struggles become easier by allowing the possibility that you can get help by simply asking for it and learning to recognize help when it comes. You can do this, even if you can’t see, hear, talk with, or feel them. It is a way to open a door to your eventually perceiving them. That is what I did, and it worked.

After some time, I became friends with a particular guide who has been with me many years. “His” name is Heyoan. He says he does not have a gender, but I like to use he. I have spent many years healing with Heyoan and the guides of each patient who walk into the healing room with the patient. Now Heyoan and I teach the healing classes. I lecture for a while, then go into an altered state and “channel” Heyoan. That means Heyoan gives a lecture through me. This always lifts the whole class to a much higher level of spiritual understanding than if I talk to the class without “channeling.” In every class, new information, which builds on all that has gone before, comes through. Heyoan has contributed several meditations for healing that you will find throughout this book.

If, on the other hand, guardian angels or guides are not a reality for you or are not acceptable for you, perhaps you can call the phenomenon of guidance “getting information from an alter ego,” “mind reading,” or simply “psychic reading.” For me, it is not the metaphor of reality that you use to describe this phenomenon that is important but the usefulness of the information that is gained through altered states of consciousness. I’m sure, as this phenomenon becomes more understood, we will find better metaphors with which to describe it.

From a holistic perspective, in which we all consist of energy fields in which our physical bodies live, what is healing? It is dissolving the veil between our personality self and our inner divine core. It is dissolving the veil between who we think we are and who we really are. It is dissolving the veil between life and death. If a patient comes to me and asks, “Am I going to die?” or, “Does healing mean I am going to get better physically?” I give the answer set within the context of the divine core within the patient and the spiritual reality I described above. One gets better whether or not one dies, and death is very different in the above context.

If a patient asks, “Will I ever be the same again?” the answer is no, but it is given in the context of life as constant personal change.

If the question is, “Am I going to get better?” the answer, within the above context, is always yes. For life is always moving toward unification with the divine whole.

The answer to “Will I walk again?” is usually “I don’t know, but it is possible. Nothing is impossible.”

QUESTION: How do I deal with this terrible pain?

BARBARA: Healing usually reduces the amount of pain, but don’t feel bad about taking pain-killers; they are also a gift from God. Doing relaxation and visualization exercises helps reduce pain. Self-rejection and self-judgment increase pain. Go easy on yourself. You are not at fault here. This is a life lesson. You are not being punished. Spend several minutes a day doing the breathing, color, and loving-yourself exercises given in Part IV.

QUESTION: I am terrified. Help me. Tell me what to do.

HEYOAN, my guide, says:

Let fear be your ally. Fear has a great deal to teach you. Fear is the experience of being disconnected from who you truly are; it is the opposite of love. Fear can be an ally if you allow it to be, and just say, I’m afraid. In continually doing this, you begin to see that you are not fear itself, but that fear rather is a feeling. “I am afraid” becomes “I feel fear.” It is the reaction of holding feelings because you believe they are coming too fast. These feelings are based on a great many assumptions of what might happen. Most fear is not of what is happening now but of what might be. If you are able to stay in the moment, fear will not find you. Fear is the projection of something that has happened in the past, into the future, through a large magnifying glass. So when you are in fear, you are not in reality. But rather than deny that you feel it, just say what you feel in the moment. This act alone will bring you into the moment, and thereby out of fear.

QUESTION: How will my life be different?

BARBARA: Because you are sick, you may no longer be able to function in what you thought your life’s purpose was. It is necessary to change your self-definition. It is necessary to focus on inner values rather than outer goals. The outer goals will come again later. Now it is time to heal the inside. What your life is all about will begin to have a much deeper personal meaning to you. You will gain insights into the preciousness of life itself you never had before. You will gain love. That is always a lesson in illness. Your life will be affected in greater ways than you can imagine now. It is time to begin to surrender to the process of healing and let yourself be carried by your greater wisdom, which is connected to the divine.

A patient often first goes to a healer, hoping to find relief from pain or a certain symptom or to be cured from a specific disease, maybe have a tumor taken away. And always the patient receives much more than that. The focus of the healer is not only to eliminate the leg pain or the tumor but to also work with the patient to find and heal the root cause of the original symptom or disease. That will be found on a deeper level of the patient’s inner being.

As a professional healer, I have been witness to healings of all kinds. At first some things surprised me. Later, I understood them to be part of the natural process of healing. As the inner corridors to the deeper self open within, the patient’s experience of life changes. So does the rest of his or her life.

We’ve all heard about people who, after experiencing an illness, change professions. They don’t do so because the illness required it—for example, because they couldn’t physically drive a truck anymore—but because they find a different purpose. They desire change. The “simple” healing of an illness can bring about dramatic change. Personal relationships change. Some healings bring about marriages; others bring about dissolution of marriages that don’t nurture the partners. In other cases, an illness will be the completion of a whole stage of life. And the patient will change just about everything—profession, home, geographic location, friends, spouse. Some healings mend long-term splits among family members. Through the healing experience, people gain a much greater respect and trust for their own inner knowing. Many people refer to this as a rebirth.