[Scarab]

Originally Posted by morganlilith

i am starting to think that when you say 'heal' you are using it in the way i would use 'cure'.

yes, i can walk into a hospital and do healing work with a patient. assuming the patient was willing and the hospital didn't have security drag me out. many hospitals do not allow 'healers'. notice i said 'healing work'. but could i 'cure' them? would their cancer/disease/disability be instantly gone? maybe, maybe not. well, technically i'm not legally allowed to cure anyone. only AMA sanctioned treatments are allowed to 'cure'. but like i said in a previous post, in most instances, healing is a process rather than a spontaneous event.

i used to participate in a large scale (several hundred people participating) healing event at an annual festival i often attend. the healing event included drumming and chanting to 'raise energy', and groups of two practitioners to do hands on energy work with a person with life threatening issues. (for example if there were 20 people requesting healing, there would be 2 'healers' working hands on with each of them). one particular year i worked on a woman in a very intense session. (lots of sweating and lots of crying). the next year at the same festival she approached me and told me that i had worked on her the year before. i wouldn't have recognized her, but she remembered me. she said the reason she had gone to the healing event was because she had an inoperable brain tumor. she'd been told, basically, to go home and get her affairs in order. but she didn't die. her symptoms diminished and then ceased. further testing showed the tumor was gone. did that have anything to do with me? maybe. maybe not. can i prove any of it? nope. i never even knew her name.

i had a massage client with whom i worked once every week or so for a few years. she was diagnosed with a large uterine fibroid, and was scheduled for surgery. we had been doing pretty mainstream massage therapy in our sessions, but i suggested doing some energy work specific to the fibroid. she agreed and so we did a couple of specific sessions in the weeks before her surgery. after the fibroid was removed, the dr sent it for further testing because he thought it 'looked weird'. the report that came back stated that it showed similar cellular structure to what they would have expected had she taken medication that is sometimes used to break down smaller fibroids. they couldn't explain it. she attributed it to the energy work. did i have anything to do with it? i dunno. but she thought so. can i prove it? nope. my client records are confidential.

now, as far as doing healing over a distance, what criteria would you require to prove to you that it is viable? and again, are you talking in terms of 'healing' or of 'curing'? keeping in mind as i said before, that being 'cured' isn't always what the person needs. many times there is much to be gained through the process of healing. and often the process involves a series of growth stages. and if a person dies, it doesn't mean the healing work was a failure. that is part of the AMA paradigm, but not necessarily part of the larger picture.

Definition of 'heal'

To make better; to revive, recover, or cure; To become better

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heal