Tag prayer

Is distant healing really a thing?

Nancy Crowe 1 Comment
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Photo credit: norsez {Thx for 13 million views!} via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

One of the coolest things about Reiki is that, being energy, it is not subject to time or space. Therefore, a Reiki practitioner can work with a client without the use of touch, or without even being in the same room. Or the same country. I can send Reiki to my brother in the Philippines from my Indiana home in the U.S. The energy goes where it needs to go, with no roaming charges.

Still, it’s one thing to believe that Reiki and other complementary healing modalities work hands-on — but the practitioner actually being able to do something for a person or animal miles away? How is that even possible? It’s a tough concept for this skeptical journalist, too, and I can’t explain how it works. I only know that it does.

A friend’s mother’s cat — I’ll call her Maisie — had been anxious, over-grooming to the point that her back legs were nearly bald. My friend mentioned her mom had just installed new flooring and wondered if that could be what was bothering Maisie. In any case, both she and her mom were worried. Wanting to help and knowing I could use the practice, I promised to send Maisie some healing energy.

That afternoon, when I sat down to meditate, I drew all of the Reiki symbols in the air, making sure to include the distant healing symbol. I asked God to let me be a conduit for whatever Maisie, and all humans and animals connected with her, needed. Then I took a few deep breaths and intuitively connected with Maisie, whom I had never met and who lived a couple of hours away. I introduced myself and asked her permission to send healing energy, explaining that she was free to decline or to take as much or as little of the energy as she wished. This is important: Whether distant or hands-on, it’s always up to the animal. If I’d sensed her turning or moving away or felt any apprehension on her part, we would have been done, with me perhaps asking if I could check in with her the next day.

Once I felt Maisie say yes, I pictured her inside a soft bubble of light, enveloped by healing energy from the earth below her and the sky above her. Animals ground with their feet, so it made sense that the new floor, with its unfamiliar feel and smells (along with strange humans in the house installing it), exacerbated whatever other anxiety she felt. I also sent healing energy to the house, envisioning a safe and happy place for all who live or visit there.

After twenty or thirty minutes, I sensed she’d had enough for the day. I thanked her, told her, “You’ve got this,” and closed the session with a brief prayer of thanks. I repeated this for three or four successive days.

It took another week or so before I remembered to ask my friend if her mom had said anything about how Maisie was doing.

“Oh, my gosh, she is doing so much better!” she said. The fur had started to grow back on Maisie’s legs … and she was playing and accepting human affection in a way she had not done in quite a while.

Did I heal Maisie? No. As a Reiki practitioner, I am the string between two cans … Maisie and a higher source, however she might conceive of such, being the two cans. Any healing that happened did so by God’s grace and Maisie’s willingness, in that peaceful space we created, to heal herself.

This is why Reiki works so well with animals, who so often are at the mercy of us humans: They are respected, and they get to choose.

To learn more or schedule a session for your animal friend, visit my Reiki page.

 

Leaning unto a new understanding

Nancy Crowe 2 Comments

TrustintheLord

No arguments here; trusting in the Lord is a good idea. Challenging at times, yes, but still a good idea. It’s the “lean not unto thine own understanding” part of this passage that, until recently, left me puzzled.

Our own understanding, I reasoned, is how we get through life — understanding the need to steer clear of a hot stove, our neighbor’s need not to hear our stereo, and the relative insignificance of the things we worried about last month or five years ago. We are put on earth to learn, grow, and understand in order to be better earthen vessels of God’s love, right? So why would we not lean on that while we trust in the Lord? Are the two mutually exclusive, as the verse seems to suggest?

The passage above is the King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version, which was our regulation study Bible in seminary, is not much help, wording it: “Do not rely on your own insight.” The Living Bible even kicks it up a notch: “Trust the Lord completely; don’t ever trust yourself.” Yikes.

Not trusting ourselves, our intuition, and what we have learned hobbles us in life and decreases our ability to trust and serve God. If we trust that God put us here — gifts and flaws and all — for a reason, and we do not trust ourselves, are we really trusting God?

More doubts creep in: “What if I’m not doing it right? Look at all my mistakes . . . sure, God forgives, but I can’t forgive myself. Of course I can’t trust my own understanding.”

So we look to someone or something else — a parent, therapist, partner, our work, our politics — to measure and determine our worthiness. Talk about slippery slopes and shifting sands.

Clarity on this Proverbs passage eluded me for years until a friend and I were talking about prayer — not the talking, requesting, praising, or thanking part, but the listening part of prayer. We talked about the importance and challenge of letting Spirit reach through the clutter of our minds, especially the mental chatter that cuts us down, and speak to our hearts. That’s when she mentioned the “trust in the Lord with your whole heart” verse, her new favorite.

And that’s when it all clicked. That still, small voice that lifts us up — not the one that tells us we’re not good enough, nothing we do makes a difference, and that some other human being always knows better — is what we can trust. It comes directly from God to us . . . but how do we know which is which?

Doreen Virtue explores this in her book “Divine Guidance: How to Have a Dialogue with God and Your Guardian Angels.” Divine guidance comes from God and God’s creations, including our higher self, angels/ascended masters, and our loved ones on the other side, Virtue says. False guidance comes from our or others’ lower self (or ego). Our higher self is set at the factory, so to speak; it is perfect, whole, and complete, just as God created. The ego is created not by God but by ourselves as we and those around us operate under the dark illusion that we are separate from God.

Virtue includes charts that break down the distinctions between the higher and lower self, and between true and false guidance. True guidance, for example, is gentle, loving, empowering, says the same thing repeatedly, and most often emerges in response to prayer. Even if we are being warned about something, that information is given calmly, constructively, and in a way that encourages us to respond rather than react. False guidance is anxious or angry, critical, disempowering, switches topics and perspectives impulsively, and comes in response to worry.

This all fits with what I have learned and experienced about intuition, our God-given communication and navigation tool. The ego is easy to hear; it’s loud, in your face, and always has a fire to put out or someone to please. Clearing that clutter to tap into our intuition can require more conscious effort, such as prayer, meditation, or exercise (or all of these), though some intuitive insights seem to come out of the blue. In either case, intuitive or God-given information is delivered in an uplifting way. Human beings may reprimand, condescend, or rebuke; God is greater.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart” — not just with thine brain. If we can hear God with our hearts and put these overloaded brains of ours to use following through on that guidance, our paths may not be smooth or straight — but they will be our paths, and God’s.