How to teach energy healing "properly"

It could be argued that no one really knows how to teach energy healing "properly". It's too new, too revolutionary for our Western mindsets, and there are too few signposts in our culture on how it could be taught. "Properly" implies acquisition: we know how to teach children how to read so they can read a book and surgeons how to operate so they can reliably remove an appendix or a gallbladder, but how do we teach people to heal?

In an earlier posting I suggested that the way most energy healing modalities likely come into being is through someone who develops the ability spontaneously, most often by accident. Next someone else comes along and says "that's a cool thing that you do. Can you teach me?" and then the two of them put their heads together to figure out how the healing is produced.

The problem is that the method thus developed is, of necessity, only a conscious approximation of what the teacher does unconsciously -- or rather, an attempt to replicate what the teacher doesn't do, in the sense that doing implies conscious action, and nothing is really being "done" here.

This means the method isn't quite it, but it's arguably the next best thing to it -- whatever it is -- and likely better than nothing at all.

Elsewhere I have also suggested that transmission forms a significant part of the teaching. The teacher stands as a gateway for the healing ability, and students can access the ability by being in the teacher's presence. Sometimes, as in Reiki, the teacher does something special to activate the transmission. Sometimes, as in Buddhism, it is sufficient for the teacher and student just to look at one another.

In my opinion it is most likely that method and transmission work together to allow the student to acquire the ability to heal. It would be interesting to know which one is more important and whether one will work in the absence of the other. My best guess is that the method is a means for facilitating the transmission and then acts as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense of the word) to allow the student to access the memory of the transmission.

Yet a third issue I have raised is that the effectiveness of the method decreases as it moves away from the original teacher, as each successive imperfectly taught generation also imperfectly teaches the next. And this is how we go from the original version of, let's say, Reiki, which was reputed to be able to cure serious conditions, to some current Reiki practitioners only being able to generate "a little warmth" and and a sense of well-being through their treatments, but not much more.

At the moment no method of energy healing has a perfect record of teaching students to heal. Students of most methods acquire different ranges of ability depending on a variety of unknown factors. This is as true of Bill Bengston's method as of all the others. But what Bill Bengston has on all the others is that he is the one best situated to tease out through scientific means how the teaching of energy healing works and how it could be made more effective. Given adequate time and resources, and provided that he possesses the will to do so, he is uniquely placed to figure out how to take energy healing into the mainstream and how to make it work.