Using qi gong visualisation for cancer

Exciting news: a reader named John Hill wrote to me to say that he used qi gong visualisation to treat his 93-year-old mother, who had terminal stage-4 cancer. Six months later she was cancer free. He described what he did as an

entanglement in a synchronistic dance where every day during my Qigong practice, part of the practice would be holding my 93 yr. old cancer-diseased mother in an energy ball, with energy passing from one hand, thru her to the other, circulating around, while cycling the visualizations thru my mind as my mother's cancer cells slowly disappeared. Not a cause and effect relationship - a synchronistic dance, like kids playing in a play-pen........

He also sent me a document describing his visualisations and generously agreed that they could be published in this blog. So without further ado, here they are:

MEDICAL QIGONG/TAICHI PRACTICE FOR UNIFYING WITH
THE COSMOS AND HEALING OF SERIOUS ILLNESS

All is based on “Watching the Breath” – standing feet parallel shoulder width apart, knees flexed, pelvis tucked under, most of the weight on balls of the feet, sinking into the earth, breathing abdominally thru the nose, tongue touching top of the mouth, eyes staring straight ahead in a general gaze, not on anything in particular. Best in a comfortable spot or in nature, gazing into a pleasant view. The breathing builds like a slow river, deep and relaxed, allowing thoughts “to fly” and happen, observing them and your mind/body/spirit (if you believe spirit). The thoughts tend to break-up as you pay attention to the breathing, leaving you in a state of peace, turning-on your immune system. Anywhere from a minute to ½ hr.

This state of peace accompanying “Watching the Breath” is called “The peace that passes all understanding” in Christianity. It resonates as brain Alpha waves, with the peace accompanied by alertness. Also called “the meditative state”, it has been shown by many scientific studies on meditators from TM, Yoga, Qigong/TaiChi, Sufi, etc. to enhance immune response. Most notably among the hundreds of scientific forays into measuring the effect of “meditative intent” on physical matter, the most exhaustive is “Conscious Acts of Creation” by Wm. Tiller, and the most impressive are Dr. Wm. Bengston’s controlled experiments healing mice of cancer at 5 universities, as detailed in “Chasing the Cure”.

Since we are always breathing, we always have the opportunity to “Watch the Breath”, making it possible to use our intent to change our cells. Greatly increasing the potential for cellular change is to combine visualization with our intent, especially if the visualization matches what is actually happening in Nature. For example, The Standard Model of Particle Physics tells us that a hydrogen atom is less than .0001% matter – it’s volume is the Vacuum Space, or Vacuum Energy, with more potential energy than all the matter in the universe. Put simply, all matter arises from the Vacuum Space, and on an atomic level, pops in-and-out of the Vacuum Space – the fuzz on an out of tune TV screen are electrons popping in and out of the Vacuum Space. Tiller theorizes in “Conscious Acts of Creation” that the “Spirit World” and the “Vacuum Space” are the same, meaning that the “Big Bang” issued from the Vacuum/Spirit World.

From Tiller’s model, our consciousness, especially the part associated with Spirit/Vacuum Space, can powerfully influence the atoms popping in and out of the molecules that comprise our cells. When we add the notion of Quantum Physics, that time is only a marker, really non-existant as a physical entity, we then have access to the full health range of our cells, for our whole life range.

So if, for example, I have cancer (which we all do), I should be able to enter the meditative state, and influence how the atoms popping in and out of the vacuum space appear in molecules that support my cancer cells. My intent should be able to change this cancer game plan with little effort!!!

But how???

By utilizing “watching the breath” with intent and visualization.

1) Make a general practice of viewing your breathing as a bellows, inhaling sustenance into your skin pores and lungs, the exhale driving this sustenance in bellows fashion to all your cells while exiting toxins from your pores and lungs.
2) In your extended meditative sessions, picture your consciousness as the center of a sphere and practice Macroscopic/Microscopic visualization:

Macroscopic – Hold the general intent that you are the Center of the Universe, your breathing goes infinitely in/out to the ends of creation, including all centers – the hollow center of a seed, the Big Bang, you as a tiny dot in your mother’s womb, the consciousness center of everyone past/future on the planet, every living thing growing from a dot to full growth, etc. Hold this macroscopic intention in a free-floating relaxed manner. As in all these meditative efforts, our minds will tend to drift from the intent – that’s fine, in fact this drifting adds to the ground covered, as long as you allow yourself to come back to your original intent/visualization. While existing as Center, also include the center of each cell, molecule, and atom of your body. Since you are breathing love from the center of creation to the infinite ends of creation, you are also breathing this love from the center of each cell in your body throughout the universe that is your body/mind/spirit. Your universe is also your mom and dad making love at your beginning through all things you have and will experience – all these things are visible from the center of your sphere.

Microscopic – Hold the general intent that your body, etc. is expanding to fill the entire universe, your atoms infinitely spread apart, so that the Andromeda Galaxy could be a tiny part of, say, your spleen. You are breathing in the Vacuum/Spirit Space, and your intent upholds all matter popping in and out of the Vacuum Space, the galaxies, all life, etc. You are breathing love thru everything that ever did or will exist, as the atoms pop in/out of the Vacuum supporting these things of past/present/future.

YOU ARE WASHING IT ALL WITH LOVE, even the atoms of everyone you ever knew or will know. This love to your universe, delivered thru your bellows breathing and your intent/visualization can influence the way your atoms pop in-out of the Vacuum Space, especially with time not existing, you both have/don’t have cancer, with the “don’t have” part gaining supremacy in your universe.

Thank you, John, for this beautiful contribution.

More about Bennett Mayrick?

I just finished reading Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal, a compilation of stories from cancer survivors who had been given death sentences by their doctors and managed to heal anyway with the help of alternative and integrative healers.

Chapter Five describes "Jeff", who had an aggressive form of multiple myeloma that after a series of horrific treatments left him in a wheelchair. With the cancer in his spine he was finally offered a last-ditch experimental treatment that would have most likely paralyzed him. When he refused he was told by his doctors to go home and put his affairs in order.

He then went for his last haircut and his hairdresser suggested to him that he consider visiting a spiritualist named Ben, who lived on a mesa. Ben said to Jeff, "You go home and decide if they can tell you that you’re going to die. If you determine that the answer is no, then come back and see me."

Jeff thought about it and decided that "no one else can tell you when you’re going to die."

Ben taught Jeff a meditation and visualization technique to clean up his spine. He told Jeff "You’ve got to be able to go outside your body and then come back into the parts that need work. You can go there, to the part that needs work, and make the changes."

In his visualizations Jeff saw his spine as a hallway. He first saw it as being "full of all kinds of horrible-looking liquid and nasty-looking fish, as if I were underwater." He worked on cleaning up the hallway for about half an hour, three or four times every day. Over time, he saw less and less gunk. Eventually "the liquid was all cleaned up".

The next time Jeff went to see his oncologist, the doctor told him there was something wrong with his labtests. He simply refused to believe that Jeff was free of cancer. A mere six weeks elapsed from the time Jeff was sent home to die to the time his cancer disappeared. Twenty years later he is still alive. He says that Ben taught him that:

‘Every day, every second, your body is recreating itself on a cellular level. That cell, at some point, determines whether it’s going to be a good cell or a bad cell. You just need to coach that cell into being a good cell.’

I have reason to believe that the Ben who treated Jeff in the early 1990s was the same Ben Bill Bengston met in the early 1970s. The chronology fits. Both Bens could cure cancer, both Bens lived in the desert, both Bens seemed to be the same age, and both Bens passed away about 8 years ago. I was very moved to find this story. The most exciting part for me was that here was a first-hand account, from a patient's perspective, that showed the evolution of Ben's healing abilities from twenty years before. In the 1970s he was not yet able to heal cancer patients who had been subjected to radiation and chemo. By the 1990s he seemed to have transcended that barrier. His technique seems to have also evolved so he was able able to teach the patient to heal himself. Embrace, Release, Heal is full of such positive stories, and well worth reading.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

It seems that what Ben taught Jeff was how to go into "the gap" and heal himself from there ...

A "must-read" for every cancer patient and care-giver (Anita Moorjani NDE)

Anita Moorjani had lymphoma. After years of battling the disease, she came to the end of the road. She was rushed to hospital, unable to move, and her husband was told that she was dying. And yet she lived through the experience.

This is how the story begins:

I had cancer (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma), and on this morning, I could not move. My husband rushed me to hospital, where, after doing scans, they diagnosed me with grade 4B lymphoma (the highest grade). The senior oncologist looked at my report and told my husband that it was too late, and that my organs were now shutting down. I only had 36 hours to live....

Anita returned from the brink of dying, and brought back knowledge on how to heal and how to stay healthy. After her near death experience her organs returned to normal functioning and her cancer disappeared. The message she imparts is that her healing experience need not be unique.

Here is her tale, in print. And here is an interview. I thank Upswing for the links.

Highlights: Anita describes herself as having been very fearful of cancer, and feeling that this fear contributed to the development of her disease. She describes cancer as an emotional illness. Two important lessons she learned in her NDE were to live fearlessly and to love herself. She realized that we are all far greater in consciousness than our limited minds, bodies and egos allow us to perceive. When we die we lose these restrictions and experience a realization of our true purpose.

I was shown how illnesses start on an energetic level before they become physical. If I chose to go into life, the cancer would be gone from my energy, and my physical body would catch up very quickly. I then understood that when people have medical treatments for illnesses, it rids the illness only from their body but not from their energy so the illness returns. I realized if I went back, it would be with a very healthy energy. Then the physical body would catch up to the energetic conditions very quickly and permanently. I was given the understanding that this applies to anything, not only illnesses — physical conditions, psychological conditions, etc. I was “shown” that everything going on in our lives was dependant on this energy around us, created by us. Nothing was solid — we created our surroundings, our conditions, etc. depending where this “energy” was at. The clarity I received around how we get what we do was phenomenal! It’s all about where we are energetically. I was made to feel that I was going to see “proof” of this first hand if I returned back to my body.

Much of what Anita Moorjani says about consciousness echoes what I learned from my meditation teacher. The only difference is that Anita Moorjani speaks about an individual consciousness that is part of the whole but somehow still conscious of its uniqueness, whereas according to the Tibetan meditation tradition individual consciousness merges into the whole after death the way a drop of water merges into the ocean. It may be that people who experience NDEs return before the final merging. At any rate, I found Anita's description of her experience deeply moving. Here is another excerpt from the interview:

NDERF: Can you elaborate a little more on how you now live your life, while being able to see “beyond the illusion?”

AM: One of the problems I have is that language is just so limited and inadequate in trying to explain what I am saying. It’s so easy to misunderstand and misinterpret the true feelings being conveyed.

First of all, to me, suffering is an illusion. And I wish there was a better word to use, because when I had cancer, and people would tell me it’s only an illusion, I would get even more frustrated. The feeling that comes is: “if it’s only an illusion, then why does it feel so real to ME???” and “So, how do I break thru the illusion??” So sometimes I hesitate to use the word illusion when others are suffering. It can cause more frustration. But right now, it is the only word I can think of to explain what it is I am trying to say.

When I was sick, I had thought that maybe the “illusion” is ... something that can only be viewed from the other realm, and while in this realm, we are “bound” to the illusion. I thought that as long as we are in this realm, it always remains “reality” to us. I never would have believed it possible to be able to see thru the “illusion” and still be able to come back and express life in the physical. But in order to do that, and come back and live life in the physical again, I had to be prepared to view life completely differently from others. Perhaps for some people, the thought of doing that is harder. It’s easier not to come back, than to live in a world of people who don’t view life this way...

The way I view life now, nothing exists in this world until we bring it into our consciousness/awareness. Nothing exists until we express it, either as an individual or as a collective. The more awareness we draw to something, the more real it becomes in the physical. As a collective, we are probably inadvertently creating our physical reality by default, unknowingly. But as individuals, we always have the choice to create differently than what is being created “out there”...

If I still saw the world through 3D eyes, putting physical before consciousness, then I would have to take the doctors’ words at face value when they said that it is medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to pass through the host body in such a short time without killing it. And it is also medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to just “disappear” just like that, without passing through the host body. And if I had to wait for the scientists to have proof FIRST, before I discovered that my consciousness overrides ANYTHING physical, then I would still have cancer!

Update August 30: Anita Moorjani has now written a book entitled Dying to Be Me.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

Related link: Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, NDE survivor and healer

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, a scientist who had a near-death experience after a domestic accident and spontaneously developed the ability to heal. I thank Upswing for the link.

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's successful cancer cure?

This is not energy healing, but an alternative medical approach to treating cancer that seems to get better results than standard treatment. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his son and colleague, Dr. Gregory Burzynski, are interviewed by Dr. Mercola:




And now see the the movie on Dr. Burzynski's struggles with the Texas Medical Board, the FDA and the American Cancer Society, who, according to the film maker, tried to shut him down and bankrupt and jail him, while at the same time the U.S. government was trying to patent his discoveries:



And here is a commentary on the movie by Jennifer Hawke, a "mama and an MD".

And now a website with testimonials: www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. On the right hand side you will see a list of names and cancers, and as you click on each name, a testimonial will come up.

Update, Dec. 24: I've received some criticism for this post from people who pointed out to me that what Dr. Burzynski does is not in any way related to energy healing, the topic of this blog. People have also told me that Dr. Burzynski is highly controversial and that the movie is little more than an "infomercial" for his clinic. I have no way of evaluating the correctness of either Dr. Burzynski's position or the criticisms leveled against him. My position on the matter is that people should have a right to choose their own treatment, and that no government or agency should step in to deprive them of this right by making sure that only orthodox treatments (some of which have proven to be dismal failures) are available to them.

Embrace, Release, Heal: an inspiring look at healing from cancer

Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson is now available for purchase from Sounds True. This book is a must-read for anyone and everyone who has had reason to visit my blog, everyone who suffers from cancer, has a loved one with cancer, or just fears it based on the statistics that are regularly produced to scare us. IMHO it should be sold as a companion volume to The Emperor of All Maladies, which has much information to offer but little hope. Dr. Mukherjee should be gifted with a copy of this book.

Here is a link to the foreword and the introduction, and here is an excerpt in Leigh Fortson's own words:

I include here both my own [story] and the stories of other people who’ve had cancer. Most were told they would die. They didn’t. After exhausting what conventional medicine had to offer, they walked away from the grisly prognosis and found another way. Some call it a miracle. I’ve come to believe it’s just the way things work when we get out of our own way. These stories will help inspire you to see the infinite possibilities that may be available to you, but that your doctor will likely dismiss. They reflect the truth that cancer can be effectively treated physically, emotionally, and spiritually through a different, more life-affirming paradigm than conventional medicine traditionally offers. These stories demonstrate why the conversation around cancer must be changed. If nothing else, I urge you to read all of them. Simply put, they are good medicine.

Many readers of this book share my view of how valuable it is. Here is a link to some reader reviews on Amazon.

And here is Tami Simon interviewing Leigh Fortson about the book on Sounds True.

What I've learned from 12 years of energy healing

Some thoughts on healing offered for your perusal. Please feel free to argue with me and to present your own thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

Just because you will it, it won't necessarily happen

Helping someone heal is not about willpower. It's about an elusive quantity known as "intent". You somehow get the ball rolling and then both you and your client simply watch the healing "happen". This is the hardest thing for fledgling energy healers to learn. Every healing method emphasizes the necessity for "getting out of the way" and offers techniques to accomplish this, but few students get what it really means. The best analogy comes from Matrix Energetics: it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. The pebble is your intent. You won't get any ripples (effects) until you let go.

If you are unsuccessful at healing, you need to see how you get in the way and also take a look at how your client gets in the way. For instance, if you see your client frowning with concentration trying to direct the energy to a specific location in his body, he is not in the right mindspace for healing. You too get in the way by "trying", i.e, by making an effort. What Yoda said about "the Force" also applies to energy healing: "do or do not; there is no try".

Cancer patients find it very difficult to want things for themselves -- and this may be a significant factor in their disease

For a while we required cancer patients to participate in their healing by doing a process called "cycling". By "cycling" here I mean "image cycling", which requires a list of at least 20 things that a person wants that do not involve others, creating images of them, and then flashing the images rapidly in front of the mind's eye like a super-fast slide show.

We quickly discovered that most cancer patients have extraordinary difficulty creating such a list. Many cancer patients tend to put the needs of others before their own, especially those of their loved ones, and so have a problem with "selfishly" wanting things for themselves. The possibility has been raised that there is a correlation between this devaluing of one's own needs and developing cancer. I discuss this in greater detail in my post The mind is a powerful thing -- part 2.

I have often been surprised (and frustrated) to see my clients using the increased energy they feel after our sessions not for their own healing, but for doing things for their families. My exhortation that at least for the duration of their illness they need to become selfish and look after their own needs first invariably falls on deaf ears. E.g., a client who above all needed to rest exhausted himself by driving his child to a birthday party hundreds of kilometres away in order not to disappoint her. Another client with stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver painted his house and reorganized the garage so his family would not have to worry about these details after he was gone.

As a corollary to this there seems to be a need to go on with an appearance of normalcy for the sake of loved ones as long as possible, i.e., to just carry on as normal until carrying on is no longer an option. But since "carrying on as normal" was what contributed to the cancer in the first place, what may be required is change. (Dr. Cunningham of the Healing Journey program found a link between "patients making definite psychological shifts towards greater self-definition and self-reliance" and long-term cancer survival.)

We have seen some patients who lived in the shadow of much stronger partners, or recently lost such a partner to an illness, and did not know how to cope. Others had come to a point in their lives where they felt completely derailed and had no clue how to get back on track, or the energy to make the effort. All these people had extraordinary difficulty simply wanting things for themselves -- even knowing what to want. One practitioner told me that she can pretty well gauge a client's prognosis by his or her ability to learn to want.

Cancer patients have been operating for a long time on low energy reserves

Many cancer patients hardly seem to breathe, and are used to operating on a very low energy setting. Many of them have been burning the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle, and expending far more life energy than they've been taking in, for a very long time. When they find their energy levels raised through breathing practices or energy treatments, many of them feel uncomfortable with this unfamiliar sensation and immediately rush off to dissipate what they perceive as excess energy. The refrain will be "I felt so good that I had to do a 40 km bike ride" or "after our session I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and did weights for an hour." Then of course once the energy runs out, as it invariably does, they crash. I don't quite know how to handle this, because exhortations "not to overdo things" have been about as effective as asking the client to become a bit more selfish in the interest of his or her own healing.

Animals and people heal differently

Animals heal faster than people. Whether it is an issue of metabolism, body size, or lack of a belief system that would interfere with the effectiveness of the healing, animals are a lot more able to respond to energy healing than people. My best patient to date has been a mutt named Bo, whom I treated ostensibly on his deathbed on two separate occasions 6 months apart. The first time his owners told me they thought he had cancer, the second time that he ate something poisonous. Both times he recovered, and he is still around, a normal, healthy dog. I wish for all our sakes that human clients were as responsive.

Animals healing differently from people in fact may not only be true for energy healing, but for healing in general, and it plays havoc with research. A 2004 article in Fortune magazine pointed to this effect as the reason so much promising cancer research turns out to be disappointing when transposed from mice to humans. Substances that heal transplanted human cancer in mice do not necessarily affect cancer in humans. We are similar to our animal cousins in many ways, but we are also much more complex. I suspect that this added complexity has to do with the complicated psyches produced by our complicated brains.

Sometimes miracles do happen

Every energy healing modality has stories of miraculous healings, which people tend to dismiss as being only anecdotal. In our group we've seen our share of miracles, the mutt named Bo only one among them. There was also the girl whose lung abscess and scoliosis cleared up within three weeks of our group beginning to treat her and a stage-4 pancreatic patient whose jaundice reversed.

The question from my perspective is what preconditions produce miracles and how we can re-create them on a regular basis. (I suspect that once we understand the miracle well enough to make it a daily occurrence, it ceases being a miracle and becomes the new science of the day.)

But the technique that produces miracles for the teacher may not work as effectively for the student

I discussed this in earlier posts as the dilution effect. Essentially if everyone who has to date taken an energy healing workshop from any of the great lights in the field were now able to duplicate the teacher's ability to heal, we would have little need for doctors and hospitals. Unfortunately most people go to workshops, diligently learn the technique, practice a little, get so-so results, then quit, or go on to learn another technique in another workshop.

The issue from my perspective is that the techniques being taught in these workshops may in fact have very little to do with the teacher's success in healing. I will take an example from physical medicine to illustrate what I mean.

Earlier this year I noticed, through the agency of the WYDDTY website, the stellar work of Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who is reputed never to have lost a cancer patient. I read the transcripts of an interview with him and discovered that what he did to treat people was no different from the treatments offered at many alternative cancer clinics, of which few will match his stellar track record. So what is different about Dr. Kingsley's treatments? I submit that it may be Dr. Kingsley himself, and what he adds to the healing through his own personality, belief systems, and energetic interactions with patients.

Another doctor in the U.S., the now famous Dr. Issam Nemeh, discovered that his patients fared better than the patients of other anaesthesiologists because he prayed for them. He firmly believes that the agency of his healing ability is prayer. It may be so -- but many others, in fact most others, pray with much lesser effect. So what is the difference? What does Dr. Issam Nemeh do/have that others who also pray don't? And could he teach others to pray as successfully as he does?

After 20-odd workshops I've come to the conclusion that the best way to learn from a teacher is to hang around with him or her for months or years on end, and to absorb not only his or her technique but the mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi that lurks behind it. I suspect that the technique offered is more often than not a sleight of hand that hides the real magic happening behind the scenes while you are busy looking somewhere else.