From what I see and read, energy healing appears to be getting better known and it is, hopefully, the path health will take in the future.  So let’s take a look at what it is.

It really starts with sound.  Sound creates patterns. Everything in the universe is created by sound and it is sound which turns matter and energy into form.  Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, understood this, which shows that it is by no means a modern concept.

If everything in the universe is sound and vibration, then the cells in our bodies must come under this heading, too.  Every cell resonates to a certain frequency. Sound healing involves re-tuning the organs, which become sick if they fall out of tune.  Think of a musical instrument. It’s sound is sublime when in tune with the rest of the orchestra, but its noise is horrible if it goes flat. It is discordant, i.e. not in accord with the rest of the group.

Why the Music Goes Flat

So what causes this discordance in the song of our cells?  Every thought we have, whether positive or negative, is creating a vibration and if we focus on what is peaceful, positive, and happy, our cells are vibrating on a high note, too.  When stress, fear, anxiety, or loss come into our lives, the vibrations change and that has a direct effect on one or all of our organs.  We say someone died of a broken heart.  As a child I thought this was literally the case and wondered how a heart could be smashed like a dinner plate. Later I realized that losing love or a loved one had caused the harmony of the heart cells to get out of sync with the rest of the body, to falter and stop working altogether.

Water can very quickly be affected by negative or positive sounds. The late Dr. Masaru Emoto published a vast body of research on the messages from water when exposed to sound.  He froze double-distilled water droplets and experimented by playing music, praying, speaking to them, thereby changing their vibrations.  The crystal formations demonstrated clearly the difference between something uplifting such as John Lennon’s Imagine and a piece of heavy metal music. They made beautiful patterns when exposed to the former and disintegrated into chaos when heavy metal was played.  Words of hate spoken to them also caused disintegration whereas words of love and appreciation resulted in magical forms.

How Vibration Heals

The good news is that positive sounds coupled with intention can even restore polluted water.  In 1997 the Fujiwara Dam in Japan was heavily polluted and the water was analyzed by Dr. Emoto, using his technique of freezing droplets and looking at them under a microscope.  They looked like some kind of primeval soup with no discernible pattern until the Reverend Kato Hoki, chief priest of Jyuhouin Temple, recited a one-hour prayer beside the dam. When the droplets were crystallized and re-examined, the most amazing transformation had taken place. A simply exquisite pattern had formed.

Now if that can apply to water droplets—and our bodies are over 70 per cent water—we can see just how it can apply to our cells.  Even if we have damaged our bodies through any number of factors, we can certainly redress the balance by changing the vibrations of our organs.  We often hear expressions such as, “When you change your thoughts you change your life.” We probably considered them to be stupid platitudes.  Well it looks as if we were wrong.  What could be more encouraging than that?  So if we start today by being mindful, living in the present, and tuning our feelings to be as loving, hopeful, and positive as we can, we will reap all sorts of benefits, the most important of which is perfect health.

Further Reading:

• Psychosomatic Illness – Is It All In The Mind?
• Praying For Health

Prayer.  Now there’s a word that has been bandied about in the context of health and healing.  Some churches say special prayers for the sick and the Spiritualists offer hands on healing in their churches.  There are hundreds of thousands of healers all over the world: folk healers, shamans, healers registered with approved associations; there are even groups who have a specific time to stop what they are doing and pray for people who are sick.  This is known in some circles as “The Healing Minute” because it doesn’t need to take more than that.

So How Do We Do It?

We use the word “prayer” to explain globally what we’re doing, but some people feel uncomfortable with it and in a group to which I belong, our methods and our beliefs are our own business; we are just required at a certain time every day to stop and send healing in our own way to the people on the main list and our personal lists.

What do I do?  Not wanting to impose anything on someone who may not have asked for help, I just see the person smiling and surrounded by white light.  I expect some of the people in the group do much more traditional things, but it doesn’t matter.  Whatever we do is never wrong if we have the good of the person in mind.  And what does seem to prove its efficacy is the fact that group healing sessions, or the sending of light, or praying, or whatever at a time when lots of people do it together gives very positive results.  The group members and the recipient don’t have to be in the same room nor even in the same country; in fact some healers insist that sending healing to someone who is not present works best,

Does It Really Work?

It has been shown how people fervently praying for the health of one person can have great results.  Take the amazing case of Eben Alexander.

In his book Proof of Heaven, Alexander, a neurosurgeon who was totally brain dead and in a coma for seven days tells us that he was so far away he had no memory of anything on earth but when he started to “come back”, to come out of his coma, he could hear murmuring all round him although he couldn’t understand the words.  He became aware of countless beings surrounding him kneeling in arcs that stretched out into the distance.  It was only afterwards when he was fully back and writing about his experiences that he realized they were people who were praying for him.  Although he reports that he was deeply sad to be leaving behind the wonders he had experienced, the vision of these people gave him an odd feeling that everything was going to be fine.

He wasn’t religious and rarely went to church, but his wife knew the local minister and prayer groups were rapidly organized.  Although I’m not saying the prayers were the reason he recovered, what I am saying is that it was his vision of what turned out to be people praying that comforted and reassured him on his return, and that’s a successful result by anyone’s standards.

Every Thought Counts

Even when we are not necessarily sending healing or praying, just thinking of someone in a positive way can be helpful.  We used to have a saying in our family when we talked about somebody who was having a hard time: “Ah, bless his heart”. We meant nothing more by it than an expression of compassion, of empathy for a fellow human being, but that’s really what praying for someone is all about and that’s why we do it.

Further Reading:

• Psychosomatic Illness – Is It All In The Mind?
• Healing Vibrations

The dictionary defines a psychosomatic illness as one “…caused by mental or emotional problems rather than by something physical”.  This idea has fascinated me since I became aware of the work Louise L. Hay has done on making a connection between our minds and our state of health.  In her view, anything affecting our lives, (and this can come from our feelings, our background, our belief system), just about anything that touches or has touched us, can be a factor.  She tells her personal story of childhood sexual abuse, which she connected to the vaginal cancer she developed in adulthood. Her book, You Can Heal Your Life, with its explanations of what may have caused illness or led to an accident, has sold millions of copies worldwide.

These are real illnesses, with a physical element, but they are not necessarily caused solely by outside forces such as heredity, smoking, a life crisis, or eating the wrong things, although these factors have probably played their part in the illness.   For many of us, illness is a wake-up call, and we need to look at what we can do to change matters.

Food For Thought

For Phil Edwardes, a UK healer, none of the causes of illness are found anywhere in the body and, emphasising that he isn’t blaming anyone, he believes that everything that happens to our bodies is because we’re inside them.  This does rather bear out a finding in the case of multiple personalities.  People who have several personalities have found they may need reading glasses in one personality and not in another; they may be diabetic in one personality and not in another.

I’d often heard of things being “all in the mind” as have most of us, but when I took my first steps in complementary medicine in 1987, I saw how this thinking could be applied.   One of my earliest purchases was a book based on Chinese medicine that was recommended by my reflexology teacher.  I immediately read what it had to say about every illness I could think of that had touched my family, my friends, or me.  And I was blown away by some of the possible explanations; things fell into place and understanding dawned.

Finding Out For Myself

The best way to learn something is to experience it ourselves and I didn’t have to wait long.  Studying for my reflexology diploma I worked on an old friend who suffered from sinusitis. The treatment really helped, but so did finding an apartment away from her parents, or more precisely her mother, with whom she was often at loggerheads.

In 1990 I started up in business, distributing and demonstrating ear and body treatment candles (although body candling arrived much later on the scene) and one of the very first people to contact me was a lady suffering from a distressing and continual noise in her ears (tinnitus).  She told me she had a handicapped daughter and in the course of our conversation she burst out: “I can’t stand it when she screams”’.  Even with my limited knowledge of the product I was so confidently selling, I knew the candles wouldn’t help her and I really hoped she could understand at some point that she was manufacturing a noise in her head to drown out her daughter’s screams.   It sounds hard, but there is only one place where the solution to any such problem lies … where it started.  In ourselves.  Until we are able to do that, few therapies will bring lasting relief.

Stories I’ve Been Told

A child’s  deafness at birth stemmed from what she’d heard while in the womb. Once her mother understood this and worked on her own emotions—a tough task for her—the child was hearing perfectly by the age of 7.

A young Catholic priest had always known he was homosexual,  but until he was ordained at the age of 32 he had attempted to deny it. He plunged into a nervous breakdown and carried on as well as possible until he started to experience a loud whistling sound in his left ear, which he interpreted as his soul crying out to speak its truth. The physical suffering was intense. He finally decided to come out and to inform his bishop that he was leaving Holy Orders. The decision made, his tinnitus immediately calmed down and at the time the article appeared, he was practically cured.

A colleague at an exhibition knelt down to chat to a girl in her mid-teens who was confined to a wheelchair. She was accompanied by her mother and younger siblings and explained there was absolutely no physical reason why she couldn’t walk, but that was the situation and she didn’t really care one way or the other. It would have been fascinating to learn something about her family dynamics, but even if a skilled therapist managed to uncover the possible root of her problem, unless she was prepared to work on herself, little progress would result.

Choosing Our Words With Care

Some of the expressions we throw around so lightly can give us a huge clue as to what’s going on in our lives—or what could be waiting in the wings to pop up.

• “She really gets up my nose,”
• “I can’t stomach it.”
• “It breaks my heart.”, etc.

We can connect this thinking with sinusitis, digestive or cardiac diseases – in fact, with just about anything.  If we look at some of the things we suffer from: arthritis, short or long sight, poor hearing, allergies, ulcers, constipation, cancer, they can tell us volumes about our deepest beliefs.  Illness may seemingly have a real physical cause, yes, and certainly has a real physical manifestation, but if we can process the painful experiences we all endure as we go through life, we can certainly reduce any damage that physical ill-health can do and hopefully avoid many problems altogether.

Further Reading:

• Healing Vibrations
• Praying For Health

Candling (or coning) has been used as an aid for health for thousands of years, throughout the world. Candling is sometimes considered an old wives’ remedy, but how many of these gentler methods are we rediscovering today?

Simple in themselves, the candles are hollow tubes or cones of differing lengths, made from cotton or linen impregnated with wax and various herbs, such as chamomile, lavender, eucalyptus or sage.  (Preferably, all ingredients are organic.)

What is Candling?

The candle or cone is placed just over the entrance to the ear canal and the top is lit. As it burns, it sends a gentle warmth spiralling down, which massages the ear drum and stimulates the immune system. We know that a properly functioning immune system is vital for perfect health and when this is built up in children from infancy, they have a wonderful gift to carry them through life. For adults, it is equally important to have a well-functioning immune system to enable us to avoid any bugs floating around, or if we don’t quite manage that, to get rid of them in record time.

The acupuncture points in the ear are also treated by the candles and six of the main meridians (energy lines according to Chinese medicine) in the human body, including those concerned with allergies, either start or terminate at a point between the nose and the ear. The candle is therefore sending energy right through the body by means of its meridians.

Practical Uses of Candling

So what are their practical applications? I have been using them and training people in their use for more than 25 years, so I have picked up a lot of information in that time, far too much to put into an article.  However, here are a few examples:

Children adore them, and they naturally react far faster than adults. A regular patient brought her four year-old daughter who fell so deeply asleep that her mother had to shake her gently to wake her up.  Candling did the trick, though; her sinuses unblocked and she was able to enjoy the flight to her homeland half a world away a few days later.

People with allergies find great relief, although the candles won’t remove the allergy.  One of my patients has been coming every month for several years, and after the very first treatment, was able to breathe more easily and snore less loudly at night and on my treatment table! It was this patient who sent me a friend suffering with sleep apnoea, telling her that it was worth a try.  She had been using an oxygen mask at night, which kept her awake and during the day she was exhausted.  After a couple of treatments she was able to discard the mask and now she comes in for treatment about every six weeks.

Another patient, who had a slight stroke four years earlier, told me that after the very first treatment, she felt more balanced than she had since her stroke and that there was “more light”. One of the functions of the candles is to balance the two hemispheres of the brain, so that was a confirmation, if any was needed, of their efficacy.

A reader of an early edition of my book told me how candles had helped and comforted her mother in the final weeks before dying of cancer. Without a treatment before bedtime, she felt as if she were suffocating; candling was the only way she could sleep in comfort.

A woman who suffered from two or three migraines a month, who was taking codeine regularly, came for three treatments over a short period and felt an attack coming on as we finished the third session. She returned a year later and told me she had suffered only one migraine during the entire year. She had completely forgotten that migraines had been her initial reason for consulting me.

A former student of mine reported on the case of a patient suffering from depression, insomnia, and constipation. As she started candling, the patient’s intestines began to rumble and at the end of the treatment, the therapist burnt a candle on the belly. The patient rushed to the lavatory and was able to reduce the load in his gut.  He stopped using sleeping tablets after the first treatment and, with his doctor’s help, was able to reduce his reliance on anti-depressants.

Body Candling

A candle on the belly? Yes, candles can be used anywhere on the body and this is something many people do not necessarily know. Of course treating the ears and stimulating the immune system are going to have a generalized effect anyway, but sometimes a more targeted approach has been found to work faster. For constipation and/or hemorrhoids, a candle burnt on the sacrum or directly on the belly can work wonders.  The great thing is that the patient doesn’t need to undress – just put a paper tissue on the spot and hold the candle upright over it.  For painful periods as well as painful glands in the breast, candling has been shown to offer rapid relief. How I wish I’d known that when I was younger!

There are always other things I have advised my patients to do to enhance their candling, such as drinking more water or less tea and coffee, avoiding dairy products if they suffer from blocked sinuses,  and managing stress. These are all things many of us know, but our lives are such that we can’t always follow them. Like most other things, candling maintenance sessions are advisable every six weeks or so depending on the problem, the person, and his/her schedule.

Even after 25 years I am still discovering conditions for which the candles are ideal.