Can healing be learned?

James Oschmann, PhD, in his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis, calls the ability to heal a human attribute that has been hardwired into our species from the very beginning of our existence. He even suggests a physiological mechanism for it: the healer concentrates the earth's electromagnetic resonance through the pineal gland and channels the resulting "energy" out through the palms of the hands.

At the other end of the spectrum from the scientific worldview, many meditation traditions in the world teach that if you meditate long enough, and polish the mirror of your mind long enough to clear it of "obscurations", you will develop seemingly extraordinary attributes and abilities, one of which is the ability to heal. It has always been there; you just haven't been able to see it until the dust has been removed.

In the past 11 years I have taken 19 workshops: three in Reiki, two in Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch, six with Bill Bengston, three in Richard Bartlett's Matrix Energetics, two in Quantum Lightweaving, one in Shamanic Journeying, one in Jeff Levin's BodySpin, and one in the Domancic Method. What I do now, like many of you out there who have taken umpteen healing workshops, is a mishmash: whatever comes, whatever the client's body asks for, whatever seems most appropriate.

In Reiki, I was attuned and I was taught the Reiki hand positions, and I learned to "heal".

In Quantum Touch I was taught to breathe funny, to "sandwich the pain", and I learned to "heal".

In Bill Bengston's workshop I learned "rapid image cycling" and to look for "hot spots", and I also learned to "heal".

In Matrix Energetics, I learned to "two-point", to "time-travel", to work with archetypes and "drop down, place intent, and let go", and thus to create "healing through transformation".

In the Domancic workshop I learned to wave my hands in prescribed ways and to follow treatment protocols like recipes, and heal specific conditions.

In fact it almost seems that whatever the method, the effect is to teach healing, which would lead one to believe that healing is a very easy thing to learn.

The most telling moment in all these workshops came when, after two full and intense days of teaching us Matrix Energetics techniques, on the morning of the third day when we were all exhausted Richard Bartlett turned to us and said "All these techniques you learned are just there to entertain you while you watch the healing happen." Which means the techniques are absolutely unnecessary. And there was another telling moment when one of our teachers turned to my friend Ellen and said that he did not understand why she would want to learn another method when, having learned his, she now had perfect access to "the Source" -- which essentially says "my technique is the only Way".

In previous posts I have said that in my opinion all these teachers are Gateways. In my opinion they could be teaching you anything as a technique, from musical scales to drumming to reciting Shakespeare, and you'd most probably still "learn" to heal from them. Partly because quite likely there is nothing to learn (see above, as per Oschmann and "removing obscurations") and partly because they are mostly showing you where the door is. And some of them are indeed amazing Gateways if you see them in person. The fact that they believe their technique is important is what makes it important: there are too many techniques out there that work for this not to be the case.

But now I am going to take this a step further and state that if you have to rely on someone else to point the way, you are only going to be a "second-hand" healer. You are piggy-backing on someone else's signal, watching the baseball game through the neighbour's satellite dish. That satellite dish was set up for the neighbour's TV, and your signal will likely be less than perfect. This might explain why healing ability gets more and more diluted the farther away it gets from the original teacher. You need to get your own satellite dish: or in other words, you need to become your own Gateway.

Is it the case that if you take enough workshops, learn sufficient numbers of techniques, or practice one particular technique long enough and diligently enough this will automatically happen? Or is there something else you need to do? I did Shamanic Journeying for a number of years looking for my own gateway to the Source and for the last two years I've also been doing Mahamudra meditation. I can comment that the "signal" has certainly become noticeably clearer. But at the same time I will still be taking more workshops to "open it up" further, because learning is enjoyable and I am forever curious.