The Energy Healing Blog

All Healing Is Self-Healing

--by Nancy Hausauer

This is from the new book I'm working on, tentatively titled, "So You Want To Be An Energy Healer: Insight, Tools And Encouragement For The New Practitioner." I'm hoping to get it done next year. --Nancy

Energy healing can be daunting—if you think that you're in charge. If you think you're the one doing the healing for someone else, it's a heavy burden.

But you can put that burden down and approach each session with a light heart, because you're not really in charge. All healing is self-healing. You, as "the healer" only support, amplify and possibly accelerate the innate healing powers and processes of the person you're working with.

You see, each of has a genius for self-healing and self-balancing. Our bodies do it naturally, all the time. It's called homeostasis.

When we offer someone a healing session, we're just giving them a little nudge in the right direction. That's why it's best not to overdo it. We want to give each person the least intervention possible.

Someone wrote to me once asking about an experience in which he had tried to "push" energy into his ailing wife. She felt terrible afterward. That's because he was trying to be a hero and save the day for her. He was trying to do more, instead of less. His intention was good, but his wife's response illustrates the importance of using the lightest hand possible in order to activate your client's own amazing powers of self-healing.

If you and your client were a race car team, your client would be the driver and you would be the pit crew. You are an important part of the team, but the main event is your client's own internal process.

Implications For Energy Workers

• Remember to check your ego—and any anxiety you may have—at the treatment room door.
• Believe in, and mentally bow to, your client's truly astonishing ability to re-balance and come back to a state of flow and equilibrium.
• Use a light hand in your work. The least amount of intervention is usually the best amount.
• Trust that your clients nearly always know the answers to their questions and carry the solutions to their problems within. Listen carefully, either with your physical ears or your intuitive ears, because they'll often tell you outright what needs to happen for them to heal! Then you can just reflect those answers and solutions back to them.
• Relax. As I keep saying, you'll do better work!

Namaste, Nancy

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Change Your Focus To Change Your Life

If you're not happy, if you're ill, if things aren't going your way -- change your focus. Just outside your front door, there could be an ocean of love; an orchard of abundance; a well-lit pathway back to wellness; a sparkling river of happiness that will quench a deep thirst. Maybe it's your eyes you need to change, not your surroundings.

How To Make Unconditional Positive Regard The Heart Of Every Session

--by Nancy Hausauer

This is from the book I'm working on, provisionally titled, "So You Want To Be An Energy Healer: Insight, Tools And Encouragement For The New Practitioner." I hope to finish it by early summer. --Nancy

When we go into an energy healing session with someone, we need to switch into a mode of unconditional positive regard (UPR). This means we fully trust that the person we're working with

• is good
• means well
• is doing their best
• has within them vast resources for self-healing.

It doesn't mean that you have to approve of everything they do. But no matter what, you trust their capacity for personal growth and evolution. You bear witness to the presence and reality of their highest self, and in doing so help them step into that state or energetic organization.

There's no formula for doing it, and it's not something you can play-act. It has to be a deep-rooted attitude, a basic orientation that you bring into the treatment room with you.

Some of the ways you can demonstrate unconditional positive regard include

• being interested in them
• deep listening
• eye contact
• willingness to go slow and allow spaces of silence in conversation
• suspension of judgement
• allowing differences
• keeping your own self-interest, opinions and biases in check
• making it clear you trust their innate wisdom and ability to heal and rebalance
• helping them reframe negative comments or opinions about themselves.

Some of the many benefits of UPR are:

• It creates an atmosphere of safety for the recipient. They can let down their guard and relax deeply.
• It allows recipients to develop greater self-acceptance and a belief in their own fundamental goodness.
• It helps them recalibrate their energy and access their highest selves.
• It encourages them to tap into their own wisdom, insight and resources and trust themselves to be able to solve their own problems.

Some Fine Points

• Don't try to be a talk therapist if you aren't properly trained and licensed. You can do more harm than good by straying beyond your scope of practice.
• Unconditional positive regard can be hard to maintain with close family and friends. These are complex, layered relationships. Just do your best.
• Don't try to maintain a perfect record of UPR outside the treatment room. It's not even clear that it is emotionally healthy to try to maintain it all the time. Experiment with it in your daily life if you wish, but don't expect it of yourself.

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Ways To Incorporate More Gratitude And Appreciation Into Your Life

--by Nancy Hausauer

If you're in the U.S., you'll be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday. Whether or not Thursday's an official holiday in your country, counting your blessings is a reliable way to elevate your energy and your life.

A sense of gratitude generates positive energy. You can literally see someone's energy change when they shift from negative thoughts to gratitude or appreciation. (Try it!) Thankfulness clears and expands your energy, redirects your consciousness, builds your light body, and strengthens your connection to the rest of Being.

It's a basic tenet of energy healing that "energy flows where attention goes." So when you focus on negatives, you feed that with your energy. When you redirect your attention to what you're grateful for and what's going right, you feed THAT with your energy.

Ways To Incorporate More Gratitude And Appreciation Into Your Life

• Observe your thoughts, speech and behavior. How much of these are negative or complaining, how much positive and appreciating?
• At night before you fall asleep or first thing in the morning (or both), reflect on things you're thankful for (or appreciate).
• Keep a daily gratitude journal. Alternatively, in the evening write down three good things that happened that day, describing them in some detail.
• Be sure to notice and appreciate things you may normally take for granted, like clean air and water. (I hope you have these.)
• Give thanks when things are going well, and more importantly, when they aren't. Even in hard times, there are plenty of things that are going right. You can always appreciate the air coming into and out of your lungs.
• Regularly voice your appreciation to family and friends, for things both small and large.
• Pick some aspect of your life you usually find fault with. Switch your perspective and focus on its merits.
• Practice any or all of these things for 30 days. You'll establish new, more positive habits of mind. Notice how this changes your life.

I wish all of us a warm home, enough to eat, health, peace, safety, the love of family and friends—and the blessing of a grateful heart. -- Nancy

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Why You Should Honor Your Heart's Desires

Your heart-felt passions and desires deserve to be honored and tended. They NEED to be honored and tended, so that the evolutionary principle, the intelligence, the love, the MAGIC they hold deep within them can be born.

Cultivating your deeply felt desires, or the underlying needs that they represent, shouldn't be an afterthought. They shouldn't be something to take care of after you've taken care of everyone and everything else. Something important is wanting to come into the world through them. Put them near the top of your to-do list. Take a step toward realizing your passions every day. They matter. You matter.

What will you do, today, to honor what your heart deeply longs for?

Namaste,

Nancy

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How Science Can Help Energy Healers Soothe Pain

--by Nancy Hausauer

This post is a "just the highlights" version of my article in the November/December issue of Energy Magazine (TM), titled "The Issues Are NOT In The Tissues: Energy Healing Strategies For Chronic Pain Inspired By Contemporary Science." Here's a link to download the full article in PDF form.

Energy Magazine, an online publication of the Healing Touch Program, is an important contemporary voice for exploring and promoting energy healing.

Energy healing has a decent track record in dealing with chronic pain, but are there ways we energy healers could improve? Let's look at some of the general insights and applications we can derive from contemporary science, which in recent decades has made huge advances in understanding pain.

Take A Holistic Approach

A major take-away from this is that there's not likely to be a single, straight-ahead "cure." Definitely, you should use your most effective local techniques for pain, but don't stop there. Treat the whole person, the whole energy system. Be creative, be holistic, approach from multiple angles and remember that your therapeutic impact is always more than the sum of your techniques.

Calm The Nervous System

Incorporate Gentle Touch

Work With The Emotional Aspects Of Pain

Nurture Optimism

Promote Empowerment

Be Realistic

For specific ideas for implementing these general strategies, download the full article.

Worried? Nothing You Can Do About It? Here's What To Do

--by Nancy Hausauer

Recently, I was telling my husband about something I was worried about. It involved a touchy situation with someone I cared a lot about, and I didn't feel like I had much influence over how it was going to turn out. I was really stewing about it and asked for his advice.

He said something simple but brilliant:

Calibrate up and trust what happens.

"Calibrate up and trust what happens" is advice I'd recommend for anyone who's fretting about something.

How Do You Calibrate Your Energy Up?

• If you pray, it's a beautiful way to calibrate an experience to a higher level.
• Set an intention for the highest good for everyone involved in the situation.
• Be present and grateful for everything you can be aware of to be grateful for.
• Remember what one of my clients brilliantly pointed out: "You can spiral up as well as spiral down." So if you're spiraling down, turn that feeling around and move the energy up.
• Imagine the situation you're worried about. You can imagine it any way you want: a scene, a symbol or whatever. Now, imagine that you are floating high above it, so high that you can't see its details, and send love, compassion and light to it.
• Use the "shield of light" technique both to fill your field with light and to put some energetic space between you and your troubling situation. Scroll down the page to find the technique.
• Move your energetic center to your heart chakra, your Third Eye, or both. Here's a technique for using breath to do that (#1 in the list):
• Develop a short, personal ritual for raising your energy. This could be a phrase, a sound, an image, a gesture/mudra, etc.
• Practice mindfulness and do your best to stay in the present.
• Remember this wisdom from Pema Chodron: "Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment" (or evolution or personal growth).

How To Work With People Facing Severe Health Crises

This is from the book I'm working on, tentatively titled, "So You Want To Be An Energy Healer: Insight, Tools And Encouragement For The New Practitioner." Although it's aimed specifically at new and aspiring healers, I think it'll offer a lot for practitioners at any stage. I'm hoping to get it done by early next year. --Nancy

If you do energy healing long enough, even if it is just for your immediate friends and family, you will eventually work with someone who is staring death right in the eye.

Repeat after me: "I will never promise someone facing a life-threatening illness that I can cure them."

Never. Ever. Ever.

Your goal is to increase their quality of life while they go through whatever physical, mental, emotional and spiritual processes they are going through.

Aim to make them feel loved and cared about. To soothe them and help them relax. To provide them with some temporary relief of symptoms if you can. Perhaps to give them a glimpse of non-material reality, which can be a comfort to someone who is dying.

Your goal cannot be to save their life. As I have said abundantly elsewhere, in energy work we do not operate on the model of fixing and curing. Leave that to the medical doctors.

And on that note, do not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship. Do not say things that make your ailing friend or loved one doubt any conventional treatments they are receiving. They don't need a particle more stress, anxiety or doubt than they already have.

Is it possible that energy healing might help them achieve a miracle, might save their lives or at least forestall death for a significant amount of time? In my experience, yes. But we have absolutely no control over that, it is not common and it is cruel to make even so much as a whispered intimation that it's possible.

Here's what I have said to loved ones and clients who were facing grave health crises. "Energy healing can't hurt and it might help. It can usually help you relax and feel better. Relaxing is always good for your state of mind, can help you feel less pain and supports your body in functioning at its best. Energy healing also can help you feel more at peace emotionally so you can make clear decisions, find more enjoyment, access your intuition and connect with loved ones."

Then just give them gentle energy work as often as you can. Lovingly do the work, and leave the outcome to something greater and wiser than we are.

And if they don't want energy work, bring soup. Everyone needs soup.

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Where Do You Focus Your Attention? (It Matters)

How A Beginning Energy Healer Can Overcome Self-Doubt

--by Nancy Hausauer

This is from the new book I'm working on, tentatively titled, "So You Want To Be An Energy Healer: Insight, Tools And Encouragement For The New Practitioner."Although it's aimed specifically at new and aspiring healers, I think it'll have a lot for practitioners at any stage. I hope to get it done by spring 2019. --Nancy

Doubt. It sometimes afflicts every energy worker I know, experienced healers as well as beginners. Sorry.

For me--yes, it still happens to me sometimes--it's a nagging, mean little voice inside my head, saying, "Who do you think you are? What do you think you're doing?"

I've developed a fairly effective response to this nagging, mean little voice. I say silently to myself, "Just do the work." I say it as often, as long and as firmly as necessary. And then I just do the work. Before long, I'm over it. I highly recommend this method.

Tips For Your First Few Sessions

Don't let that stop you. There's probably no help for it! It's like starting anything new--you just have to do it. But here are some tips that may make it easier:

• Start by working with people you're very comfortable with, who are open to energy work and who are supportive of your doing it.
• Let them know you're new and still feeling your way around.
• Tell them whether or not you want feedback, and if so, what kind.
• Give yourself permission to be awkward and to make what you might perceive as mistakes (while knowing there are no real mistakes).
• Really lean into practicing non-attachment to outcomes. Don't expect anything in particular to happen. Don't worry if you don't "feel" anything. Just go into the session with an open heart and mind, practice your "Basic Energy Healing Toolkit" and do whatever else occurs to you.
• Also, remember if something that feels like an energetic disharmony will not resolve in a reasonable length of time, it may be that the disharmony is a necessary part of a larger process of healing. Just set an intention to support the healing process without feeling the need to fix it. Being humble and having a perennial "beginner's mind" is as important as any specific energy healing technique you can use.
• It's OK to feel like you don't know what you're doing. Just re-ground, re-center and "do the work."
• Know that sessions will become smoother as you do more of them. You'll learn through experience how to sequence your session, how best to communicate certain things, how to set people at ease and so on.

Above all, try not to take things too seriously. Sometimes energy work can be serious, but often it's a lot of fun.

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Image by Mike's Birds from Riverside, CA, US - House Wrens Fledging, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63824042