Since the publication of Hands of Light, my first book, I have continued to study the relationship of our life energies to health, illness, and healing. I have become very interested in the deeper questions of why we get sick. Is “getting sick” part of the human condition, with some deeper meaning or lesson behind it? How does living a “normal” life in our culture lead to illness? I wondered what life rhythms were most healthy for us to follow. How do our day-to-day choices and actions affect our health? How does the shifting of our consciousness moment to moment affect our health? I wondered if and how our illness could be related to our creativity and our evolutionary process.
I stopped my healing practice to get more time to create the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, and I continued to observe energy phenomena in class and group situations as well as within individual students. As I continued to teach and lecture, a very interesting pattern started to be revealed. At the beginning of the year, my guidance told me I would be lecturing on the creative process. When I finally was able to have several of these lectures transcribed, edited, and put together, I discovered a whole new connection between the evolutionary plan of the earth, our life task, our creativity, our health, and living in what Heyoan, my guide, calls the unfolding moment.
In order to understand the new material, it is necessary to enter into a new paradigm. Webster defines the word paradigm as “a pattern, example, or model.” It is the way we perceive the world. A paradigm is a shared set of assumptions that explain the world to us and help us predict its behavior. We take these assumptions for granted. We define them as basic reality and don’t think about them further. Does a fish notice the water?
“Most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don’t examine or question,” observes Werner Erhard, creator of est and the Forum Workshops. “We bring these assumptions to the table with us as a given. They are so much a part of who we are that it is difficult for us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions—we think from them.”
Medical paradigms determine how we think about our bodies. Over the years, western medicine has identified evil spirits, humors, germs, and viruses as causes of disease and has designed treatments accordingly. As technologies in medicine advance and as we learn more about our mind-body connections, our medical paradigms are shifting. New paradigms give rise to new possibilities.
In the past, the auric field has been known to be associated with health and healing, but in a rather “esoteric” way. Knowledge of the field has been a mixture of real observations, assumptions, and fantasies. Now, as we learn more about bioenergy in our laboratories and clinics, the idea of a human energy field that is directly connected to our health is becoming more acceptable within the western medical paradigm.
In this book, I present a new view of health, healing, and illness. Part I includes a scientific background, based on both energy field and holographic theories of why and how laying on of hands works.
In Part II, I describe what a healer can and cannot do for a person, the basic format of a healing session, and how a healer-physician team can work. Part II presents the concept of the internal balancing system, an automatic—usually unconscious—system that keeps us in top shape if we listen to and follow it. Part II also shows how we can create dis-ease in our lives and bodies if we don’t follow our balancing system.
Through a series of interviews with patients in Part III, I present the stages of personal experience that take place during the healing process from the patient’s point of view. I discuss what a patient can do to get the most out of that process, including how to work with a healer and a physician to create a healing plan. Case studies help bring the process of healing into everyday terms.
Part IV gives detailed healing plans and very useful healing meditations and visualizations that will help your personal healing process.
Part V describes how relationships affect your health in both positive and negative ways. Practical ways of creating healthy relationships are described, as well as the auric field interactions that occur in relationships. Ways to re-establish healthy auric field energy exchanges and connections are given.
Part VI describes the higher spiritual realities and deeper dimensions of creative energies and relates health, dis-ease, and healing to the creative process.
Appendix A presents a transcript of a healing session; Appendix B, a list of types of health-care professionals, what they do, and the national organizations through which you can find them; and Appendix C, a description of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which trains men and women healers for professional work and sends out lists of healers who have graduated. Plus the Bibliography provides resources for further study and reading.