Introduction to
the Technique and
Theory of Healing

Rosalyn L. Bruyere is an internationally acclaimed healer, clairvoyant, medicine woman and author. Founder and director of the Healing Light Center Church, the Rev. Bruyere is a frequent collaborator with physicians and scientists. Her knowledge of ancient traditions and practices, and her ability to see patterns of disease and to transform tissue at a cellular level, have brought her worldwide attention. Most recently, the Rev. Bruyere was invited to be a participant in the Working Group on Unconventional Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Since this is the first of a series of articles dealing with healing techniques and approaches, I think we need to define what a healing technique is and separate the difference between a healing technique and the way a healer approaches a case, which is more a healer's internal process.

Probably every holistic health conference in the country has between ten and thirty workshops just on some healer's technique for something general or something specific. It usually involves the healer discussing or describing how they came to this awareness, what their attitude is in approaching the problem -- and then there's some mechanical part of it where they talk about manipulating the patient's body or applying energy to the patient's body or prescribing herbs of some kind in a certain set sequence that makes a difference. In this series, we want to deal with practical energy healing techniques that our students and professionally trained healers have found useful in the treatment of disease.

We want to start with the ones that are the most often used, or the basics from our own healing courses, but we also need to emphasize to that same population that knowing the technique doesn't make you a healer, it makes you somebody who knows the technique. But the internal part of delivering that is also part of the healer's field. For us, the energy field, or aura, is the basic. You can apply good technique and you can channel energy that's perhaps even beyond your capacity to maintain -- but at some level, every healer has to develop their character because it's part of their aura . . . their emotional stability because it's part of their aura . . . their intelligence because it's part of their aura . . . their kindliness because it's part of their aura.

When in other healing schools people go on and on about love being the healer, they're really talking about that approach: about that love and respect for the client, that sympathy for the client's condition that makes them able to contact or touch or share an energy field with that client, probably over the long haul of the recovery from a chronic or critical disease.

Just the application of energy to fill a void or to lift the patient's energy level to the point where the body can heal itself sufficiently or the fact that the healer is adding a different kind of energy than the patient normally runs could be enough, certainly, to relieve symptoms. But a lasting change is going to involve the healer's own deep process and is going to involve the healer's capacity to show, over a long period of time, their faithfulness and their dedication to service -- all of which can be transferred and can give the necessary inspiration to the patient that's needed for a life-long change so that the patient doesn't go back into the condition that got them sick to begin with. They might go right back into the same disease again or they might, in fact, manifest a new variation of illness.

I've taught a lot of healers, and it is my experience that the most spiritually and personally developed healers have the greatest percentage of success with their clients. That good development has to do with developing their lower [energy] centers at the same or equivalent rate as their upper centers. To sort of break it down into chakra terms, if they're physically and emotionally well developed, intellectuality is a given because the people that enter into the healing profession aren't morons. They're all pretty bright people. So it's getting the emotional and the physical development to back up their intellectual level that makes them able to sustain spiritual goals and directions. These are essential foundational building blocks.

For many people, development of the emotional center means plain, old-fashioned psychotherapy. They need to understand themselves. In the ancient world, in an ancient mystery school, as you walked in there was a sign over the door that said, "Know Thyself." When people enter the healing profession, they assume they know themselves but they find that they really don't; that they don't act in ways that are familiar to themselves in the presence of energy . . . so they can't expect anyone else to. They have to be conscious of how other people react to them and how they react to other people.

There needs to be a great deal of awareness. Some people learn it through acting class and some people learn it through professionalism in business or through life's tragedies and recovering from certain adversities, but there's nothing to say that because you've had losses and tragedy, you'll come out the other end healed. You might come out scarred. Therefore, every healer needs psychotherapy and ongoing peer contact and feedback.

Physical development enters into the healer's ongoing training because channeling enough energy to make a change in difficult physical diseases means that the healer needs to have enough tone in their own body to smoothly channel ever greater amplitudes of energy. So the healer's body needs to be developed. In the ancient world, in various mystery schools, and today in Eastern medicine, both Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, there are a lot of different kinds of physical practices that were considered prerequisites. In the East, you have yoga and you have qigong and tai qi which give you a particular kind of tonicity. While it wasn't about body building per se, muscle tone is very, very important because the tendon strength carries the qi. If the healer only channels energy to get tonicity, what happens is that the healer's body ends up absorbing a lot of the energy to make it more fit instead of that energy being able to pass through them to the patient. So physical training is an important part of our program and something we insist upon in all of our students.

I mentioned intellectual development being a given. I think the correct role of the intellect was best personified by Orma Bonnie, who has retired to spirit, as it were, from our healing staff. Orma had a spiritual discipline that she followed on a daily basis. She got up rather early -- she was quite an early riser -- and spent about two hours every morning this way: a few minutes in meditation, and then she would look at the list of clients she was going to treat later in the day and look up all the medical information she needed to treat each case effectively. She acted as a sponge for every piece of medical data she read in several medical journals, both for lay people and professionals. I remember her reading about an experiment they were doing at USC medical school where they were transfusing the blood of leukemia patients out of their body, freezing it, and then unfreezing it and putting back into the patient. She decided that was a little rough on the patient and that she could do it with energy. She experimented with that and her leukemia patients got better.

It was a very practical, mental practice. It was her intellect in service of our soul. What was remarkable about Orma was that she was the classic person who, through her own personal tragedy had done some personal growth work and grieving and emotional maturing. This was a very active, agile intellect, but Orma is the classic example of what I was talking abut -- about the lower chakras also being developed -- because when she came to healing, it was after thirty-five years of metaphysical and spiritual discipline. She didn't do things in a shallow or light way and, as a result of that, she carried in her field a kind of authority that was passed to the patient. It made the patient believe that if Orma believed the patient could do something, then they could do it. She was able to transfer her positivity because it was already in her aura.

I think professionalism, as taught in medical schools, is more a detachment and a removing oneself from the patient. In Orma's case, her professionalism demanded of her that she maintain a mental discipline and positivity concerning the positive outcome for the patient because, in her case, that was the personal vow she took.

You might think that this just sets the healer up for emotional problems when the patient's outcome is less positive than one would have liked. All patients die -- we all die sooner or later. But I think it's important for healers to maintain their positiveness in the face of darkness, in the same way as they do in the face of success. I don't mean go into denial and pretend to themselves that nothing's going wrong or that the patient isn't liable to die. But to stay with the energy of life as long as there is life in the body is part of our professional ethic as well as our belief in life everlasting.

Where does technique come in and where does theory come in for healers? Technique is what it is you're actually going to do to the patient. But to decide what you're going to do, you have to understand the theory of how energy works in and through the body as well as outside the body, and what things affect it. So you must have, to the best of your ability, the best information, the latest knowledge about how energy fields affect health -- because the body is a living electrical field. And you have to be grounded in both the science and the mysticism because you're dealing with the energy that passes between the human's life and the human's soul as it journeys through life.

From the beginning of recorded history, healers have had to take vows of ethical practice. Whether it's the Hippocratic oath or some of the codes in the Old Testament, or any of the medical oaths that Chinese doctors took 4000 years ago, every professional group of healers has deemed it terribly important for the moral and ethical code of healers to be above reproach. If your ethics and your morals are in fact in your aura, they will affect the patient's belief in you, the patient's ease with you. They could perhaps even ally patients and healers in unhealthy relationships because they'll have matching poor ethics and excuse each other when the healer's job is to challenge the patient beyond their limited current situation to enter the state in which they can attain and maintain health.

The patient also plays a tremendous part in the healer's development. If the healer is alert and aware of the difficulty of the case in front of them and aware of how much they want to do versus how much they can do, each patient brings a challenge to the healer that is just beyond what the healer already knows. That edge constantly going back between what you're capable of channeling versus what the patient needs is the cutting edge of growth for every healer. Can I be enough? Can I be open enough? Can I be strong enough? Can I hold energy long enough in the face of devastating illness and probable failure? One of the things that everyone asks every healer they interview is, "How do you know when you're going to be able to heal somebody and when you're not?" The answer is, you don't ever know. I mean, I have a good idea based on prior experience, but the truth of the matter is, I don't know who's going to live and who's going to die. And I must have the daily courage to try to heal anyway.

Sometimes in a class, someone will ask, "Why not just put your hands on the patient and be open and ask God to do it all? Wouldn't that be more effective than the healer making the effort? And isn't God much more capable than someone who's trying to keep up with medical texts and use their own development and centers and practice as the basis from which to heal?" Actually, statistics show that's not true. The opposite is true. The healers that attempt to do it only with God's help statistically have only about 1.5% of their cases that end successfully; the healers who align themselves with God's natural healing by understanding the theory, by understanding the practice, by understanding what we can know scientifically and medically at this point, create an opening through which their intellect doesn't block God getting through but rather allows God to come through them into the patient because they've prepared their channel in receptivity of concept so that deity can recreate the creation.

Another question I'm often asked is, "Can anyone learn to be a healer?" Well, when I was younger, I thought anyone could. Now I know better. Everyone has the capacity to channel energy, to alleviate simple health conditions -- not heal them, but alleviate the symptoms. What most people don't have is the stamina, the internal discipline. It takes the skill of a scientist and the art of a musician, painter or sculptor to make a good healer because you have to be creative / spiritual in your application, and you have to be able to think on more than one channel at a time. You have to maintain an intellectual boundary while you release the boundaries of the psyche to serve, and so it really requires someone who isn't forced to do one thing at a time.

I think the last thing that's important is an old-fashioned spiritual notion that has taken a beating at the end of this century with support groups and psychology and even has become almost unfashionable in religion, and that is the notion of the place or the role of the ego for the healer because there are certain inflated states of ego that the emotionally underdeveloped are given to that people who are emotionally developed are not given to. The practice of developing some natural humility, understanding the part of the healing that you worked for and therefore got, and the part that was beyond what you worked for and you got it anyway must be acknowledged . . . you need to be grateful. Those kinds of strengths are important to develop, and an egotistical attitude needs to be worked with and worked on and eliminated. Arrogant attitudes are not useful in healing. They don't allow energy to pass; they absorb energy because the purpose of an arrogant attitude is to gather attention and if the healer gathers the attention, it's not going to the patient.

Everyone I've ever trained has found their training to be one of the most interesting studies of life that they've had. It's interesting; it's fun; it's challenging; it's also one of the places where ultimately, as with great artists, you're forced to look at your own window of ignorance. Something happens somewhere between the time a healer decides, "I think I would really like to dedicate my life to saving people who are ill" and the time they feel that they are competent to be professionals in the field. They will have faced some pocket in themselves that would have eliminated them in any career -- but in this career has to be eliminated.

Adapted from an article in Oracle: A Journal for the Future, Volume 22, No. 1 published and copyrighted © 1997 by the Healing Light Center Church, Sierra Madre, California.

Rosalyn L. Bruyere is the author of Wheels of Light and its companion piece, a 60-minute audio cassette, Chakra Healing, that offers a clear description of the chakras and auric fields. It guides listeners through exercises and meditations for sensing and interpreting the flow of chakra energies within. The cassette is available for $13.35 (includes s/h - CA residents include $.90 sales tax). Send check or Money Order for the correct amount payable to Bon Productions, 261 E. Alegria #3, Sierra Madre, CA 91024.

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