A broader spectrum of ways of healing rests with greater communication between healers and medicine. Plans for the future of Barbara Brennan's highly successful school for healers build strongly on continued positive action and intentions for just such dialogue.

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TMA: Barbara, your first book was Hands of Light, and then Light Emerging was published. Has there been a new book since Light Emerging?

BB: Yes, since 1999, I’ve been channeling books called Seeds of the Spirit, one for each year.

TMA: What are the essential teachings coming out of these channelings?

BB: In 1999, I channeled a lot about the millennium and changes in earth and cultures. We talked about the development of the soul, the development of the spiritual body, mystical body. There were teachings about the community: that we are building a community of the sacred human heart and aspects of that. I did a lot of channeling at International Healing, and that's what we’re focusing on more this year: to take all of the steps in self healing and then include your significant other—which would be your husband, partner—and then include the group around you and the larger group around that until you’ve included the nation and all other countries. Those are the kinds of themes that we’ve been working on.

I have a new tape out which deals with death and dying and the interface. I did a lot of channeling on walking within both worlds, first walking between the spiritual, or the so-called spiritual-material world, and then walking in both worlds at the same time. That was actually last year’s channeling: learning to walk in that interface. The longer you’re trained in healing, the more you do it; the more your consciousness expands and your high sense perception expands until there is more and more of an integration between what one experiences with high sense perception and what one experiences with normal sense perception. There’s a lot of psychological and emotional work to be done to include the spiritual realm that becomes part of everyday life. I did a tape, a really nice channeling about that interface and about the things relating to dying, birthing and that kind of thing.

TMA: What has you excited these days? What are you most focused on?

BB: We moved the school to Florida. We’re finishing our second year there as a licensed vocational school. Next year we are applying for college credits. I don’t know if we will receive them or not, but we’re applying. The way the system is set up in Florida, it is necessary to apply for a license every year. It was the state education board of Florida that suggested we go for college credit, and in the last two years we have re-arranged the program so that it fits into a college credit type program.

TMA: Would you be granting degrees out of your school, or would it be connected to another school?

BB: The first step in that long line is to get classes accredited. Any degreed program would be further down the road.

TMA: More and more we’re finding that various things in this field are becoming accepted by the mainstream, and I’ve heard of accreditation being sought in other contexts like this.

BB: Eventually that’s what we want to go for. But I don’t want to be naïve about it, it will take a long time. We’re ready to go the long haul, whatever that may be. We have a lot of support from the state of Florida and so far have been very well received. We do have a rigorous program. It is all laid out as a school and so they appreciate that. We are initiating some research programs and we’ve got a literature search. Sherry Pae, who will be in the Chicago workshop, is a very experienced nurse. She’s trained nurses, worked in Intensive Care Units, in Operating Rooms and burn labs and helicopter rescues, all that kind of thing. She’s the main person in the school right now interfacing with the medical community.

We have two different programs. One is a research program that we’re starting with surgeons, a pilot project in conjunction with the University of Miami. Hopefully, after the pilot project, we’re going to go into a long-term study about mastectomies. The other thing that is quite exciting, is that we will start training people, in conjunction with some health care professionals in the Chicago area, to train health care professionals to teach our work in medical schools. We think that could probably happen a few years from now.

TMA: That would be a very big step.

BB: We really hope it’s going to happen. It is in conjunction with physicians who have graduated from the school and other medical professionals. It’s initiated by a physician who graduated from the school. We are really hoping that program goes. But it’s long in the future. I am very excited about those things. I’m also going to do a European tour, which I’ve been too busy to do for many years.

TMA: You’ll get a lot of response there.

BB: We actually have one-third of our program in 46 different countries outside the states. One-third of the students attend a professional studies program.

TMA: You’ve had students go on to become well known in their own right. I’ve spoken with people over the years who have come through your school. There are people who are born with it and people who learn it, yes?

BB: Well, that’s one way to say it. I think that in becoming a healer and helping others, there is a lot of training needed in how to handle people. One of the things that we focus on in our school is, you really need to have the skills that are taught psychotherapists in terms of handling transference and counter-transference, understanding that when you tell somebody something how [strongly to express it] and how to interact with people and hold space. There are several simple rules that I use, but it’s much more complicated than that. If you’re going to tell somebody something that might frighten them, you really have to know what you’re doing. You really have to know how to help them. You need to tell them what they can do about it. You need a whole energy field of loving kindness and support for that situation, and that takes training. In the years that I’ve been a healer, I’ve seen all kinds of things that I wouldn’t consider ethical. So that’s what I’m concerned about. It’s a difficult subject to talk about because there are many, many techniques and many ways of healing, and people need to be well trained.

TMA: I understand what you’re talking about from my own perspective as an astrologer. I’m sometimes appalled by what people come and tell me other astrologers have said to them.

BB: Exactly the same issue. Do you take a weekend course and hang a shingle out and say you’re a healer? Is that ethical? I don’t think so.

TMA: People read two or three books and print themselves some business cards. At the same time, I’m not excited about having some sort of political governing board deciding who can practice and who can’t.

BB: I’m not either, and I think it’s a really difficult subject. There’s a lawyer in the state of Minnesota who has succeeded in passing legislation that says that healers cannot be sued for practicing medicine without a license, which is another issue. I think that’s a good piece of legislation. How do we create a peer review board that really understands how to encompass all these different types of modalities and determine if they’re good or not? We were asked by the White House Commission on Integrated Medicine to write something about that. They were studying that last year at a meeting at Harvard. There is a lot of that starting to happen. It’s very difficult to figure out how to create a peer review board for trying to set some guideline for how all the various different modalities work, and how they determine who’s really good at it and who isn’t. Of course in my school we do that all the time with the graduates during school. That’s my most difficult subject to talk about. That’s what I have taught. That’s the methods that have been developed. And again, the methods that I’ve developed are based on the structure and function of the energy fields, so there’s a lot of grounding in our ways of determining whether or not a healer can practice.

I speak of the energy field but I mean the energy consciousness system, which we now call the human energy consciousness system. It includes all aspects of the human being, so any kind of system we have created in terms of grading has to do with all of that. The ability to be present, the ability to perceive, the ability to hold and be present psychologically and personally for the client. The ability to handle the energy field, to handle your own energy field and balance it while you’re giving a healing, the ability to perceive what you’re doing when you do it, the ability to affect the client’s field the way you want to affect it according to what you are reading in the field, the ability to have enough energy to affect a client’s field and to—the term is “carry them”—that’s the term used in psychology. In other words, you’re there for the client between the sessions as well as during the sessions. All of that is a lot to learn in healing in terms of transference and counter transference. If a client comes and they’re ill and you have the ability to perceive their field and see inside their body, you’re going to have a whole lot more transference on you than if you’re a therapist.

TMA: I imagine a strong knowledge of anatomy is important as well.

BB: Oh yes, that’s a requirement. You can’t get into the junior year training without a year of it. We have our own courses now that integrate standard anatomy-physiology with the anatomy-physiology in the field and how they all interact. This year Dr. Ruey Rayburn, a lecturer emeritus at the University of Hawaii Nursing School who taught nursing for many years at the University of Hawaii in Oahu, is teaching our Anatomy and Physiology course and developing it. We’re thinking about making it a two-year course because there’s so much infor-mation. They need to integrate all of that.

The course that Sherry Pae and I developed is “Healing the Human Heart.” My part of that workshop is to describe the energy field, and especially the heart charka, in terms of physics. Then Sherry gives the anatomy and physiology of the heart itself from a nurse’s perspective. Then Laurie King is going to do the healing and the human interaction work.

TMA: It’s interesting to watch as society and indeed many medical doctors themselves are becoming more and more open to these non-traditional approaches. We don’t even want to get into what “should” be traditional and non-traditional, but at the same time, there is still a backlash among conservative physicians—and I think especially coming out of the pharmaceutical companies. It’s interesting to watch as the culture accepts it and yet there is still a bit of a campaign to try to limit or, if they could, stamp the whole thing out.

BB: I think that’s always true of anything new that hasn’t been in society. It’s certainly true in the field of physics. Galileo went to jail. It’s nothing new, really, in terms of what human beings do. Human beings protect their own turf.

TMA: I was going to say, it’s economics.

BB: A lot of economics involved, absolutely. Especially since the Harvard study came out that showed that huge amounts of money are being spent out of pocket for holistic practitioners rather than through insurance companies. As soon as that came out, people woke up and started really saying hey, this isn’t okay.

I’m not for having a big fight about all this stuff. I think we need to integrate medicine and healing, however one labels the division here. There are some really great articles by Kathy Kemper at Harvard. She wrote this article on dividing all of health care into four areas; biochemical, bioenergetic, biomechanical and lifestyle. You can divide everything, all of the treatments, into these areas. You can look at all treatments that are given to all human beings, no matter which side of the split they are on, from those four perspectives. It doesn’t matter if it’s a drug that a drug company is putting out or an herb. Either way, it’s still biochemical. It’s a biochemical agent being put into the body. Biomechanical is manipulating the body, and then, of course, human is bioenergetic. So if you look at all those things, I would say, the large difference is that the drug companies are upset about is that they’ve had to do tremendously long efficacy studies for the FDA, and a lot of the herbs and things haven’t been tested that much. They are being tested now, but I can understand why they’re upset about that. It costs a lot of money.

TMA: Of course any time tests are being run, it can be more important who’s paying for those tests than who’s doing the tests.

BB: Yes, there are a lot of issues. There are issues of what a healer actually does that haven’t been proven, and then on the other side, where a lot of requirements for proof are already in place by the FDA. There are issues of the amount of money and who’s doing the test and are they honest, et cetera. There’s just a lot. We’re all human beings. That’s how human beings are. From the perspective of the healer, the main difficulty with this healing/medicine interface is the lack of understanding by the medical people of what really is happening. There is so much information that once you get your high sense perception in healing and great effects that don’t make any sense to a medical person who hasn’t been trained in it—they don’t know anything about it—it’s not going to make any sense to them. And then when a healer sees a very strong negative effect of an already tested and approved drug in a field and can see that effect in the energy field ten years later, then there’s another issue from the healer’s perspective.

It seems to me that the real healing of this split is to go for the truth, and both sides to learn how to speak each other’s languages. I don’t speak the medical language. It’s difficult for a person in the medical field to hear me speaking. And the same if I start talking about tears in the auric field. If I see something from a drug this person took ten years ago and how it’s affecting the field, it doesn’t make any sense to a medical person. There’s a lot of communication that has to be done. There are a lot of positive intentions needed to create a broader spectrum of ways of healing.

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Barbara Brennan is a world-renowned spiritual leader, healer and educator. A pioneer and innovator in the field of energy consciousness, the former NASA physicist has been researching and exploring the Human Energy Field and realms of human consciousness for more than 25 years. She holds a Master’s Degree in Atmospheric Physics and worked as a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She is also a graduate of the Institute of Core Energetics and a Senior Pathwork® Helper. Her best-selling books HANDS OF LIGHT® and LIGHT EMERGING are considered classics in the field of complementary medicine. Ms. Brennan’s newest releases, the SEEDS OF THE SPIRIT® series, are collections of transformative poetic channelings expressing deep spiritual truth and our connection with the Divine.

In addition to lecturing worldwide, Barbara Brennan is the founder and president of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. She personally supervises the faculty as well as channels and demonstrates cutting-edge healing techniques. Highlighting each class session is Ms. Brennan’s channeled healing to the entire school, integrating the week’s learning with direct spiritual experience.

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